Congressman Sam Brownback, the 39-year-old freshman Republican from Kansas, knows many things but is defined by something he did not know until last week. He has been in Congress 11 months, and in 1991 he was a White House Fellow assigned to the U.S. trade representative. But when recently he was invited to join a journalist for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, he did not know where the hotel was.
His work is on Capitol Hill, his wife and three children are back on the plains of eastern Kansas, and when he is not on the former he is on the latter, so a lot of the federal city is unfamiliar to him. But the city is horrified to know him and the other 72 Republican House freshmen who dug in their 146 heels and forced Republican leaders to force the president to agree to a seven-year timetable for balancing the budget. From that they would not budge.Not all of them are "conviction politicians" to the same degree, but Brown-back believes that less than a quarter of this Class of 1994 has begun to go native, making decisions motivated by careerism. Most are like Oklahoma's Steve Largent, NFL receiver turned legislator, who said he would like his political career to be summarized in three words: "Brilliant but brief."
For Brownback and his classmates, the pebble in the shoe of life is not the executive branch or even congressional Democrats. Rather, it is the Senate. Once in the 1950s when Air Force General Curtis LeMay was being briefed by a young officer who repeatedly referred to the Soviet Union as the "enemy," LeMay, exasperated, interrupted and said, "Young man, the Soviet Union is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy." Which is how House freshmen feel about the Republican senators who are reluctant to get with the program.
In 1992 Ross Perot got 28 percent of the vote in Brownback's district, and in 1994 this district's inclination to dis' the established order enabled Brownback to pile up 66 percent of the vote against a former governor. In Congress Brown-back has organized the misnamed New Federalists, who actually are spiritual descendants of the Anti-Federalists. Two centuries ago they distrusted the centralizing tendencies of the Constitution and feared it would result in, among other things, a corrupt political culture.
Back home, Brownback's experience, like that of his classmates, is that constituents' questions concerning the nation's moral condition come "eight to nine" times as frequently as questions concerning the nation's economic condition. And in Washington the freshmen do not treat, because they do not regard, economic questions as merely, or even primarily, economic questions.
They regard the budget as the cause of many kinds of unwholesome behavior and the sender of many deplorable social signals. Which is why they cannot get in the Washington spirit of splitting all differences.