Lawmakers Toss in Towel; Record Turnover Possible : Congress: Frustration a leading factor in veteran members’ retiring. New faces in House could top 100.

For Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), it was the refusal of his colleagues to face up to the biggest overdraft of all: a $400-billion budget deficit. For Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.), it was partisan pettiness, legislative gridlock and the “hysterical superficiality” of television. And for Rep. Vin Weber (R.-Minn.), it was the prospect of dragging his family through a “vicious, negative and highly personal campaign” in which his opponent would have accused him of writing bad checks.

For a variety of reasons, some philosophic, some pragmatic, members of the House and Senate are announcing their retirements from national politics in unexpectedly large numbers that could contribute to record turnover when the 103rd Congress convenes next year.

“I have observed all kinds of stresses and strains and frustrations in legislative bodies for years now, but I have never seen anything like this,” said California Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), a seven-term congressman and third-ranking Republican leader in the House. “It’s almost a pall hanging over the place. . . . It’s a negative mood so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

“It is a time of fear and frustration,” agreed Rep. Fred Grandy (R-Iowa).

So far this year, 44 House members--29 Democrats and 15 Republicans--have announced they are not running for reelection to their current seats. The number is expected to grow and perhaps exceed the postwar record of 49 voluntary departures in 1978.

At least 11 other House members will be leaving involuntarily--incumbents who have already lost primary races and those who are certain to lose because redistricting has forced them into races against other incumbents. That places the House turnover total at 55 so far.

Some political observers, citing poll findings that suggest widespread public antipathy toward Congress, have predicted that the combination of retirements, redistricting and forcible evictions could bring more than 100 new faces to the 435-member House next year. The record for House turnover was 118 members in 1949.

In the Senate, the seven retirements announced so far are just slightly above the average for an election year. Even so, the list of departing senators is considered remarkable because it includes a number of younger, respected and up-and-coming members, a phenomenon also evident in the House, although to a lesser extent.

Faced with public scorn, media criticism, legislative gridlock and election campaigns that are expensive, difficult and often demeaning, many lawmakers who once thought of making a career in the House or the Senate are deciding that being a public servant is no longer worth the grief.

“I can well understand why many good people are getting fed up and are leaving. We all feel very frustrated,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of Congress’ most influential members on health and environment issues. “There are a lot of good people here who want to do the right thing and make the tough decisions, and they are taking a lot of abuse. . . . It makes me very worried. I worry about what kind of people are going to run for public office in the future and what kind of people are going to stay.”

Political experts and incumbent lawmakers say there is no single, overarching reason for the rash of retirements this year. Instead, they cite a “confluence of factors that in combination are going to produce a major turnover,” in the words of Rep. Lewis.

The House banking scandal is clearly a major consideration. The list of retirees includes Rep. Edward F. Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who was among the top 22 abusers of the House bank, and Weber, a Minnesota conservative and member of the Republican leadership who has admitted overdrawing his checking account 125 times during a 39-month period reviewed by the House Ethics Committee.

While predicting that he could have won reelection easily, Weber said in announcing his retirement that he was “simply not ready to put myself and my family through what is sure to be a vicious, negative and highly personal campaign . . . that focuses on nothing more than personal attacks” resulting from his House banking record.

Even without an ethics scandal, congressional redistricting would have produced a larger-than-normal number of retirements by members reluctant to run in new and unfamiliar districts or face off against well-known or better-financed incumbents. Rep. Frank Annunzio (D-Ill.), for instance, chose to retire rather than run against fellow Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

For a few veteran members, retirement looks especially attractive because 1992 is the last year in which lawmakers who have been in office for at least 12 years can convert their accumulated campaign funds to personal use if they leave office. Of the 79 members still eligible to take the money and run, 13 have announced they are retiring--although all but a handful have said they will distribute their funds to charities or other campaigns.

Besides the purely political or financial considerations influencing many retirements, other, more disturbing reasons are being cited, not only by lawmakers who are leaving but also by many who are staying behind.

The grievances include a growing sense of anger at what many characterize as the media’s trivialization of the political process, and the often demeaning demands placed on candidates who must raise enormous sums of money to run for office.

The complaints reflect dissatisfaction with the inability of a bloated congressional bureaucracy to break the gridlock that ties up important legislation in countless subcommittee meetings.

Similarly, lawmakers say they are increasingly frustrated with the end result of a divided government in which important legislation often receives a veto by a Republican President that a Democratic-controlled Congress cannot override.

There also is a growing sense of despair over the low esteem in which Congress is held by a public that many lawmakers, speaking privately, complain is uninvolved, uninformed and unrealistic about what it can expect from a government lacking the popular mandate to enact real and necessarily painful reforms.

“First is the stalemate to which economic mismanagement and partisan pettiness have reduced the work of our government,” Wirth of Colorado said in citing the reasons for his decision to retire from the Senate next year. “The budget is out of control. Our debt is crippling. . . . The President shirks his duty to lead and the Congress is stymied by relentless and pointless maneuvering.”

Second, he said, is the “continuous money chase” that political campaigns have become as they turn “increasingly shrill, negative and devoid of content.”

But “worst of all,” Wirth added, are the negative strategies and poisonous partisanship that lead to a “reflexive cynicism in the print press and a hysterical superficiality in the electronic media’s focus on sensational themes.”

Wirth’s frustration was echoed by two colleagues whose recent retirement announcements rocked the Senate. Rudman of New Hampshire said he is leaving because he is “terribly frustrated” by the failure to reduce the budget deficit and because he no longer sees “this Congress doing what has to be done while we still have time to do it.”

Kent Conrad, the Democratic junior senator from North Dakota, cited the promise he made in 1986 to not seek a second term unless the deficit had been reduced. “A lot of people in Washington have a hard time accepting it, but I made a public promise and I felt it was important to keep it because I didn’t want to contribute to the air of cynicism mushrooming across the country. I just didn’t want to be a part of that,” he said.

Conrad also complained that the media bear some of the blame for trivializing debates by packaging them into 30-second sound bites and focusing on scandals to the exclusion of issues of substance--a complaint voiced by many lawmakers. “No attention is being paid to what really matters, to things of substance,” he said. “It is only perks and sideshows.”

Democrats place much of the blame on what they say is President Bush’s failure to lead, and Republicans blame the Democrats controlling Congress. Still, a conviction that the system no longer works stands out as perhaps the most significant bipartisan consensus that both parties have been able to reach in the supercharged politics of an election year.

Both sides say that campaign reform is urgently needed--but unlikely to get very far until one party controls both the White House and the Congress or the President, at least, comes up with a bold agenda for the future and receives a strong electoral mandate to carry it out.

“Nothing would help Congress more than either Bush or (Democrat Bill) Clinton or whoever it is going to be coming in with a clear mandate to lead this country and a good idea of the direction in which he wants to go,” said Larry Hansen, a research professor at George Washington University and the author of a recent study on congressional problems.

Unless that happens, he added, the paralysis is likely to continue and good leaders are likely to leave Washington while others choose not to run, with only “second stringers” taking their place.

Waxman agrees, saying that in the “sour mood” gripping Congress these days, more and more lawmakers with “families they don’t want smeared” are talking about “throwing in the towel and saying ‘forget it.’ ”

Mr. Smith, the archetypal congressional reformer portrayed by actor James Stewart, would “never go to Washington today under the present circumstances,” observed one cynical congressman.

“Because if he did, the opening credits would barely be over before he was mugged by the 30-second sound bite.”

Times staff researcher Ann Rovin in Denver contributed to this story.