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The Sierra Club Congressman
Will conservatives revolt against Rep. Wayne Gilchrest?
JOHN J. MILLER
On February 26, 1998, Andy Harris spotted a headline in a copy of the Washington Post that was sitting in the doctor's lounge of the hospital where he works. "I still remember that it was on the front page of the Metro section, on the right-hand side," he says. Here's what it announced: "Md. Senate Delays Bill on Abortion; Issue Won't Resurface This Year, Officials Say."
The story described how his state senator, a Republican, had played a vital role in killing a proposed ban on partial-birth abortions. "He led the fight against it, which really surprised me," says Harris. "I decided that he couldn't cast a vote like that and not be challenged."
Harris had no political experience beyond his occasional attendance of local Republican-club meetings - the kind of gathering that he says usually drew fewer than a dozen people. Harris nevertheless resolved to take on state senator F. Vernon Boozer, a 17-year incumbent, in the GOP primary - and won a victory that shocked Maryland's Republican establishment.
Now Harris is both aiming higher and trying to repeat history: On February 12, he'll square off in a GOP primary against Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a liberal Republican who has sat in Congress for as long as Boozer served in the state senate. The contest, which also features state senator E. J. Pipkin, promises to be one of the most expensive in Maryland's history. More important, it could function as a Republican bellwether: Are conservatives so disgruntled following the defeats of 2006 that they'll evict a longtime incumbent whose voting record places him well to the left of his constituents?
Maryland's first congressional district includes all of the state's eastern shore, plus parts of suburban Baltimore. President Bush has carried it easily, winning with 62 percent in 2004. After the 2000 Census, state Democrats gerrymandered the district to contain as many Republicans as possible, with the goal of making other areas more favorable to Democrats. The result is that some of America's most contorted congressional districts lie between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The aesthetics may be questionable, but the election returns were clear: Maryland's House delegation moved from a four-to-four tie between Democrats and Republicans to a six-to-two lead for Democrats.
Gilchrest, a former Marine who won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in Vietnam, has never been an especially good match for his district. He favors abortion rights and gun control, and he even won the endorsement of the Sierra Club for his environmentalism. In its congressional scorecard, the American Conservative Union gives Gilchrest a lifetime rating of 61. Only two of his Republican colleagues have earned lower marks, and they at least have the excuse of coming from districts won by both Al Gore and John Kerry.
"The debate over liberal versus conservative is bizarre when it comes to competent public policy," says Gilchrest. "I think I'm a liberal like Gorbachev is a liberal - he wanted to bring freedom to his country. I don't follow a mythical, purist ideology."
That's not all he doesn't follow. Last summer, Americans for Tax Reform condemned Gilchrest for twice violating a no-new-taxes pledge he'd signed. The congressman claims not to remember signing the pledge, but ATR keeps a copy on file. "He gets letters from us regularly that remind him that he took the pledge," says Grover Norquist, ATR's president. "I've never heard that excuse before."
Gilchrest also broke his word in November, when he voted to override Bush's veto of a $606 billion domestic-spending bill. Less than five months earlier, he had joined 146 other House Republicans in signing a letter that promised to sustain the president's spending vetoes. "If I signed a letter such as that, it was to be reasonable about it," he says. "I thought the spending increases were a reasonable amount of money." Most House Republicans disagreed, and they just barely managed to keep the bill from becoming law.
So it's easy to understand conservative frustration with Gilchrest. For Harris, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a commander in the Naval Reserve Medical Corps, the breaking point came last spring, when the congressman opposed the troop surge in Iraq. "That issue is just too important to our national security," says Harris. "I looked around and saw that nobody was getting ready to challenge Gilchrest, so I decided to step forward." He declared his candidacy in June.
Since then, conservatives have rallied around Harris, a Brooklyn-born son of immigrants from Ukraine and Hungary. "They hated Communism," he says of his parents. "The only newspaper my father read regularly was Human Events, and he read it cover to cover." National Right to Life, Eagle Forum, and the Washington Times editorial page have endorsed Harris, and so have two-time gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerbrey and 18 current members of the Maryland legislature. His most prominent backer is former governor Bob Ehrlich, who once served with Gilchrest in the House.
"We need Andy in Congress, given where we are as a party in this state and at this time," says Ehrlich. "We need someone who wants to build the party in Maryland. Wayne has shown no interest in doing that and Andy has." Conservatives frequently point to Gilchrest's flame-throwing interview with Reason.com last May, in which he tried to explain the Republican woes of 2006 and beyond: "I think the GOP was dissolving. Now it's drying up and the wind's going to blow it away. I just don't think we have the depth of knowledge, intellect, and experience necessary for a viable political party anymore."
This isn't the first time Gilchrest has faced an opponent in a GOP primary. In 2002 and 2004, he beat back conservative challengers without much difficulty. Harris, however, is by far his most significant threat to date: Harris's campaign expects to spend more than $1 million on the race. Gilchrest allows that Harris may outspend him, but says, "We'll have a sufficient amount of money." Last year he agreed to accept donations from political-action committees, which he had made a point of not doing in previous elections.
He'll need every penny. The Club for Growth, a free-market group that concentrates on GOP primaries, has already spent $340,000 on anti-Gilchrest ads and is almost certain to commit more money to the race as February 12 approaches. "My mother said that if I didn't have anything nice to say about somebody, then don't say anything at all," Gilchrest says of the Club for Growth. He pauses, but can't resist: "They're destroying the Republican Party. They're weakening and degrading it."
The Club for Growth has a history of boosting underdogs. Most famously, it backed the 2004 effort by Pennsylvania congressman Pat Toomey to unseat GOP senator Arlen Specter - a near miss. Then, in 2006, it had its first unqualified success against an incumbent when it helped conservative Tim Walberg swipe the GOP nomination from liberal-leaning Michigan congressman Joe Schwarz. "We're going to do the same thing to Wayne Gilchrest," says Toomey, who now runs the organization. "It's hard to believe how far to the left he's moved."
Unfortunately for Harris, a potential spoiler candidate entered the race in November. Like Harris, E. J. Pipkin is a Republican state senator. In 2004, he ran against Democratic U.S. senator Barbara Mikulski and lost badly. Pipkin is anti-tax, pro-gun, and an Iraq War supporter. Although not a 100 percent pro-lifer, he supports most of the abortion restrictions he might vote on as a congressman. If Harris hadn't jumped in first, it's conceivable that the candidacy of Pipkin, a former Wall Street trader with enough personal wealth to fund his own campaign, could have become a conservative cause. Even so, many Republicans are puzzled by a financial contribution Pipkin once made to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat who ran for governor in 2002.
The worry among many conservatives is that because there's no runoff, Harris and Pipkin will divide a large anti-Gilchrest vote and award the congressman a new term that most of the Republicans in his district would prefer to deny him. Yet incumbents don't always survive three-way races: Two years ago, Alaska governor Frank Murkowski, a Republican, finished behind two challengers in a GOP primary. In December, a Club for Growth survey found Harris's support at 26 percent, Gilchrest's at 23 percent, and Pipkin's at 18 percent.
If those numbers hold up, the Washington Post will run a front-page article on February 13 and this time Harris won't merely read the story - he'll be the story.
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