OPINON: New biography reminds us of Tom Foley and a better time in politics

When Tom Foley lost reelection in 1994 — Foley represented Spokane and eastern Washington in Congress for 30 years and eventually became speaker of the House — the guy who beat him helped make conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich the new speaker. What an awful swap.

If you’re old enough to remember that election — watershed seems hardly adequate as a description of what the outcome foretold — you might recall the sharp, ugly attacks launched on Foley and many other Democrats by Gingrich and his acolytes including, most importantly, on hard right talk radio.

Some dubbed 1994 the “talk-radio election,” a campaign, as one observer termed it, of “anger and alienation.” The language used 30 years ago is eerily similar to what we hear today from the hard right.

G. Gordon Liddy, a sleazeball who served time for helping mastermind the Watergate break-in during Richard Nixon’s presidency, reveled in Gingrich’s takeover. “This is the beginning of the end of the dreadful, disastrous, venal, corrupt, sleazy Clinton presidency,” Liddy told his national audience.

Rush Limbaugh hailed the election as “one of the most massive shifts to the right in any county in any year since the history of civilization.”

A conservative columnist in Boston opined that “it seems a little sunnier today knowing that Tom Foley is roadkill.”

Gingrich succeeded in nationalizing the election so the three decades of service, including bringing home the bacon for Fairchild Air Force Base and eastern Washington farmers, ceased to count among the 51% of Foley’s constituents who voted him into retirement. If you wonder where Donald Trump’s insane rhetoric comes from, look no farther than 1994.

Gingrich implored Republicans, as historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer wrote in their book “Fault Lines,” to demonize their opponents as “sick” and “destructive.” Democrats would “lie” while “threatening” America. And, of course, every Democrat was a “socialist.”

None of that, of course, fits Foley, a supremely talented lawmaker with a commitment to decency and bipartisanship. Yet, in Gingrich’s overheated, grievance-filled world, the attacks worked. Never mind that Gingrich was out of office four years later, a victim of his own sleaze and the animus of fellow House Republicans. Typically, Gingrich blamed his demise not on his own excesses and hubris, but on the “cannibals” in his own party who began to behave just as he had instructed them.

And since there is always a second act for bombast and grievance, Gingrich still shows up to regularly peddle his incendiary poison on cable television.

In contrast to the fire breathed by the hard right, Foley left public life, as the Spokesman-Review noted, “as ever a voice of conciliation.”

Now Foley has a new biography worthy of his impressive career, a book that reminds us that who we choose to represent us, who we trust with leadership, really matters.

R. Kenton Bird, a former reporter and now a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Idaho, and John C. Pierce, a former Washington State University dean, have added substantially to our understanding of Congress, as well as why Foley’s civility, decency and accomplishment have fallen so far out of fashion.

“Tom Foley: The Man in the Middle” is the latest in a long string of distinguished studies of congressional leaders published by the University Press of Kansas. Reading the book will tell you a lot more about the state of American politics than any 15 Gingrich appearances on Fox News.

“Throughout his career,” Bird and Pierce write, “Foley was largely an institutionalist, reflected in the values-based commitment to the House of Representatives as a strong, bipartisan, constitution-derived, procedurally consistent, and democratic legislative body.”

Foley strove to be, and largely was, “a man in the middle,” always working to sand off the raw edges of partisanship in the interest of moving issues and the country forward.

Foley also was a man of great accomplishment. With a Jesuit undergraduate education from Gonzaga, a commitment to social justice and trained in the law, Foley became an aide to legendary Washington Sen. Henry Jackson, who encouraged him to run for Congress. Foley beat a longterm Republican incumbent and accumulated influence and respect in Washington, eventually chairing the House Agriculture Committee — the first chairperson outside the South in 95 years — then becoming majority leader and finally speaker in 1989.

Foley became the first speaker in history from a state west of Texas.

As speaker, Foley helped engineer passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a big budget and revenue bill in 1990, the Family Medical Leave Act, an assault weapons ban and the North American Free Trade Agreement. The last two measures, unpopular with many in eastern Washington, almost certainly contributed to Foley’s defeat.

In the nearly 30 years since Foley represented eastern Washington in the other Washington (D.C.), two Republicans have held the seat. The current seat warmer, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, has been a dependable vote for a hard-right agenda that includes opposition to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance coverage that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, benefits 17,000 of her constituents. You can search long and hard to find a significant piece of legislation carrying McMorris Rodger’s name.

Bonus points if you can name the guy who defeated Foley and is now, of course, a lobbyist.

After defeat, Foley served as U.S. ambassador to Japan. He died in 2012.

If this republic of ours is to survive and move beyond the increasingly toxic partisanship of the last three decades, it must return to the quality of political leadership Foley exemplified. It won’t be easy and, perhaps, it is not even possible, to again celebrate decency, civility and bipartisanship. But what’s the alternative? The Bird-Pierce biography helps us remember a better way and better leaders.

Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.