This is the saga of Jason Lewis. For a quarter-century, the Minnesota congressman was a talk-radio host. He started in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolis and did a spell in Charlotte before returning to the Twin Cities. I was a guest on his show a few times. As best I recall, they were frisky discussions of political issues, a notch or two livelier than the normal talk radio stuff.
In 2016, Lewis decided to run for the House of Representatives from Minnesota’s Second District. It’s a swing district that leans slightly Republican. It consists of the fast-growing suburbs south of the Twin Cities that meld into farmland. The seat was open. John Kline, the influential chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, was retiring.
Kline wasn’t keen on being succeeded by a rambunctious radio host like Lewis. “I liked to provoke,” Lewis says. “I liked to raise eyebrows. I liked to tell them something they didn’t already know.” Kline backed businesswoman Darlene Miller. But Lewis had campaign experience, having run for a House seat in Colorado in 1990 (he lost badly), and Miller didn’t. Lewis won the primary, 49 percent to 31 percent.
Democrats, it turned out, were ready for Lewis—or thought they were. He specialized in economic issues, but he was just as fluent on social issues like gay marriage. Lewis insisted marriage was a state matter and defended the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the effect of which was that same-sex marriage approved in one state wouldn’t be recognized in other states. He continued to defend DOMA after it was nullified by the Supreme Court.
To put it mildly, that was controversial. Lewis says someone had obtained tapes of his radio broadcasts and taken them out of context to make them sound as shocking as possible.
Word of all this got back to Washington in a heartbeat. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee vowed to force Lewis to “defend every sexist, racist, misogynistic and outrageous comment he’s ever made.”
The Atlantic called him “Minnesota’s Mini-Trump” and a “hard-right radio provocateur.”
Lewis was unruffled, but Republican strategists and campaign staffers were shaken. They feared other GOP candidates would be tarnished and made to answer for his comments. Most of all, they didn’t know how to handle him. But all that didn’t matter. Democrats thought it wise to link Lewis to Trump. That didn’t matter either.
Lewis won that fall. He beat Democrat Angie Craig, 47 percent to 45 percent, aided by an independent candidate who got 8 percent. (Craig had outspent Lewis by four-to-one.) Trump won the district too—running a percentage point behind Lewis.
Then came the big shock. The Jason Lewis who showed up in Washington in January 2017 was not what the town expected. He declined to join the Freedom Caucus, the two dozen or so members on the right who push conservative legislation that can’t pass and give Republican leaders so much grief.
Lewis turned out to be a team player. He was willing to compromise if it moved the ball in a conservative direction. He’s spent the last two years focused on results. He’s worked to build coalitions broad enough to enact a Republican agenda, one that would by necessity be diluted. He’s not a hard-right yahoo. Were he in the Senate, he’d gravitate toward Mitch McConnell.
Oh, and before I forget, he’s read the conservative classics—Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt. The list goes on.
And here’s the biggest surprise: Jason Lewis is a serious policy wonk. He was a leader in the battle to pass an imperfect health care bill that would have killed some but far from all of Obamacare. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he blamed the late senator John McCain for defeating the bill with his vote.
All of this would have been less of a surprise on Capitol Hill if the troops had listened to Lewis’s colleague Tom Emmer, who represents the Minnesota House district once held by Michele Bachmann. Lewis, he says, “is unbelievably smart. . . . He’s one of the top leaders among Republicans. Jason was one of the top on-air political voices we had in the Twin Cities for 20 years.”
Lewis, 63, is critical of the sour, muted brand of political discourse today. It’s no longer sharp and bold and outspoken. It’s smothered by political correctness. “Don Rickles couldn’t get a job today,” he says. “Blazing Saddles wouldn’t get out of the screening room.”
The story doesn’t have a happy ending. He lost his bid for reelection last month, but tired old tapes weren’t the reason. The dark cloud spread by Trump was. Democrats tried again to make an issue out of tapes of Lewis in talk-radio action. They were a flop. But the media wouldn’t give up. Reporters demanded that House speaker Paul Ryan deal with the tapes as if they were a matter of compelling interest.
“He was a shock jock,” Ryan said. “That was his job at the time. . . . I obviously don’t support those comments. But the Jason Lewis I know here . . . is an extremely conscientious man, a very hardworking, a very effective member of Congress who has been nothing but an exemplary congressman who represents his constituents well.” Amen.
