Paul Simon, 75; Senator Ran for President

Former Sen. Paul Simon, a Democrat with a professorial bow tie who ran for president in 1988 as a budget-balancing liberal, died Tuesday of complications after heart surgery in his home state of Illinois. He was 75.

On Monday, Simon had undergone single-bypass heart-valve surgery at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, according to Southern Illinois University, where he worked in public policy.

Simon had a long career as a populist Democrat, starting with his election to the Illinois Legislature in 1954. He was lieutenant governor of Illinois from 1969 to 1973 and served five terms in the House of Representatives. He won election to the U.S. Senate in 1984, ousting ousted a Republican incumbent, Charles Percy, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, even as President Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide.

Simon served two terms in the Senate before retiring from Congress in 1997.

His 1987-88 presidential campaign helped make Simon nationally known. He portrayed himself as an earnest, admittedly unglamorous, Midwesterner, an heir to the New Deal and the Great Society. He extolled both fiscal responsibility and social programs.

A man who had grown up during the Great Depression, Simon spoke frequently of the value of government, even as he identified himself as a budget balancer.

“Some people say, if you have an economic agenda that requires balancing the budget, you can’t have a social agenda,” Simon told one crowd in Iowa in late 1987 on the presidential campaign trail. “I would argue precisely the opposite, that those who say we can continue to indefinitely borrow from our children and grandchildren and generations to come in fact are eroding our ability to do what we ought to do in education, in health care and in other things.”

At another point in the campaign, he said government was “not the enemy” but an agent for making a “vast difference in the lives of millions.”

During that campaign, one of his opponents in the hard-fought Iowa caucuses, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, ridiculed Simon’s policies as “Reaganomics with a bow tie.” Gephardt beat Simon in Iowa.

Simon was forced to bow out of the Democratic presidential race in April 1988 after finishing second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire and winning only his home state. Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts went on to capture the party’s nomination but lost in the general election.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who succeeded Simon, said in a statement: “Paul Simon set the standard for honesty and caring in public life. Illinois has lost a great public servant, and I have lost a great friend. At a time when people gave up on other politicians, they never gave up on Paul Simon.”

Republicans spoke highly of him as well. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) praised Simon as “a distinguished statesman.” Hastert said Simon had “dedicated many years of his life as a selfless public servant who put those he represented first and foremost throughout his tenure in office.”

Born Nov. 29, 1928, in Eugene, Ore., the son of Lutheran missionaries, Simon was editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper in southern Illinois before he entered politics. He made a name for himself while crusading against political corruption.

Though his initial political leanings were toward Republicans, he joined the Illinois Democratic Party in 1949 and never swerved from his partisan loyalty thereafter. Some in his party winced, though, when Simon railed against what he perceived as the corrupt Illinois Democratic machine in the 1960s.

In the Senate, Simon advocated a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, which was never adopted, and a shifting of defense funds into education, housing and other domestic programs. He also championed federal student loan programs and campaign finance reform and crusaded against television violence in an effort to get the industry to police itself. He served on the Senate’s Budget, Foreign Relations, Judiciary and Labor committees, among others.

After announcing his retirement from Congress, Simon told an interviewer, “I got a variety of job offers” -- including as a lobbyist.

“It paid a huge amount of money to be a lobbyist,” he said. “Obscene almost, but life is too short to do something you don’t want to do.... That’s not my cup of tea.”

Instead, he chose to lead a public policy institute at Southern Illinois University and continued to write books that showed his long-running interest in issues and good government. Among them are “Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It” (1998), a 1999 autobiography and “How to Get Into Politics and Why” (2000), written with Dukakis.

In one of his final public acts, Simon from his hospital bed on Thursday endorsed former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He told the Chicago Tribune that Dean would “tell us the truth and not just pander to us.”

Simon’s first wife, Jeanne, died in 2000. He married Patricia Derge in 2001 and is survived by her; his daughter, Sheila; his son, Martin; and a stepdaughter, Jennie.