SALT LAKE CITY — He’s a private citizen now, a regular old constituent like the rest of us, free to wonder what in the world they’re thinking back there in Washington!
Still, it’s been less than three months since he was one of them. In January, Jim Matheson left the United States Congress on his own terms, walking away unblemished after 14 years and seven straight election-night triumphs. That’s rare, going undefeated, although hardly unprecedented. Jim Hansen once won 11 congressional races in a row before retiring and going out on top.
But Hansen was a Republican in a very Republican state. Jim Matheson ran every race as a Democrat, the party of his father, the late Gov. Scott Matheson, and while the surname was undoubtedly a huge plus, it was countered by more than a few huge minuses. Twice, Republicans extensively gerrymandered his district to bring in a mob of more of Republicans … and Matheson still won. In his last term he owned the distinction of representing the heaviest Republican district in America commandeered by a Democrat.
Imagine a fox hunt with the fox winning seven straight times. That’s Jim Matheson’s legacy.
He has elected to remain employed in Washington, D.C., taking a position in the public policy division of Squire Patton Boggs, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious law and policy firms. On weekends, he'll continue to return to his family and home in Salt Lake City.
The Deseret News sat down with former Rep. Matheson, who turns 55 on March 21 and with memories of his time served still fresh, to talk about politics past, present and maybe future.
DN: Thank you for your time, and welcome to the private sector. What prompted your decision to step down?
JM: I never saw myself as a lifer in the House. Fourteen years is a long time, and I decided it was time for a new chapter. Really it’s that simple. I remember when my dad was in office for two terms as governor and everyone wanted him to run for a third term, and he said no, you get in, you do your service, you get out, and you move on. It’s kind of a bias I always had as well. I got to the point where I decided I’d achieved a lot of the things I wanted to achieve. My time in Congress was the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done in my life, but it was time to move on.
DN: Any plans to run for any of the following in the future: Congressman again? Senator? Governor? President?
JM: (Laughs) You’re the first person to ever ask that question. I’ve promised all kinds of people that they’ll be the second to know. All joking aside, look, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know if there’s a future in politics for me or not. As I said, I’m excited about what I did for 14 years, I’m excited about this new opportunity I have right now. That’s what I’m focused on. But I can say (running for) president isn’t likely. I can take that one off the table.
DN: How does it feel to retire undefeated, especially as a Democrat in a very Republican state?
JM: It’s very satisfying to have been successful in those elections. It’s true that on paper I never should have won any of them. So of course it always feels good to win, but beyond that I think it’s a credit to the voters here in our state. You know, everyone says they vote the person and not the party, but across the country that’s often really not true at all. But in Utah they do, or I never would have won. I think it speaks really well for the independent streak of folks who live here in Utah. That made me all the more comfortable about representing them, because I have an independent streak as well.
DN: What’s the most important thing to do in a campaign?
JM: I have an easy answer. The most important thing is be yourself. At the end of the day people want to know if you’re being honest with them. If you try to be what you’re not, people sniff it out anyway. None of us is perfect, so just be yourself.
DN: What was the extent of your relationship with President Obama?
JM: There was not a particularly strong relationship with him. Of course I think that might apply to most members of Congress. I had far more interaction with George Bush during my time in Congress than I did with Barack Obama. I would like to have seen a more cooperative effort between the executive and legislative branches, but that’s not all on the president by the way, it’s also on folks in Congress. It’s become very much a polarized dialogue that has made it very difficult for effective governing.
DN: Is that polarization the biggest change you saw during your time in office?
JM: Without question. The number of moderate Republicans and Democrats in the House was far greater when I got there than when I left. You had some significant elections that really picked off the moderates in both parties, starting with the 2006 election where Democrats took back the majority and a lot of Republicans who got beat were the moderates. In 2008 it happened again. Then of course 2010 was the year of the tea party. Sixty-three Democrats got beat, many of them moderates. Those three elections changed the Congress in a significant way. After the 2008 election, the New England region did not have one Republican congressman. Not one. And there were only two or three from New York, and that was it from the whole Northeast. Those were the Rockefeller Republicans who were gone, Republicans we need as part of the national dialogue. Southern Democrats, they’re also practically gone, and we need that point of view as well. It doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong, but we need those points of view, and now they’re gone from Congress.
DN: We’re more partisan now, then, than ever?
