WASHINGTON — A specter is haunting Congress — the specter of boredom.
The United States Congress is dull. It is bland. It is tepid. It is tedious.
If Congress were a color, it would be beige. If it were music, it would be Muzak. The problem is the members of Congress. They are, in a word, boring.
"It's gotten dull," says Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. Congress is suffering from a severe shortage of colorful characters, he says — pols who stand out by virtue of their vividness, flamboyance, eccentricity or outrageousness.
Why?
"I don't know why," Tauzin says. "I haven't thought about it."
So he thinks about it. He thinks for a long moment. Finally, he comes up with an answer.
"Because Jim Traficant had to go away for a while," he says, laughing.
Indeed, Congress lost one of its most colorful characters when Traficant — the Ohio Democrat famous for delivering surrealistic one-minute speeches ending with the phrase "Beam me up!" — was convicted of bribery and racketeering, expelled from the House and sent to federal prison in 2002.
"I miss him," says Tauzin. "We all do."
That loss was only one of many such blows. Rep. Bob Dornan, the California Republican who was Traficant's only rival as a wacky one-minute orator, was defeated in 1996. Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who loudly demanded Bill Clinton's impeachment even before the Monica revelations, was defeated in the primary in 2002. So was Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia Democrat famous for wearing gold tennis shoes and advancing weird conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Retiring from the Senate were Phil Gramm, the crusty Texas Republican, and Strom Thurmond, the centenarian South Carolina Democrat-
turned-Dixiecrat-turned-Republican.
The Hill is now populated almost entirely by the kind of pols whom Dan Rostenkowski, another colorful congressman who went to prison, used to call "the blow-dried guys."
"I don't think people want to take risks," says Tauzin, "and having fun and being flamboyant is risky in this business."
It wasn't always like this. For two centuries, the humdrum but important work of Congress was enlivened by the presence of pols who were eccentric or funny or buffoonish or obsessive or outrageous or simply larger than life.
"There have been characters like that all through history," says Ray Smock, former official historian of the House of Representatives. "Before the Civil War, they were very colorful and flamboyant. In the 19th century, oratory was more of an art form than it is today."
In the 20th century, too, Congress had plenty of colorful characters. "Huey Long comes to mind," says Smock.
So do Fiorello LaGuardia and "Fightin' Bob" La Follette and Adam Clayton Powell and Joe McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen and Bella Abzug and Newt Gingrich.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the Senate's last colorful pols, has his favorites: fellow Arizonans Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator, and Mo Udall, the liberal Democratic congressman.
"Barry — well, anybody who says you gotta give Jerry Falwell a kick in the ass is colorful, to say the least," McCain says. "And Mo was one of my favorites because of his great, biting sense of humor. We'd be in one of those long, dull, stupid meetings that consume so much of our lives and Mo would say, 'Well, every possible thing that can be said about this issue has been said, but not everybody has said it yet.' And then he'd call on the next guy."
McCain pauses. "Of course, for pure entertainment, it was hard to beat old B-1 Bob Dornan." And he bursts out laughing.
Ah, B-1 Bob! He earned that nickname for obsessively touting the B-1 bomber during the time reserved for one-minute speeches on the House floor. But he could just as easily have been called "Adultery Bob" for his obsessive one-minute speeches attacking Bill Clinton's philandering. Or "Right-to-Life Bob" for his obsessive one-minute speeches denouncing abortion.
"What we are worshiping in this country today, unfortunately, is the god Baal," Dornan said in a one-minute anti-abortion speech in 1990. "They fed him children. They threw them into the fire."
He held up a plastic model of a fetus. "Call it Michelle, call it Michael," he told his colleagues. "I will let you touch it and handle it."
When his minute expired, Dornan walked away, dropping something. It was the fetus' carrying case, but his colleagues thought it was Michelle or Michael and they started hooting.
"You killed it!" somebody yelled.
Ah, those were the days! Back then, politicians were not ashamed to do their part to keep America entertained.
Dornan was just one of many who turned the House into a Theater of the Absurd back in the '80s and '90s. There was Silvio Conte, R-Mass., who wore a Miss Piggy mask when railing against pork-barrel spending. And Bill Dannemeyer, R-Calif., who delivered endless speeches denouncing homosexuality, one of which included a pornographic section titled "What Homosexuals Do." And Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, who showed his support for the Afghan rebels by visiting the rebels' camps accompanied by his girlfriend, a former Miss USA. And Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md., who demonstrated her displeasure with Japanese trade policy by smashing a Toshiba TV set with a sledgehammer.
And, of course, there was Traficant, who took to the House floor nearly every morning to deliver comic one-minute tirades on subjects ranging from the Wonderbra to canine Prozac to the IRS, which he called "The Internal Rectal Service" and "one big enema."
With his "Beam me up!" battle cry, his hideous polyester garb and a gray toupee that looked like a squashed squirrel, Traficant set the gold standard for colorful pols. The good people of Youngstown, Ohio, elected him nine times. In 2002, he won 15 percent of the vote running as a independent from a federal prison.
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., an American Indian who wears a ponytail and cowboy boots and rides a Harley, says the blandness starts with attire. "People feel they have to conform to the Beltway view of what a senator should look like — a dark suit with a red tie, riding in a black Lincoln Town Car with a cell phone in your ear," he says. "Some of my colleagues feel they have to look like that or they'll be teased or ridiculed or something."
Tauzin cites fear of television. "I think the TV cameras have made everybody blander, more, um, appropriate," he says with a laugh. "You get more speeches but less flamboyant speeches."
McCain agrees. "If anybody says something that diverges from the party line, they become the subject of conversation on the talk shows."
B-1 Bob, now 70 and host of a syndicated talk radio show, says the new pols are "annoying little guys who ran for class president in fifth grade and lost and ran again in eighth grade and lost again and now they're policy wonks and all they want is power."
Dornan is not too shy to name those folks. One is House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. — "the anti-colorful man, the antidote to it."
Just when you think B-1 Bob has nothing nice to say about anybody, he starts talking about himself.
In all of Congress, only one pol shows promise of someday rising to the legendary status of Dornan and Traficant. That man is Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.
Tancredo opposes illegal immigration, and he's not too fond of legal immigration, either. Nearly every week, Tancredo takes the House floor after the legislative day is over to deliver an hourlong anti-immigration harangue to, as he puts it, "an empty House except for a few bag people who come in when it's cold out."
In his first term, Tancredo, a former public school teacher, signed a pledge calling for the elimination of public schools. Recently he called for a congressional rule change that would ban House caucuses based on "race or ethnicity," which did not endear him to colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus or the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
A leader of the term limits movement, Tancredo promised in 1998 to serve only three terms. Last year, after attending a religious retreat, he changed his mind. "God has a plan for everybody," he explained, "and our task is to determine what it is and serve it out."
And last June, Tancredo ended a one-minute speech by quoting Traficant's famous battle cry: "Beam me up, as our friend used to say, Mr. Speaker, beam me up."
Peter Carlson is a reporter for The Washington Post.