Frist better get tougher
Agreed. Some interesting thoughts on Frist from Howard Fineman:
New Senate boss: a fish, er, Frist, out of water?
M.D.-turned majority leader faces a host of challenges
By Howard Fineman
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM
msnbc.com
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — I’ve covered Sen. Bill Frist, M.D, since his debut in Nashville in 1994 and I can tell you this: No one in politics is more ambitious, talented or driven — and no one is less likely to enjoy or thrive in the thankless job of Senate majority leader. He’s temperamentally ill-suited for it, surrounded by more enemies than friends and has to run a legislative body that is suffering an institutional nervous breakdown. All of which is bad news for George Bush, a suddenly vulnerable president whose agenda — from tax cuts to terrorism to Republican minority outreach — Frist has to carry in Congress and the country.
THE FIRST EXAMPLE of Frist’s predicament is how the Senate did — or rather did not — get started in its new term. For the first time ever, the Senate was unable to “organize” itself, that is, pass a resolution agreeing on committee structure and budgets. In computer terms, it couldn’t boot up. The dispute was truly juvenile, but a harbinger of the guerilla warfare the Democrats are determined to pursue, led by Commandante Tom Daschle. Having decided not to run for president, Daschle is determined to play a major adversarial role in the 51-48-1 Senate. Too bad for Frist; Daschle knows how to run parliamentary rings around his adversaries.
Democrats aren’t Frist’s only problem. He has to deal with a residue of bitterness and jealously in his own ranks. The Republican Old Bulls didn’t like the way he charged forward when Trent Lott got in trouble. They tried to save Lott, initially. Others who had paid their dues and who wanted to ascend to the top job — Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — weren’t happy to see Frist (a senator far “junior” to them in terms of service) zoom by them on the strength of his ties to Rove & Co. at the White House. I spent a good deal of time in the Senate Gallery in the opening days of the session, and the atmosphere on the GOP side of the aisle didn’t seem quite collegial. At times, it was downright frosty.
Privately, GOP senators view Frist this way: as a talented, hungry guy who views the majority leader’s job as a mere way station on a royal progress to the White House.
That is rarely the kind of person who inhabits the job. LBJ was an exception; the rule is more self-effacing institutionalists such as Bob Dole, George Mitchell, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. Every senator wants to be president, but the etiquette of the Club is that if you want to be leader, you have to renounce your other worldly ambitions. Frist doesn’t accept the old rules. To put it bluntly, colleagues are jealous of the guy. He is too rich, too well-spoken, too well-credentialed. He has it all, and wants more, and the senators don’t like it.
Frist likes to be hero, and likes for the world to know about it. He’s not afraid to discuss his medical exploits, such as the aid he gave during the shooting incident in the Capitol a few years ago, and his prompt action in dealing with the scientific side of the anthrax attack last year. What other senator can have a picture on his wall of a picnic gathering of 200 people — all of whose lives he had saved? Frist had that very picture on the wall of his campaign office in 1994. Every heart beating in that picture was one he had transplanted. The fact that he IS a hero doesn’t make his colleagues any less resentful.
It’s ironic that Frist’s rise was prompted in good measure by his presumed closeness to Bush and his White House lieutenants. But though he worked closely with them on the 2002 elections (Frist was chair of the GOP’s senatorial campaign committee), there is a large measure of wariness at the White House about Frist. They don’t really seem him as a team player. Like any king of the Hill, Bush prefers vassals whose position is wholly dependent on his largesse. Frist has too much money (his family owns the Hospital Corporation of America), too many successes in life (as a hotshot surgeon) and too much independence for the White House’s comfort. The Frist Family in Tennessee is about as powerful as the Bush Family in Texas — and there can be only one royal family in the GOP at a time.
STEM CELL UPSTAGING
White House insiders, let by Karl Rove, spent months working on the issue of stem cell research, and worked just as hard to sell the world on the notion that the president was studying the issue deeply. Rove & Co. were not pleased when Frist, — weeks before the president, with much fanfare — made his own views known in a detailed position statement on the issue. As an M.D., Frist wasn’t about to subsume his own views in a White House white paper. Bush partisans didn’t appreciate Frist’s take-charge attitude on the anthrax matter at the Capitol; it made the administration’s own response look sleepy by comparison.
As if to rein Frist in — and remind him who’s Boss — Bush has thrown Frist some hand grenades to handle in his first weeks as majority leader. He’s asked him to deal quickly with his judicial nominees, including the controversial Charles Pickering. Bush’s tax plan, with its supply-side focus on upper-bracket cuts, is another difficult issue. It’s as though Bush is saying: “Don’t think you can be the good cop, pal, just because you’re Lott-Not. I’m the good cop around here — and you have to get your hospital whites a little dirty.”
ENERGY TO SPARE
How Frist will handle these challenges isn’t clear. On the up side, he has, for one, an almost inexhaustible fund of energy. Last summer he published a book about how to deal with bioterrorism. I asked him at lunch one day how in the world he had managed to write it while doing his Senate business and running the campaign committee. His answer: He barely sleeps. “I got up at 4 a.m. to write,” he said, as if that is what anyone would do. He has a surgeon’s eye for the crucial detail, and monumental retentive powers. He is a quick study.
In the operating room, Frist certainly faced pressure far more demanding than any heat Tom Daschle might apply. But in the operating room he was in charge, and when he barked an order nurses and doctors snapped to and did as they were told to do the instant they were told to do it. In the Senate, you can’t speak without permission, and actually doing something is often the farthest thing from anyone’s mind. You can bark orders in the Senate, but no one has to listen.
Howard Fineman is Newsweek’s chief political correspondent and an NBC News analyst. |
