Florida’s 24th District
Feeney vs. Jacobs
Newt Gingrich began tentatively to push a conservative agenda in the U.S. House after the historic Republican takeover of 1994-and, in fact, might well have done more had his tenure as speaker not been cut off by unexpected circumstances. Tom Feeney, as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, is a good model for how to do the job.
As the linebacker behind Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, Speaker Feeney showed that a genuinely conservative agenda is possible to enact when one has the votes and can count them. After Bush and Feeney went to work in Tallahassee in January 1999, more than $6 billion in tax cuts were enacted. A parental notification measure was given life by the legislature and the first statewide school vouchers, albeit limited, were enacted. Now Florida schools themselves will be graded like students and, if they failed, their pupils will be given vouchers for other schools of their choice.
Bush, Feeney & Co. also took on quotas and affirmative action and were able to end controversial set-aside programs at the state university level.
And, of course, it was Feeney-along with Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the lawyers and the chads-who had his Warholian "15 minutes of fame" as he guided the legislature toward certifying that Florida’s electoral votes were cast for George W. Bush, thereby helping to make him President.
It goes without saying that a record like that makes friends and enemies, and the 44-year-old Feeney has them both as he is "termed out" of his legislative seat and is now the Republican nominee for Congress in Florida’s new 24th District. But controversy is no stranger to real estate lawyer Feeney. As a freshman state legislator in 1992, he made headlines by being the only GOP lawmaker in Tallahassee not to sign a letter in support of the renomination of then-President George Bush over insurgent Pat Buchanan. Good-as-Goldwater conservative Feeney was disappointed by the elder Bush’s violation of his no-new-taxes pledge, although the young legislator did campaign for the President in the fall race against Bill Clinton. (Feeney’s stand on principle obviously didn’t offend the Bush family. Two years later, in his first bid for governor, Jeb Bush tapped him to be his lieutenant governor running mate, but the conservative "dynamic duo" lost that year in a heartbreakingly close contest.)
This year, Feeney faces Democrat Harry Jacobs, worth an estimated $100-$150 million as senior partner in the personal injury law firm of Jacobs and Goodman (Goodman being his wife). It’s always hard to be a candidate with a record of votes on nearly every issue and to face an opponent with next-to-no record. In Jacobs’ case, the last time he held public office was in the 1970s when he served on the Altamonte Springs City Commission. Records show that Commissioner Jacobs missed all six of the Budget Committee meetings in 1978 and more than half of them in ’79.
Like Feeney, Jacobs was a player in the Florida saga of the 2000 race for President. He sued to throw out 16,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County-primarily from college students, the elderly, and the military. None of them were disenfranchised, however, as the Jacobs suit was quickly tossed out of court. (Predictably, that didn’t stop Jacobs from sending Seminole County a $250,000 tab for his services.)
So just what does Jacobs stand for and why is he running for Congress? From the debates that he and the Republican nominee have had so far, it seems to boil down to three points: First, he doesn’t like Tom Feeney. Second, he favors increasing teacher salaries. Third, he wants to reduce classroom size. There is nothing Feeney can do about the first point but, as gently as he can, he has tried to remind his opponent that the other two issues are state rather than federal matters.
As vague as Harry Jacobs may seem, the fact is that vague people do win office when they have a large personal fortune, a fraternity of like-minded backers (80% of Jacobs’ contributors are fellow trial lawyers), and a dedicated claque of well-heeled left-wing organizations (the vehemently anti-military PEACEPAC, for example, has contributed to the Jacobs coffers) helping out. Their apparent common denominator is hatred of the conservative opponent with a record. That is one good reason for conservatives nationwide to rally to Tom Feeney. The other is that he has been a proven conservative leader in Tallahassee and is likely to be one again in Washington.
(Tom Feeney for Congress, 1420 Alafaya Trail, #103, Oviedo, Fla. 32765; 407-366-2212)
Iowa’s 4th District
Latham vs. Norris
This is a portrait of a man in search of a House district. Democrat John Norris has been preparing himself for a bid for Congress for most of his 41 years. Much like the young Bill Clinton, who started as a campaign operative for George McGovern, the young Norris in 1988 began to make contacts throughout Iowa and then nationwide as head of Jesse Jackson’s campaign for President in the Hawkeye State (although, as Jane Norman of the Des Moines Register points out, he omits any references to Jackson in current biographies). He went on to become executive director of the Farm Unity Coalition, which is credited with convincing Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis to come out for government price controls.
Utilizing his left-wing contacts in a state Democratic Party that was obviously moving to port, Norris became state party chairman, top aide to Rep. Leonard Boswell (D.-Iowa) and then chief of staff to Gov. Tom Vilsack. During his stint as Vilsack’s right-hand man, the governor attempted to make special rights for homosexuals state law by executive order-prompting a suit by Republican State Sen. Steve King that went all the way to the state supreme court, where Vilsack was thwarted.
Earlier this year, Des Moines resident Norris filed to run for Congress in the vacant 3rd District (Des Moines), which Republican Rep. Greg Ganske was relinquishing to run for the Senate. But then Norris’s old boss Boswell chose to move from his reapportioned former district and run for re-election in the 3rd. Norris thereupon bought a house in Ames, home to the Iowa State University and part of the reconfigured 4th District of Republican Rep. Tom Latham. According to the Washington Post, "three out of five voters are new to [Latham]-and Democrats are more plentiful than in his current district."
