Book Excerpt: 'Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator
Oct. 23 -- Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, writes of the lessons he's learned in more than 25 years of public service in his new book, Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator. "In 1976, the United States was a different place politically than it is today," he writes, explaining how he was spurred into a life-altering move into political office.
Excerpted from Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senatorby Orrin G. Hatch.
Chapter One: When Is the Right Time to Run?Service is the rent you pay for room on this earth.— Shirley Chisholm
Whenever people ask me about running for office, I try never to discourage them, no matter how implausible the idea might seem. I have only to look into the mirror to remember that conventional wisdom is not always an accurate predictor of one's political future.Instead, I suggest they consider the following five questions. If they honestly listen to their own answers, they will have a pretty good idea whether they are personally and professionally ready to take such a life-altering step.
Is running the right thing to do? Is it the right thing for your family, for your state and for your country? Is it the right thing for you and your own future?
The simple fact is that it is hard work trying to reconcile the demands of being a senator or representative with your responsibilities as a parent, let alone deciding where the family should live. Much will depend on the location of your home state or district. If you are from Delaware or Virginia, the travel demands are much different from what they are if you are representing Hawaii or Alaska. Still, I have always felt it important, if possible, to move your family to Washington. Their presence during the week is critical to keeping a sense of balance and perspective.
There will be significant trade-offs no matter where your family is. The constant demands on your time, meeting with constituents, campaigning and fundraising, both in Washington and back home, will force you to choose between your family and job far more often than you could ever imagine. To survive, let alone succeed, you will need an unusually patient and understanding spouse.
Do you have the personal strength, the mental and physical stamina, to run an effective campaign and bear up through the process? Running for office can be physically grueling and emotionally exhausting.
It is no place for the faint of heart or those filled with self-doubt. You can be assured of exposing yourself and your family to public scrutiny; the achievements of which you are most proud will be sullied; and your statements during the campaign will be twisted and distorted until they no longer even remotely resemble their original meanings.
As Barry Goldwater once observed, following his unsuccessful presidential campaign, "If I hadn't known Barry Goldwater in 1964, and I had to depend on the press and the cartoons, I'd have voted against the son of a bitch."
Is it the right time for you to run and are you running against the right opponent? Some consideration has to be given to the political landscape of the moment, and whether you are in tune with the people you hope to be representing. If the voters are uncomfortable with who you really are and what you believe, you may not be the right person to represent that constituency.Similarly, it helps to be running against the right opponent, against someone who has a different agenda and outlook from yours. As so many have observed, more elections are lost than they are won.
Can you attract the support you will need to put yourself in a position to win? Until a better system comes along or you are independently wealthy, you will have to raise your own funding. Running a campaign is like remodeling a house: It always ends up costing more than twice what the experts predict.
Are you running for the right office? There were some who thought my decision to run for the Senate was a sign of excessive ambition. After all, I had no previous experience in public office. It might have made more sense to run for the House of Representatives first, a more traditional path to the Senate.
Despite the considerable importance of serving in the House of Representatives, I simply was not comfortable risking my law practice for a position that might last only for two years. Moreover, I did not feel I had the economic wherewithal to begin planning the next campaign the minute the first one ended.
The final decision should always the candidate's, and the candidate's alone. No one else can be a more effective judge because ultimately the person running has the most at stake.My own decision to run had more to do with my opponent than with my own interest in becoming a United States senator. In 1976, the United States was a different place politically than it is today.
The country was headed in the wrong direction. We were struggling with double-digit inflation, high interest rates and growing unemployment. Our military strength was eroding. The nation was still reeling from the war in Vietnam and the scandals that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Congress was locked tightly in the control of the Democratic Party, and no one thought there was much of a chance that the Republicans would ever be able to regain control of either the House or the Senate. What Congress did best was spend money. The federal budget was expanding rapidly, expenditures were far outpacing revenues, and yet no one seemed concerned or even aware that they were saddling future generations with a massive debt.
Instead, Washington was governed by the belief that government was the answer to every question and the solution to every problem. All that was needed to establish a perfect society was the right number of laws, the right number of rules and regulations, and scores and scores of federal regulators charged with making sure that things worked perfectly.
To many in the western part of the country especially, we were heading toward an American brand of socialism. Naturally, one has to be careful about such generalizations. As Justice Earl Warren noted, "Many people consider the things which government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things government does for others as socialism."2 Still, the trend was there, complemented by the growing conviction that Americans could not be trusted to make the right decisions by themselves. It was as if our national motto had become: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of the government, a man would swallow up his neighbor alive."3
Moreover, the practice of religion was treated with increasing hostility. After 150 years of permissible school prayer, the Supreme Court, in Engle v. Vitale,4 banned the practice in public schools. In 1973, the monumental decision in Roe v. Wade5 legalized abortion, reading a right to an abortion into the Constitution. For many, these cases epitomized the trend toward the judicial legitimization of a devolution of moral accountability and personal responsibility.
I was convinced that someone needed to stand against these trends. Someone needed to point out the deterioration of our moral fiber, the proliferation and increasing acceptance of drugs and crime, the expansion of the welfare state. There was a need to refocus attention on the diminishment of our military, the federal takeover of our local schools and the bartering of our children's future by politicians who seemed more concerned with their next election than the need for fiscal responsibility. It was time for a different philosophy, a different kind of politician.I believed that the answer lay in lower taxes, less government, fewer regulations, less centralized power and a wiser use of the power that must be exercised on behalf of the people. As Barry Goldwater once noted, "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."6
Unlike many in office at the time, I had a greater faith in the collective wisdom of the public than in the parochial views being espoused in the echo chamber inside the Capital Beltway.Utah was also a different place then. The governor, Calvin Rampton, a Democrat who had held office for three terms, was extremely popular, although he had decided not to run for reelection. There was only one Republican in the then four-person congressional delegation, Senator Jake Garn, who had been elected in 1974.
The incumbent senator up for reelection, Frank E. "Ted" Moss, an entrenched Democrat who had held his seat for eighteen years, was considered by most political experts to have one of the safest seats in the country. U.S. News and World Report claimed he was the only incumbent running who could not be beaten. He was considered a superb campaigner who had not let his leadership position in the Senate interfere with his reputation for constituent service.