JM: That’s what I see. Let’s not kid ourselves; we’ve had partisanship throughout our country’s history. But there is a harsher edge now, and I think it’s a reflection of where society has gone in terms of how we communicate information. The Internet has no barrier of entry. Anyone can put anything on the Internet, and that’s created a diffused message and a great amount of clutter. So how do you break through the clutter? There are two tried-and-true methods. One is to keep it short — the more pejorative term is "dumb it down" — and the other is to be provocative. Politics is being broken down into two simplistic, ideological arguments. But life is not that simple, life is complicated and politics is complicated. We’re not supposed to be behaving as a parliamentary system, and that’s the way we’re going now. We’re supposed to be a republic with elected representatives who bring everyone’s point of view to the table, but more and more that’s not what’s happening.
DN: How much do you see gerrymandering as a contributor to this increased partisanship?
JM: Gerrymandering has been around forever, but today, with access to data where they know what kind of shampoo you buy and what kind of shoes you run in, the level of sophistication is far greater than it used to be. After wave elections that radically shift legislatures to one party, the majority party locks in boundaries and stacks the deck. A telling example is the election in 2012, where Democratic congressional candidates had 2 million more votes nationwide than Republicans and yet Democrats remained in the minority. Gerrymandering today leaves you with these pure Republican and pure Democratic districts where there’s no competition in November. The competition is all about getting the nomination. The November election is merely a formality. There are 435 congressional districts in America. How many have competitive races? Maybe three dozen? That leaves 400 that are not competitive. Another problem is that this concentrates all the money from super PAC’s into those three dozen races. If you had 150 or 200 competitive races, it would disperse the impact of that outside national money, and the campaigns would be more localized. In this new super PAC world, we’re taking the candidates and shoving them off to the sideline. They’re the minority of the overall amount of communication and money going into the race, and it’s these third parties and out-of-state money that’s dominating.
DN: What’s the solution to re-leveling the playing field?
JM: One way is to look at what California has done. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, the Democrats had the state wired, and as a Republican he was pretty frustrated about that. So he got enough interest to effect a ballot initiative that changed the way things happened in two ways. The first was creating an independent commission to draw boundaries for both state races and congressional races. Let me give you a great data point on this to tell you how bad it was in California. There are 53 congressional districts in the state. They (the Democrat majority) set the boundaries after the 2000 Census for the next 10 years. With an election every two years, five times 53 makes 265 election results in that 10-year period. Of those 265 elections, in 264 of them the same party held the same congressional district. That’s how aggressively they gerrymandered it under the old system. Then Schwarzenegger did another thing. He said we’re not going to have a Democratic primary and a Republican primary any more. We’re doing one primary, everybody’s on the ballot. That brought in those independent people who you could put a gun to their head and they wouldn’t take a Democratic ballot or a Republican ballot. Schwarzenegger believed, and I do too, that more participation creates less impact from the ideological extremes on the right and on the left. When you get more people engaged in the process you get results that better reflect all of the constituents. The top two go on to the general election. California has had two elections under this system so far, and time will tell how it all works out, but I think it’s going to encourage greater participation and generate some level of moderation.
DN: Couldn’t this result in two people from the same party squaring off in November?
JM: It can and it has. Think about it, let’s use Utah as an example. You’ve got a state legislative seat, you’ve got two Republicans running in November. Who are the independents and the Democrats going to vote for? Probably the more moderate of the two. Not definitely. But probably. Conceptually, there’s an argument that it would have a moderating impact. But even during the primary, it would have a moderating impact because you’re no longer just campaigning for a particular ideological base. You’re appealing to a whole group of people that can vote in the primary.
DN: Aside from your father, who is your greatest political role model?
JM: Well, I love my dad, so it’s impossible to give you a different answer than him. I’ll tell you the man I most looked up to in Congress: John Dingell (of Michigan). He just retired, the longest serving member in the history of the House of Representatives. I think he is arguably the greatest legislator in the history of the United States Congress. He is a remarkable man. He always worked to build consensus. I learned a lot from him, and in terms of how to legislate. He was a mentor for me.
DN: What are you most looking forward to as a civilian?
JM: I look forward to continuing in the policy world, I think I have the ability to contribute there, and I look forward to not doing fundraising. I loved campaigning, I did not love getting on the phone and asking people to write a check. And I look forward to having a little more control over my schedule so I can do things with my family. In Congress, not only is your schedule kind of given to you, but it also has a way of changing at the last moment without notice.
DN: What are you most proud of as a congressman?
JM: One thing I’m really proud of is that I promised that I was going to be an independent voice and stand up for my constituents regardless of whatever is going on with party politics, and I believe I kept that promise. I had people both on the left and the right who would be mad at me at times, but the vast majority of my constituents were happy with what I was doing. There was a graph that the National Journal published in my last term in Congress that plotted how all 435 members voted relative to party unity. So you can imagine, there’s this sea of blue in one corner and in the other corner this sea of red. Then as it moves to the middle it gets a little less cluttered and then way down in the very bottom there’s this one blue dot, and that was me. I was proud of that.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com