Retiring Virginia Congressman Tom Davis is the subject of an article in today’s New York Times Magazine, and he doesn’t hold much back:
Tom Davis arrived in Congress with the Gingrich class of 1994, again ousting an incumbent Democrat, but he was hardly a revolutionary. Davis was a business-oriented Republican animated by economic competitiveness, fiscal responsibility and bipartisan problem solving. Right away, he teamed with Democrats to tackle the financial collapse of city government in Washington. “He was basically mayor by default,” his longtime aide, Howard Denis, told me. Davis worked with President Bill Clinton’s aides and other Democrats to form a financial-control board to get the city back on its feet. “We moved it through a lot of land mines,” he recalled. “That taught me right away up here — if that had been a partisan deal, it never would have gone.”
That is the model he says is missing today. As coarse as politics seemed in the 1990s, Davis remembers it as a productive period when Clinton and Gingrich and their parties actually did business. They overhauled welfare and eliminated the deficit. Davis managed to close the long-hated Lorton prison in Virginia and to push through legislation allowing children from the District of Columbia to pay in-state tuition at any state college in the country. Divided government, he told me, may actually be better for getting results. “If you’re solving a big problem, whether it’s welfare reform or Social Security, you want every perspective at the table — not so they can veto it, but so you can get everyone involved,” he said.
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No more. The revolution is over, the thrill is gone and the Republican brand under President Bush has, in Davis’s view, been so tarnished that, as he likes to say, “if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf.” These will be Davis’s last few weeks in Congress. He decided against re-election, disaffected by the partisanship, by a process he calls broken, by a party he considers hijacked by social conservatives. “We’re just not getting much done,” he said.
Looking at how the past eight years have gone, it’s hard to argue with Davis’s assessment.
