Fanesville, Wisconsin
“I WOULD IMAGINE HIS PLATE is pretty full right now.” That’s how Lydia Spottswood, a Democrat, politely told me last week that her bid for Congress stands a better chance if Bill Clinton doesn’t come to southeast Wisconsin to support her. It’s bad news for the president that a Clintonite such as Spottswood would conclude this, especially as the district is hardly a hotbed of conservatism. Les Aspin was the congressman here for over 20 years before Clinton named him secretary of defense in his first cabinet. Voters here not only supported Clinton twice, but also Michael Dukakis over George Bush in 1988. Spottswood only barely lost this seat two years ago to Mark Neumann (who’s running for the Senate this year) and now finds herself in a surprisingly close contest with Paul Ryan, a 28-year-old former congressional staffer.
A disciplined, risk-averse candidate, Spottswood saw only political pain in standing by the president. The day after Clinton’s August 17 speech, she said she was “very disappointed in him.” Asked whether he should resign (this was before the release of the Starr report), she said she didn’t want to prejudge anything and pledged, “If it’s obvious the president has broken the law, I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice but to vote to impeach.”
That’s assuming she makes it to Washington. Her defection is a sign not only that the president’s position is precarious, but that even strong Democratic candidates are on the defensive and could lose in November. Spottswood tries to put the best spin on the Clinton story, saying it has “energized” Democratic voters and that it’s mostly reporters who ask about it, but she can’t hide her frustration. In late August when a group of national political reporters repeatedly questioned her about Clinton, she barked: “President Clinton isn’t on the ballot.”
Wishful thinking. A few months ago, congressional Democrats were planning to use Republican opposition to a tobacco bill and campaign-finance reform to galvanize voters in the fall elections. But those issues have been completely overshadowed. The scandal, sighs Spottswood, has “overwhelmed the national debate about everything. There’s nothing else really on the table.”
In an ordinary election year, Spottswood would probably have a comfortable lead over Ryan. Not only has she run for the seat once before, she also served eight years on the city council in Kenosha, one of the district’s largest cities. Ryan hasn’t lived in the district for any extended period of time since high school. But a recent poll showed him trailing by only a statistically insignificant three percentage points.
While twentysomething congressional candidates usually don’t fare well, Ryan has a few factors working in his favor. Wisconsin has a tradition of sending spring chickens to Washington (Aspin was 32 when he was elected, Steve Gunderson was 28, and Bill Steiger was just 26). And Ryan has a wealth of Washington experience. He’s worked for Republican senators like Bob Kasten and Sam Brownback, as well as for heavyweights Steve Forbes and Bill Bennett (all four have campaigned for him, and Jack Kemp is due for a fund-raiser in October). When Hillary Clinton came to the district in April, she made hay with Ryan’s links to conservatives like Bennett, warning her audience against Republicans who “have their chain pulled by some . . . far-right political commentator.” Ryan also has an impressive command of local issues, a Clintonesque ability to connect with voters, and an appreciation of fund-raising’s importance (he and Spottswood have both raised about $ 600,000).
For all of his Washington experience, though, Ryan has never held elective office, thus complicating Spottswood’s effort to tar him as a right-wing troglodyte (the best she could do at a recent forum was to fall back on the hoary charge that the GOP cut the school-lunch program in 1995). Ryan, in other words, has gotten off easy so far. He had no serious opposition in the primary, and Spottswood has yet to run any negative ads. Even more important, the liberal advocacy groups that aired over $ 800,000 worth of commercials blasting Neumann in 1995-96 have been AWOL.
A street brawl, however, is likely if the race remains close. While Spottswood regularly appeals for positive campaigns, and once broke into tears when a reporter from the New York Times Magazine asked her about the nastiness of the effort against Neumann, her sincerity is in doubt. She didn’t make any fuss about the barrage of anti-Neumann ads two years ago, and the New York Times reporter recounted in his article that Spottswood “told me stories, all apparently baseless, that call into question Neumann’s business ethics, even his parenting skills.”
What kind of Democrat would Spottswood be on Capitol Hill? On most issues, she sounds like a Gephardt Democrat. Asked about renewing the president’s fast-track trade authority, she lays out an array of difficult-to-meet conditions (she’s even more skeptical of NAFTA). Earlier this year, she appeared at a labor rally in Racine with striking Textron workers and sounded a distinctly Old Democrat theme, thundering against “the synergy of Wall Street which says one plus one equals three.” Not surprisingly, much of Spottswood’s support has come from conventional liberal groups such as the AFL-CIO, which endorsed her eight months before the Democratic primary, and EMILY’s List, a feminist fund-raising outfit that has given her nearly $ 100,000.
On social and cultural issues, Spottswood is a mixed bag. She’s firmly pro-choice, but changed her mind about partial-birth abortion — she supported the president’s veto two years ago but now says she’d vote to override. Her biggest problem may be her strong support for a defeated 1994 referendum that sought to ban handguns in Kenosha. There’s a powerful pro-gun constituency in the district — the local General Motors plant shuts down on the first day of deer-hunting season — and Ryan will benefit from a statewide referendum on the ballot in November proposing to add the right to bear arms to the state constitution.
In the end, though, all of these traditional “issues” may not matter much. The scandal has distracted attention from everything Spottswood wants to talk about, and it’s not clear she can change the subject. She may try to distance herself and protest otherwise, but increasingly it looks like Bill Clinton is going to be on every ballot this fall.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
