Spend some time listening to Dick Durbin, and you’re apt to get an odd feeling that you’ve heard this stuff before.
Then take a look at the record he’s compiled in his 14 years in Congress, and the nagging feeling is even stronger:
A congressman from Springfield with a respectable record but no well-articulated vision for what he would do if voters promoted him.
A partisan who fights tough but is renowned for working with the opposition to reach a compromise.
A lawyer who has spent virtually all of his adult life on a government payroll, with the telltale inside-the-Beltway vocabulary that everyone else can only dimly understand.
And yet, in the end, he’s a gentleman, an Illinoisan, just a man.
Finally, as sudden as sundown in an Illinois cornfield, it hits you: Dick Durbin in many ways is the Democratic version of Bob Dole.
And just like Dole, Durbin has to pull off the same rhetorical trick that bedevils the Kansas Republican–namely, persuading voters to overlook much of his record as a public servant in favor of a freshly minted, more electable political persona.
For Durbin, a longtime disciple of two of Illinois’ most famous Democratic senators, Paul Simon and Paul Douglas, it’s a matter of figuring out how to bask in their collective glow while dodging any connection to the liberal traditions they embody.
At a time when the liberal label can be the scarlet letter of American politics, Durbin is taking a bright yellow highlighter to the more moderate parts of the record he has established in seven terms as a congressman–including deficit fighting that dates to his earliest days in Congress, well before it was considered politically fashionable.
“If it is liberal to support more funding for education, if it is liberal to support environmental protection, if it is liberal to fight the gun lobby and support sensible gun control, if it is liberal to support a woman’s right to choose, so be it,” Durbin, 51, said as he talked in his River North campaign headquarters about his race for the U.S. Senate.
“Those are my positions. But I really think if people will hear me out, they’ll say, `Well, there’s a lot more to it than that label.’ “
Whatever his ideological evolution, there was nothing in Dick Durbin’s background, growing up in East St. Louis, that foreshadowed he would one day represent the same U.S. House district that sent Abe Lincoln to Congress.
There were no early hints that he would some day wrest one of the most powerful positions on Capitol Hill from an entrenched and feared 51-year veteran.
Nothing to indicate that this son of a stevedore would wind up touting his position as a member of the “college of cardinals,” the clout-heavy elite on the House Appropriations Committee that shapes all government spending.
For starters, Durbin was not born in a log cabin, though the biography he distributes has Lincolnesque, bootstrap elements to it. Durbin describes himself as the hardworking son of hardworking parents, growing up in a working-class neighborhood. His biography says he spent “four hot summers laboring in stockyards and slaughterhouses to pay his own college expenses.”
Durbin’s mother, Ann, was born in Lithuania and worked as a payroll clerk for the New York Central Railroad. His father, with only an 8th-grade education, worked for the railroad too.
The family–Durbin was the youngest of three boys–lived on the white side of the segregated town. But this comfortable chapter of Dick Durbin’s biography came to a wrenching close after his father, William, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer when Durbin was 14.
Later, the death of his father would provide the emotional underpinning for an anti-tobacco crusade that has won Durbin national attention–and placed him on the hate list of any smoker who has ever had to fly cross-country without a cigarette.
But, says Durbin, “I’ve always tried to make it clear that I didn’t stand by my father’s bedside and vow to get even with the tobacco companies.” Back then, in 1959, cigarettes still were considered glamorous, not deadly.
While his college classmates, eager young Catholic boys under the spell of the Georgetown University Jesuits, spent sultry, scary, eye-opening days off from college, marching for civil rights, Durbin earned tuition money working part-time jobs–from a bookstore to the stockyards back home in the hypnotically flat soybean country of central Illinois.
He has been on a government payroll almost every day since.
Durbin’s introduction to politics came not from some stirring deep within but by sheer chance. He spotted a help-wanted notice on a Georgetown University bulletin board for a job interning with Illinois’ respected, liberal Sen. Douglas.
In long conversations well into the night as the lights were turned off in the marble hallways of Congress, Douglas spun political tales to the young man with the earnest, open face of a head altar boy. Durbin recounts that Douglas taught him not to be afraid of taking on the powerful.
Durbin launched his own well-publicized fight against the influential by winning a 1988 smoking ban on commercial airline flights less than two hours long. Eventually expanded to all domestic flights, the ban secured him national attention and enduring grief from cigarette companies. They have since poured money into Durbin’s opponents’ campaigns, most recently that of GOP Senate nominee Al Salvi.
“Durbin has become not only anti-tobacco but anti-agriculture,” said Walker Merryman, a vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the cigarette companies’ lobbying group.
That would come as news to corn growers, who count Durbin as one of their most devout boosters, along with Dole and other powerful farm-state legislators, of their pet project: ethanol.
Not coincidentally, Durbin has consistently backed federal efforts that boost the fortunes of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the biggest maker of ethanol, the corn-based alternative fuel. ADM, the Decatur-based agribusiness giant at one time in Durbin’s district, last week agreed to pay a record $100 million fine for price-fixing.
ADM Chairman Dwayne Andreas has been a generous, controversial contributor to Dole and, with less publicity, to Durbin and other Illinois politicians.
Durbin likes to point out that he was a deficit hawk before it became the rage on Capitol Hill. In 1983, he joined 25 other Democratic freshmen in temporarily stalling a spending bill to force party leaders to seriously consider the deficit.
