John Lewis got up and proclaimed, “I don't want to preach.” But Lewis hails from Troy, Alabama, and graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961. He walked with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, and so when he says he doesn't want to preach, it just means that he's going to have to.
That's why Nancy Pelosi's weekly lunch for members of the Democratic caucus turned into a revival meeting recently when Lewis began beseeching members who are defending safe seats to give money from to help fund the campaign of Democrats in tough races. Lewis himself promised to pony up $100,000. By the end of the lunch, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had pledges of nearly $400,000.
“You've got to come to the table with more than just your appetite,” Lewis said.Lewis, who had been in the House for almost 18 years, is a leader of the civil-rights movement and a safe choice to include on your list of political heroes. He is also an unfailingly courteous man who never seems to want to rumble -- it's just that sometimes he has to. When Lewis attacked his state's senior senator, Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia, as a “shame and a disgrace” for taking a speaking role at the Republican national convention, you knew something was afoot: When John Lewis starts breathing fire, it's worth paying attention.
“He just has a certain conviction that is so real and so powerful, it moves people,” says Representative Jay Inslee. “And he saves it for important moments, and this is an important moment.”
What is important, of course, is that suddenly House Democrats can taste victory. They can see John Spratt as chairman of the Budget Committee and Charlie Rangel as chairman of Ways and Means. They can see a Speaker Pelosi and a Whip Lewis, and suddenly they are all believers.
“It is important for people to say that victory is possible,” says Inslee, a Washington state Democrat. “We inside the Beltway can get so enamored with our 12-hour polls and our dissection of the body politic that we can forget there is a heart out there. And the heart is beating with incredible fury, and when that gets unleashed, incredible things can happen -- and it did in 1994.”
Inslee, apparently, was the man who got the lunchtime prayer meeting going last week, though he's smart enough to defer to Lewis, who in voice and vision is the archetypal Southern Baptist preacher. “I wouldn't mention me in the same sentence as my hero,” Inslee says.
Inslee, who has already given $75,000 to the DCCC, offered to match the contribution of any Democrats who sit on an exclusive committee -- Budget, Ways and Means, Appropriations, or Commerce -- up to $150,000. The Inslee offer brought pledges from Marion Berry of Arkansas, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, Adam Schiff of California, and Jim Cooper of Tennessee.
Inslee, who represents a suburban Seattle district, refers to himself as a member of the “dead-man-walking caucus,” one of three Democrats who lost a seat in the GOP landslide of 1994 but has since returned to the House. The other two are Ted Strickland of Ohio and David Price of North Carolina. (Jim Cooper could have associate-member status. Elected in 1982 at age 28, he resigned his House seat in 1994 to run for the Senate but got pulled under by the Republican tide; he returned to the House in 2002. Maria Cantwell of Washington also lost her House seat in 1994, but returned to Congress in 2000 as a senator.)
Inslee presents himself as political Prufrock -- “I am Lazarus come back form the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” -- returned from the netherworld with news. Essentially, he thinks that the same forces that brought the GOP to power in 1994 are working against it now.
“I think when you see a tidal wave go over your head, you recognize some indication of its presence later,” he said. “I think in 1994 you saw this passion, almost bloodlust, to change things in Washington, and you have it again this time around, only in exactly the opposite direction.”
For evidence, he points not to the polls but to people.
“I had this déjà vu moment the other day,” he says, recalling a town meeting held in his district. Instead of the usual attendance of about 50 people, he got 250. “And they were all literally yelling at me,” he recalled. “There was this one woman just chastising me for not standing up enough to George [W.] Bush. She was totally unreasoning, and I thought, ‘This is what it was like in 1994,' except it was against the Democrats.”
David Price, another member of the “dead-man-walking caucus,” sees some parallels to 1994, too.
“There is an underlying restlessness and discontent that is reminiscent of 1994,” says Price, who graduated from the Yale University Divinity School and went on to earn a doctorate in political science from Yale. “We all go home every weekend and we all feel this anger about the wrong way our country has been taken,” says the former Duke professor.
The result is that Democrats are encouraged. “Morale has definitely picked up,” says Price.
But morale will only get you so far. Right now it's about money, and John Lewis is making sure that everyone knows how serious he is about that.
“Don't make me lose my nonviolence,” he preached.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
