NUNN DARES NOT TREAD

But she has come to Washington at a time when the once-potent party of Sam Rayburn and Harry Truman looks more like a gang of George Bush wimps. Just when the party needs them most, Democrats — long the champions of the underdog — have lost their legendary chutzpah.

So with their prize fighters like Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley slinking off to retirement homes, Stabenow isn’t sure the battle is worth it. Not if it means being trapped eternally in the minority. “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she says.

Yet for six hours she listened, along with 70 other potential candidates, to Democratic recruiters cajole and counsel her, including a special plea from House minority leader Richard Gephardt. “We need you,” he said, becoming flushed and pounding his fist against the podium. “This is the group that will take the people’s House back in ’96. Winning this election is about more than politics. It’s about saving the country. That much is at stake.”

It’s easy to understand why Gephardt sounds so desperate. Just 24 hours earlier, Rep. Norman Mineta of California packed up his bags in mid-session and split for a job in the private sector, while Rep. Harry Johnston from Florida announced he was calling it quits at the end of the term.

“Right now conservative Democrats only have two choices: switch parties or retire,” says Rep. Mike Parker, who is considering the former. But, as Stabenow notes, there’s a third choice: Stay and fight. “It’s not fun being in the minority,” Stabenow says, having experienced it in the Michigan legislature. “And a lot of people just can’t take it.”

Indeed, in the Senate, Nunn, the highly regarded ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said he’d rather go home than return in 1996. He is the unprecedented eighth Democratic senator to announce his retirement in a single session; two more — Sens. Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell – – have switched parties. And Republicans, having seized the Capitol, may be about to dig a moat: a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in 1996.

On the House side, the numbers are equally grim: Though only five Democrats have said they will retire so far, three others have found their inner Republican souls, one has resigned mid-session and another has gone to jail.

Some departures, like Rep. Sonny Montgomery’s, were expected. He is 75. But others seem to be a product of Democratic blues, and a kind of sanctimonious passivity. Bradley decried the state of American politics. “On a basic level, politics is broken,” he said. “Neither party speaks to people where they live their lives. Both have moved away from my own concept of service and my own vision of what America can be.”

Nunn echoed: “The ability to raise big money and buy saturation television ads has become the dominant theme of our political races.” And Sen. Paul Simon groaned: “Politics today are unnecessarily ugly.”

Sounds good, even stirring, except for one thing: Politics has always been ugly. In 1856, Democrat Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane in the Senate chamber. In 1902, two Democratic senators punched each other in the face over their “honor.” And in 1964, then-Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond wrestled down Democratic Sen. Ralph Yarborough outside the Senate Caucus Room and made him cry uncle. “If you didn’t see manifestations of ugliness, you’d wonder what was wrong,” says Senate historian Richard A. Baker.

And if the future of the country is really at stake, as all the Democrats contend, where have all its defenders gone? The party, facing the prospective end of its cherished New Deal and Great Society, has lost something much more critical than vision: guts.

That’s why the image of the 75-year-old Rep. Sam Gibbons yanking on Republicans’ ties, throwing paper balls, and exploding on the House floor is so stirring for Democrats. “We call it the “Normandy instinct,” says Rich Davis, a former press secretary for Gibbons. “It’s the same instinct that led him as a 24-year-old to parachute into darkness while German soldiers were firing at him.”

Yet with few exceptions, no Democrats are plummeting into the darkness. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a conservative Democrat, says he implored Nunn and Bradley to stay in the trenches. Gephardt cornered senior Democrats, begging them to keep fighting. And President Clinton called and pleaded with Mineta, who was offered a lucrative job with a defense contractor. All to no avail.

Mineta took the money and ran, saying, “after 20 years, frankly, I have nothing to show for this.” In an interview with The Hill newspaper, he said even his family was surprised at his sudden exit. “My kids said, ‘Gee, Dad, we thought you’d go out feet first.'”

Instead, as Republican party chairman Haley Barbour has noted: “Democrats have voted with their feet.” As a result, the party has lost its best and brightest — Mineta, a former chairman of the Public Works and Transportation Committee; Nunn, a defense expert; Sen. Paul Simon, an ardent Great Society liberal; and Bradley, a former Rhodes Scholar and intellectual voice of moderation.

Call it a Democratic brain drain. And with so many departures, some party faithful have tried to find a certain nobility in the exodus, as if they were Jews crossing the desert. “The bottom line is that Gingrich’s style of politics won’t benefit the country,” says Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat. “We won’t tear things down just to prevail. People like Nunn and Bradley and Montgomery are too dignified for that.”

Perhaps. Democrats may have even discovered a newfound nobility in the minority. The problem is that only an old-fashioned political brawl will save the Democratic party from imminent death.

With Democrats like Nunn and Bradley heading for the hills, only people like Stabenow may be left to resist the Republican revolution. “I’ll have to make up my mind soon,” she says. For the Democrats’ sake, she’d better.

David Grann is executive editor of the Hill.