On the opening day of Congress, the elevator deposited me on the fifth floor of the Longworth House Office Building, where the parties celebrating the hard-fought November election victories had spilled out of the offices and filled the corridor with revelry.
The offices here are small and cramped and are occupied by freshmen, who draw numbers in a lottery and try to snag quarters close to the elevators. But on opening day, friends and families who have arrived to launch the freshmen into their new careers self-consciously mix and mingle with folks from other states doing the same thing. It’s a reminder of all the hard work it takes to win a House seat when you’re not an incumbent.
Every new member has his own story. Walt Minnick’s is more unusual than most. For one thing, he is only the second Democrat to hold his House seat in the last 42 years, and the first in 14 years to come to Washington from the Republican state of Idaho. For another, he is, at 66, much older than most of the other freshmen, but ran and finished the Boston Marathon last year.
Finally, he is the only former Nixon White House staff member to win election to this Congress. He had just come out of the Army and took an administration job working on drug-control issues when Watergate broke. He resigned in protest immediately after the “Saturday night massacre,” when Richard Nixon ousted his attorney general in order to remove Archibald Cox as the Watergate special prosecutor.
A native of eastern Washington, he chose Boise as his home and joined a forest products company, eventually becoming its president. Later, he started a successful nursery business.
Then politics came along. In 1996, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, recruited Minnick to run against Republican Sen. Larry Craig.
Last fall, he found Idahoans “so fed up with the partisanship in Washington” that his desire to straddle party lines resonated with voters. He had the advantage of being up against a highly partisan and contentious Republican, Rep. Bill Sali.
“My whole campaign was aimed at persuadable Republicans,” Minnick told me. It worked — but barely. Minnick won with less than 51 percent.
This means, of course, that he will be high on the Republican target list for 2010. Minnick says he is ready to show his new constituents a different style of representation — one not marked by partisanship.
He has joined the Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats and, on opening day, co-sponsored with Rep. Mike Simpson, the Republican from the neighboring district, a bill to protect an Idaho wilderness area.
His is one story of many — and that’s what makes opening day on Longworth Five a good place to be.