"The Democratic Party," adds the Post, "considers [Norris] one of its top recruits" and he has made the contest a veritable referendum on the less expensive, more private-sector-oriented prescription drug plan supported by Latham (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 88%) and House Republicans. In Norris’s words, "We can’t rely on that in this district. There is no guarantee it will work-or even be available." Strong stuff, all right, and potent in a district in which 23% of the residents are 65 and older, twice the percentage nationwide.
For his part, the 54-year-old Latham hits the senior citizen centers, restaurants, Kiwanis and Rotary lunches-often accompanied by 85-year-old mother Evelyn Latham-and patiently explains and defends the complex-but-less-expensive Republican alternative bill on prescription drugs. In his words, "It’s real policy that will do people some good. For someone to demagogue it and make it a partisan issue, I think, is outrageous."
Latham’s patience and relaxed style have taken him a long way in selling a conservative record in an area that has been trending Democratic in recent years. A family farmer and co-owner of a seed company who still lives down the road from the farm in Alexander (population: 168) on which he was raised, Latham came out of nowhere in 1994 to win a seat in Congress in his first race for office. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee in his first term, Latham was a champion of the Freedom to Farm Act that was to phase out subsidies. Now a member of the Appropriations Committee, he opposed the most recent farm bill because he felt it mainly benefits large farms in the South instead of the small family farms that are still numerous in the Midwest.
In the age of matinee-idol candidates with blow-dried hair and flexible principles, Tom Latham is still the farm boy he has always been and ever the conservative he first campaigned as. But the hard truth is he is now running in unfamiliar territory against an opponent with obvious state and national resources. For conservatives to take his re-election for granted and overlook Tom Latham is unwise and, considering the nature of the opponent, should be unthinkable.
(Latham for Congress, P.O. Box 71, Clarion, Iowa 50525; 515-233-3855)
New Jersey’s 5th District
Garrett vs. Sumers
One has to go back well more than a generation to find the last genuinely conservative U.S. representative from New Jersey’s Bergen County-based 5th District. That was J. Parnell Thomas, once mayor of Allendale and Republican House member from 1936-50. With his bald pate, ever-present cigar, and bulldog demeanor, Thomas is best-remembered as chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the postwar years. He still lives on-immortalized in newsreels of the Hiss case, the Hollywood hearings, and other celebrated parts of the HCUA saga that are frequently brought back to life on television.
After a half-century of "establishment" Republicans-with six years of a liberal Democrat added in-the 5th District is poised to finally send another conservative in the Thomas mold to Congress. To call Scott Garrett "anti-establishment" is an understatement. In both 1998 and 2000, State Assemblyman Garrett took on the seemingly unbeatable Rep. Marge Roukema (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 51%) in the Republican primary. In a state where county party organizations are still quite strong and where no sitting member of Congress has been denied renomination since conservative Jeff Bell defeated liberal Sen. Clifford Case in 1978, Garrett went after the incumbent and graphically campaigned on their differences: He was strongly pro-life, a backer of the 2nd Amendment, and had a record of favoring tax cuts since going to Trenton in 1990.
And guess what? Garrett almost pulled it off. In both races, he drew about 48% of the vote against an opponent whom pundits and pols agreed was as familiar as a piece of furniture in the 5th District. In fact, had 1,000 votes changed in the June 2000 primary, Garrett would have beaten Roukema.
This year, Roukema chose to step down and the 43-year-old Garrett finally became the Republican nominee for Congress. Never once has he trimmed his conservative sails and, although there were several other Republican candidates in the six-man field who insisted they were conservatives, many of the groups and individuals who backed him against the odds in ’98 and 2000 stayed with him. This helped Garrett win even though some of his opponents were backed by county organizations in the district that spreads along the northern border of the Garden State and around its northwest corner.
It might now seem that Republican nominee Garrett could rest and start interviewing a staff for when he takes up his new duties in Washington in January as the representative of a district that has been in Republican hands for all but six of the last 66 years.
But that isn’t the case. Successfully challenging the party establishment often leaves political scar tissue that doesn’t heal before the fall election. Here, it’s about as bad as it gets. The congresswoman Scott Garrett twice challenged is refusing to endorse him, even though he was nominated by their fellow 5th District Republicans, and Roukema, retiring at 72, is highly unlikely to run for office again. Her self-proclaimed (and much-publicized) "neutral" stance only enhances the chances of the Democratic nominee, ophthalmologist Anne Sumers. Repeatedly charging that Garrett is "out of the mainstream" and wants to "turn the clock back" on issues such as choice (Sumers is pro-abortion) and gun safety, the Democratic nominee often quotes Roukema as saying that the Republican nominee is a "right-wing extremist."
Garrett backs down from none of his positions and reminds voters that his opponent not only "has no experience," but also, although claiming to care deeply about education, failed to vote "in 13 straight school board elections" in her hometown of Upper Saddle River.
Were it not for the fractious nature of the Republican primary and the vindictiveness of the liberal lame-duck incumbent, the candidacy of Anne Sumers would be a joke. But it is not a joke and, unless conservatives rally to their best hope in a half-century in New Jersey’s 5th District, no one on the right will be laughing November 5.
(Garrett for Congress, P.O. Box 905, Newton, N.J. 07860; 973-300-0470)
