The House: Political Genes and Reaganomics

All in the family

Tennessee’s Fourth Congressional District is brand new, and so are the candidates. But it is old family ties that dominate the electoral showdown between Republican Cynthia (“Cissy”) Baker, daughter of Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr., and Democrat James Cooper, son of former Tennessee Governor Prentice Cooper.

“I want to be known as Cissy Baker, not as Howard Baker’s daughter,” protested Baker, 26, before her Aug. 5 primary victory. To prove it she pointedly asked her father to stay out of her campaign. “It just about killed him to sit on the sidelines for a year,” she says. But after her rancorous primary contest that split Tennessee Republicans, Baker permitted the family’s heaviest hitter to go to bat for her. Says she, a bit defensively: “Dad is helping every other Republican running for office in this state.”

To familiarize herself with the Fourth District, Baker has spent a week in each of its 23 counties, staying in the home of a different family each night. Before going into politics, she worked as an editor in Washington for the Cable News Network. “I know how Washington works,” she says, “and which doors to open for the people of the Fourth District.”

Cooper, 28, a preppie-looking graduate of Groton and Harvard, cannot match Baker’s family clout. Only elderly constituents remember his father, who in 1938 snatched the Governor’s seat from Baker’s grandfather Howard Sr. (“This is Round 2,” quipped an aide to the majority leader), went on to serve three terms and died in 1969. The former Rhodes scholar has countered Baker’s hard work with a little shoe leather of his own—literally. Since his campaign began in July 1981, Cooper has worn out three pairs of walking shoes and logged 63,000 miles in his car crisscrossing the district.

The Baker name works magic with campaign contributors. As of June 30, Cissy Baker had a cache of $498,000, some of it gathered at out-of-state fund raisers, including one at which her father was host. At the same point in his campaign, Cooper had $258,700. Both scions benefit from strong national party support. Former President Gerald R. Ford will drop into Tennessee on Baker’s behalf; former Vice President Walter Mondale will stump for Cooper.

The rural and conservative Fourth District was carved out last year by the Democrat-controlled state legislature after the 1980 census gave the state its ninth congressional seat. With unemployment in the district at 16%, both candidates have urged federal steps to create jobs in the region. Both assail government-funded abortions and decry gun control. Admits Baker: “I think my opponent and I agree on about all the issues.”

With an 18-point lead in the polls and 53% of the voters Democratic, Cooper should be optimistic. But, as his primary opponent Buddy Perry, now working for Cooper’s election, has counseled him, “You’re running against Howard Baker as much as against Cissy Baker.”

Competing cures

Glen Warner, the Republican candidate for Ohio’s Eleventh Congressional District seat, likes to tell the story of two doctors treating a man with acute appendicitis. One tells the patient he will need an operation; it will be painful, but he will not die. The other offers the man morphine. In Warner’s view, Democratic opponent Dennis Eckart is the man with the morphine and the wrong prescription for the district’s ailing economy. To Eckart, Warner is a man who would trifle with people’s lives for the sake of economic theory. Says Eckart: “We need a government that cares about working people.”

The district clearly needs a fix of some kind. Once one of the state’s fastest-growing areas, with an enviable mix of farming and light and heavy industry, it is suffering the worst battering since the Depression. Unemployment among workers, nearly 50% of them blue collar, is running above the state average of 12.5% in four of the district’s five counties.

Warner, 42, an executive in his family’s plastics corporation in Ashtabula and former G.O.P county chairman, served in the Baptist ministry until nine years ago. Now he preaches economic salvation through Reaganomics. He favors an extension of unemployment benefits as a temporary remedy but otherwise counsels patience. “We have paid 70% of the cost of a revitalized economy,” he insists, “and if we switch theory and people now, we lose that investment.”

Now 32, Eckart is a “boy wonder” who served three terms as a state representative and two years as a Congressman from Cleveland’s suburban 22nd District before losing his seat through redistricting. Determined to return to the House, Eckart moved his family 20 miles to the Eleventh District. Despite charges of carpetbagging, he handily won the Democratic nomination in the June primary, taking 56% of the vote.

A pragmatic liberal, Eckart supports a nuclear freeze and handgun control. He has been pressing hardest on the unemployment issue, telling voters he favors federally funded job-training programs. Eckart is believed to have a slight edge, but the race is very close. The district’s congressional seat has been in Republican hands for 20 years, but that has been largely due to the popularity of Representative J. William Stanton, 58, who is retiring because of poor health. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 34% to 21%. Says State Republican Chairman Michael Colley: “It’s a horse race.”