(4 of 4)
Elsewhere in the East, Democrats tasted sweet revenge. In New York, freshman Republican John LeBoutillier won fame far outside his affluent Long Island suburban district for his eccentric ideas and acid tongue. He advocated a "polar prison" for hardened convicts to be built on an island off the coast of Alaska and likened House Speaker Tip O'Neill to the Federal Government: "Big, fat and out of control." The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee retaliated by supplying his opponent, Suffolk County Legislator Robert Mrazek, with a campaign manager and a press specialist. Mrazek, insisting that the district needed "responsible representation," persuaded voters to give "the Boot" a boot out of Congress.
In Western Pennsylvania, Eugene Atkinson was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1978, converted to Republicanism after Reagan's sweeping tax and budget victories, and was welcomed to the party fold by the President at a ceremony in the White House. The Democrats at first had a hard time finding anyone to oppose him but finally came up with Joseph Kolter, an ex-Marine and state representative, who denounced unemployment in the steel mills and won handily.
SOUTH. Democrats arrested the gradual shift toward the G.O.P. that has been going on for decades, winning two additional seats in Florida, two more in North Carolina, and three each in Virginia and Texas. The most heavily spotlighted contest turned out to be no contest. Cissy Baker, the 26-year-old daughter of Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker, campaigned in a newly created Tennessee district with help from such outsiders as Mrs. George Bush and former President Gerald Ford. To many voters, however, she seemed to have nothing to offer except her name. She bragged, "I can get you a tour of the White House"; that was scarcely the most pressing concern of voters in a district suffering 16% unemployment. Said her Democratic opponent, James Cooper, 28: "During this campaign, people walked up to me on the street and asked me for a job because I had a shirt and tie on." Cooper, also the scion of a prominent Tennessee political family, took two-thirds of the vote.
As always, inspection of these varied results leads to one general conclusion: the House reflects all the diversity of America. Speaker O'Neill's favorite maxim, all politics is local, did not hold completely true this year. But while national issues like the economy influenced the outcome of many elections, the House races just as often turned on local political phenomena: the personalities of the candidates, how they campaigned and where they stood on community issues. —By George J. Church. Reported by Lee Griggs/Peoria and Neil MacNeil/Washington