Alienated Voters Go for a House Cleaning

Georgia voters accomplished this week what the president and congressional leaders have often failed to do: In a small but meaningful way, they changed the tone of Washington.

The twin primary defeats of two members of Congress--Republican Bob Barr and Democrat Cynthia A. McKinney--removed, in a stroke, two of the capital’s most colorful verbal bomb throwers and elevated in their place blander, although not necessarily more moderate, partisans.

At work in Georgia and elsewhere is a longer-term trend that is changing the nature of the two parties in the House. They are becoming more disciplined. Insurgency is on the wane.

More and more, candidates on the campaign trail espouse the messages crafted for them by national party leaders, and when the victors arrive in Congress, they tend to be party loyalists. These developments have strengthened leadership within the parties, although bipartisan deal making remains as difficult as ever.

Barr and McKinney are on their way out because alienated Georgia voters refused to renominate them in party primaries. Another unpredictable and outspoken lawmaker did himself in before the elections; Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., a Democratic iconoclast from Ohio, was expelled from the House in July after being convicted of bribery.

That trio alone accounted for a large number of barbed, unpredictable and occasionally outlandish quotes emanating from Capitol Hill on a regular basis: Barr on the Clintons; McKinney on President Bush; Traficant on the world.

“My holy trinity,” Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, called them. “Now they’re all gone. It’s amazing.”

Another controversial and sometimes rebellious lawmaker--Rep. Gary A. Condit of Ceres--also will leave Congress at year’s end after self-destructing in the Chandra Levy scandal. Democratic voters in his district spurned him in a March primary.

By contrast, the candidates who either beat or are seeking to replace these newsmakers have offered themselves as dependable partisans without the baggage.

Rep. John Linder, a quiet GOP veteran who thumped Barr by a breathtaking 64% to 36% in the 7th Congressional District north of Atlanta, said in a phone interview Wednesday that voters viewed both Barr and McKinney as “out of touch, out of the mainstream.” Linder, who had run a television ad during the campaign that linked the two firebrands, continued: “After Sept. 11, [voters] didn’t want anger. They want people to sit down and talk to each other and work things out. Antagonism was not going to do well in this election.”

Likewise, Denise Majette, the former state judge who defeated McKinney by a surprisingly wide margin (58% to 42%) in eastern Atlanta’s 4th District, said in a statement on her campaign Web site: “In today’s political climate, just shaking one’s fist at the system and taking credit for political initiatives does not produce results.”

To be sure, every congressional race has its own story line. McKinney, a staunch supporter of Arab causes, was defeated by a candidate who had greater financial support, including many out-of-state donations from Jewish and pro-Israel groups. Barr and Linder were thrown into the same contest after Democrats in the state’s Legislature redrew congressional district boundaries for partisan advantage.

In addition, Georgia’s open primary system allowed Democrats to vote against Barr and Republicans to punish McKinney. Many apparently did.

In the next Congress, the departure of such lawmakers as Barr and McKinney will mean more than the absence of quotable figures. It will accelerate generational shifts within the two parties.

For Republicans, Barr is the latest prosecutor from President Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial to leave Congress. Of the 13 House impeachment managers, only six are expected to return to the chamber in January. In addition, Barr is the latest member of the famous GOP class of 1994 to leave.

Many Republican lawmakers from that 73-member class, which helped bring the GOP to power in the House, formed a rebellious, aggressive force within the party. They lifted Newt Gingrich to the speakership and later helped dump him. They agitated for the shutdown of the government in a memorable confrontation with Clinton in 1995-’96.

Now their ranks are thinning, and the class members who are left are becoming more pragmatic. With Barr’s loss, that trend will continue; only 32 are expected back in January. But the House Republican leadership as a whole is expected to continue to champion a strongly conservative agenda.

For Democrats, the primary defeats of McKinney--and, earlier this year, Rep. Earl F. Hilliard of Alabama--will prompt soul-searching within the influential Congressional Black Caucus. Hilliard, like McKinney, had pro-Arab support but was defeated by a challenger, Artur Davis, funded by backers of Israel.

Many of the black Democratic lawmakers who will return to the next Congress are among the party’s elders. They will face the questions of whether and how to adjust the caucus’ positions on the Mideast and other matters.

Mann predicted that Majette and Davis, who are both African American, would work toward a new kind of black politics--less focused on civil rights and more on a broader party agenda.

“Both are clearly liberal Democrats, but their styles are different” from McKinney’s and Hilliard’s, Mann said. “Each of them will try to build biracial coalitions.”