Ten years later, as the new chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on agriculture, he cut 10 percent– $1.3 billion–from sacrosanct programs, some of them pure political lard.
Durbin also boasts of his efforts to increase spending on food for poor, pregnant women and a successful effort to toughen meat inspection rules. But he has no distinctive, overarching vision of what he would do as Illinois’ next senator.
His generic support for education tax cuts, gun control and protecting Medicare and Social Security read more like mimeographed pages from the national Democratic play book.
The closest thing Durbin has to a guiding political philosophy is his belief that a legislators’ worst offense is to be divisive, that mutual respect is the key ingredient to making public policy.
Even with tobacco-state legislators, he said he has tried to keep it business, not personal. And other opponents concur.
“We disagree on the issues, but Dick Durbin is a gentleman,” said Pat Valentino of the Illinois State Rifle Association.
Following the 1992 elections, Durbin staged what observers described as a “palace coup” when he maneuvered around the autocratic, legendary and gravely ill Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.) to win the chairmanship of the House subcommittee that controls the government billions spent annually on agriculture. His move was viewed with respect and relief by members of both parties.
“Durbin had a lot of admirers, who, after 40 years of being kicked to death by Whitten, (thought) here was a fair, open-minded congressman that you could deal with, who wouldn’t extract a pint of blood for a pound of coin,” said Alan Guebert, an Illinois agriculture expert. “His colleagues loved him.”
The result was quick passage of the agriculture spending bill, a rare display of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.
Yet Durbin also is considered by many Republicans to be a tough party attack dog, one of a handful tapped by Democratic leaders to publicly take on the Republicans’ Contract with America and GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Sprinting away from the liberal tag, Durbin has seen his voting score on specific measures favored by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action go from a near-perfect 95 in 1994 to 85 last year to 80 this year. For all those years, he still ranked well within the top one-third of “liberal” voters in the House.
“He’s conservative on some issues, and he’s liberal on other issues,” said Robert Wilson, a former mayor of Harrisburg, Ill., who is chairman of the Democratic Party in Saline County. “He’s capable of adopting different stances.”
Some call it flip-flopping. Take abortion.
Durbin was opposed to the practice when he was first elected to Congress in 1982 from a district with a substantial Catholic population, defeating longtime Republican Rep. Paul Findley.
After getting to Washington, though, he gradually changed his mind. Now Durbin is “100 percent pro-choice,” according to spokesman Chris Widmayer.
In a recent interview with the Tribune editorial board, Durbin said that in 1990 he had “announced” that he was moving away from the strict anti-abortion position in a Catholic newspaper in his congressional district.
The implication was that he had taken a courageous step by publicly revealing the change in a paper widely circulated among his Catholic constituents.
But, in fact, Durbin was merely responding to questions from that newspaper, the Catholic Times.
Abortion opponents say his conversion was a calculated political decision to assure that he could rise in the Democratic Party, which favors abortion rights. Durbin said it was conversations with pregnant victims of rape and incest–and the opposition to family planning by some anti-abortion groups–that changed his mind.
Durbin’s current stance on abortion is just one of his positions that mirrors those of Simon, his mentor and friend. This second, important relationship with an older politician developed when Durbin, fresh out of Georgetown Law School, became Simon’s legal counsel when the bow-tied Simon was Illinois’ lieutenant governor.
While doing part-time legal work for the Illinois Senate, Durbin ran unsuccessfully in 1976 for a seat in the chamber. Two years later, he ran for lieutenant governor on a losing Democratic ticket with gubernatorial candidate Michael Bakalis.
Durbin’s family has followed him into government work. His wife, Loretta, works for the Illinois Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation, a state agency whose work includes hosting foreign delegations.
They have three children: Christine, 28, an international project manager in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which her father’s subcommittee oversees; Paul, 27, a Springfield lawyer; and Jennifer, 25, a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
As his current campaign against Salvi has demonstrated, Durbin can give as good as he gets. But he said he has one cardinal rule of campaigning: Never involve your opponent’s family.
During the Democratic primary, former state Treasurer Pat Quinn raised six-year-old allegations that Christine Durbin received $1,350 in scholarships from a fund established by a lobbyist for a defense contractor with work before one of Durbin’s committees.
Durbin said he never knew the lobbyist, James T. Kane. Of Quinn, Durbin has said: “The hottest ring in hell is reserved for politicians who attack their opponents’ families.”
Durbin got caught on the fringes of the U.S. House Bank scandal–by turning himself in. In 1992, Durbin said he discovered that he had written 12 overdraft checks totaling $5,780.03 between 1988 and 1991. He said the House Bank never informed him of any problem. He attributed the overdrafts to his own poor bookkeeping. An accounting firm calculated that a commercial bank would have charged a $204 overdraft fee, and Durbin wrote a check reimbursing the government for that amount.
Checking goofs aside, for Durbin, “the most unforgivable sin of a politician is to be divisive and to divide Americans against one another–whether it’s race baiting or immigrant baiting or gay baiting.”
Like it or not, though, he finds himself in the middle of one of the nation’s most ideologically divisive Senate contests. Win or lose, Durbin hopes voters remember him this way:
“He worked within the system and advanced in the system,” Durbin said, using the Dole-like third person, “and yet was not afraid to tackle some of the special interest groups that dominate on Capitol Hill.”
