November 13, 2006
Lessons from the Class of ’74 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST In an earlier post I suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been incorrectly typecast as a “San Francisco liberal,” a pejorative term that connotes all sorts of cultural extremes, when in fact she is a Baltimore white ethnic” at heart. I also wrote about the checkered past of Rep. Jack Murtha, a lead contender for Majority Leader in the next Congress. Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam case some 26 years ago.
Now it seems that Pelosi has endorsed Murtha for Majority Leader, which strengthens my argument that she is more of an old-style party boss than a hippy-dippy reformer.
The last (and most famous) Democratic sweep of off-year elections occurred in 1974, when the party tapped into popular disgust over Watergate to capture 48 House seats and four Senate seats previously held by Republicans. The so-called “Watergate babies” who composed the famous Class of ’74 tended to represent affluent suburban districts in the West and Northeast and were more committed to ethics reform than to traditional liberal policies. “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” claimed Gary Hart, the incoming senator from Colorado and a leader of the “new politics” movement of the 1970s. In total, the Democratic freshmen numbered 75 members and became a powerful force within their caucus.
Some of the reforms pushed through by the Watergate babies augured well for a more democratic (small-d) House. For instance, by a vote of 144 to 122 the Democratic caucus wrested control of committee assignments, which had previously been doled out by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The caucus also made the chairmanships of Appropriations subcommittees subject to caucus approval, thus subjecting the “cardinals”—Appropriations subcommittee chairs, who enjoy tremendous control over government funds—to popular oversight. At the same time, these reforms actually strengthened the hand of the House speaker, Carl Albert, at the expense of individual committee chairs. So it was hard to say whether a cleaner House would also be a more democratic House.
It’s ironic, to say the least, that the incoming Democratic majority, which partly owes its election victory to the public’s disgust over congressional ethics, may tap an Abscam veteran to hold its second-ranking position. Perhaps it’s too punitive to hold Murtha accountable for actions he took a quarter-century ago. But in politics, appearance is everything, and should Murtha ascend to the post of majority leader, the party is going to lose its reform luster.
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