NFIB

Lautenberg: Liberal Then, Liberal Now
10/28/2002

By Herb Jackson
Trenton Bureau Bergen County Record

A rags-to-riches son of immigrants, he got into politics to make sure all kids could get the same opportunities he had.

Following that credo for 18 years in the U.S. Senate, he came to be loved by liberals and hated by conservatives. The nation's largest teachers' union gave him an average grade of 97 percent for voting the way it wanted nearly every time. The National Taxpayers Union gave him a 27.

Now, as the 78-year-old tries to make a comeback as the Democrats' last-minute replacement for Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, it's clear that retirement has done nothing to moderate Lautenberg's views.

On the campaign trail, the millionaire Democrat openly attacks President Bush's tax cuts for being too generous to the wealthy, saying surpluses that could have bolstered Social Security have been replaced by deficit spending. He defends his opposition to the death penalty for terrorists by questioning how a death threat would be a deterrent to people willing to commit suicide to achieve their goals.

And as an ardent advocate for gun control who compares the National Rifle Association to the Mafia, Lautenberg does not hesitate to use the sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C., area to try to score political points against Republican opponent Douglas Forrester.

"Some maniac is out there with a gun killing people at random," Lautenberg said at a recent Democratic Party dinner in Hudson County. "And my opponent says we don't need new gun laws. That's the same thing the NRA tells us. This man doesn't understand what's going on."

Such comments are standard rhetoric from Lautenberg, an aggressive campaigner who excels at molding opponents' statements into wedge issues to drive voters to his side in elections.

Lautenberg's critics paint him as an arrogant and pushy publicity hound who never hesitates to drag a campaign through the mud. But his supporters describe him as tenacious and driven, someone who plays for keeps and tries to make sure he gets the credit he deserves.

"He's a wonderful guy in terms of his sense of purpose and his sense of humor, and that helped to make him a very effective senator," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., a longtime Lautenberg friend.

"He was not hesitant to get into a fight for something he believed in, but he knew how to work with his colleagues as well."

A different view comes from former Rep. Dick Zimmer, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Torricelli for the Senate in 1996 and now works as a lobbyist for a Washington, D.C., law firm.

"He's hardworking, but he's not very charismatic. He was very competitive, sometimes to the disadvantage of the state's interest," Zimmer said. "He was hard to get along with."

When Lautenberg entered the Senate in 1982, he gave up his post as chairman and chief executive officer of payroll and computer services giant ADP, a company he co-founded in 1952 that now employs 40,000 people. He had poured $5.1 million of his own money into that first campaign, but there was more where that came from. Lautenberg's 2000 Senate financial disclosure statement listed his net worth as between $11 million and $56 million.

At the time, businessmen-turned-senators were rare, and news accounts from the period say Lautenberg bristled against the niceties of Senate procedure. But supporters say he learned to work the system, and was eventually successful in battling some of Washington's most powerful special interests, including the NRA and big tobacco companies.

Eve Lubalin, his former chief of staff, credits Lautenberg with kicking off the smoke-free revolution, citing a 1987 law banning smoking on airline flights of under two hours. That law eventually became a smoking ban on all domestic flights, and opened the door for numerous subsequent restrictions on smoking in offices, restaurants, and even outdoor stadiums.

Lautenberg's father had died of cancer at age 43, when Frank Lautenberg was just 18 and about to enter the Army to fight in World War II. Lubalin said Lautenberg always believed his father's death was somehow related to the Polish immigrant's work in the Paterson silk mills, and it influenced Lautenberg's commitment to worker safety and environmental protection. In addition to endowing a cancer research center in Israel, Lautenberg was eager in the Senate to take up the battle against smoking.

"I remember in 1987, we had a lobbyist for RJR [R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.] in our office, threatening me with political retribution" when Lautenberg came up for reelection in 1988, Lubalin said. "I'd go into his office and deliver the information and say, 'FYI senator, this is what they threaten to do to you next year.' It would only get his back up more."

Lubalin said colleagues who disliked Lautenberg may have done so because he pushed them to take votes they would rather have avoided. For example, she cited his effort in 1996 to prohibit people convicted of domestic violence from possessing guns, something Lautenberg lists as one of his proudest achievements. Lautenberg attached the ban to a spending bill that had to be passed to end the government shutdown that year. Republicans were faced with either voting for it, or prolonging the shutdown, which had already caused them political damage.

But while Lautenberg may have made enemies because of differences in policy, his personality was also a factor in souring dealings with other colleagues. Though all were Democrats, Lautenberg's relationship with former Sen. Bill Bradley was chilly at best, and he had a well-publicized feud with Torricelli.

Bradley did not return calls seeking comment for this article, and so far has not campaigned with Lautenberg. Torricelli also declined to comment. Party leaders said Torricelli had initially agreed to turn over money he had raised for this year's campaign to his successor, but reneged when Lautenberg was tapped for the role.

Though Lautenberg's allies are running a television commercial that quotes former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean praising Lautenberg as a helpful New Jersey advocate in Congress, the senator's relationship was rocky with former Republican Gov. Christie Whitman.

Former Whitman spokesman Peter McDonough said that when Whitman's office needed help from Washington, Lautenberg's office "always seemed to be trying to find the most negative aspect of any request we were making." McDonough recalled trying to arrange a flag-raising ceremony on July 4, 1998, to mark New Jersey's victory in a legal battle with New York over the sovereignty of Ellis Island. Whitman needed clearance from the National Park Service, which owns the island, and aides reached out to Lautenberg. "We got absolutely stonewalled. The calculation appeared to be very political, as in how was Governor Whitman trying to get ahead by doing this. It became so difficult that we abandoned trying to work with them and went to Senator Torricelli's office and in a matter of 10 minutes the problem was solved," said McDonough, who now works as a spokesman for Forrester's company, BeneCard.

Nearly every Lautenberg supporter mentioned his primary focus on New Jersey issues in the Senate. When it came to committee assignments, for example, he joined and moved up the ranks of committees that controlled environmental policy and transportation spending.

Lautenberg helped secure funding for the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system, which now links Bayonne with Hoboken and is supposed to eventually reach Bergen County at the New Jersey Turnpike's Vince Lombardi Service Area. Lautenberg also got Uncle Sam to fund a new rail transfer station in Secaucus that will allow North Jersey commuters to switch to trains running directly into midtown Manhattan. The station will bear Lautenberg's name when it opens next year.

"A lot of the criticism he got was that he focused only on small things," especially in comparison to the more globally focused Bradley, said the Rev. Reginald Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey. "But I thought that was a good thing. He was the senator elected from New Jersey, and he was talking about issues that really affected New Jersey.

Jackson also praised Lautenberg for never forgetting his roots. He grew up poor in Paterson, and says he probably would have ended up as a factory worker like his father if service in World War II didn't entitle him to a college scholarship under the GI Bill.

He got a degree in economics from Columbia University and was selling insurance when he ran into some people he knew from Paterson in the same office building. They were trying to build a company, called Automatic Data Processing, to use advanced adding machines to process business payrolls, and he soon joined in.

More than 30 years later, Lautenberg and Henry Taub, another ADP founder, were trying to help Paterson children still living in poverty get a better life. He and Taub were among six benefactors who pledged more than $750,000 in 1988 to pay the college tuition of sixth-graders who met their challenge of finishing high school and getting admitted to college.

More than 100 students were given mentors, tutors, summer jobs, and help on the college boards, but in the end, fewer than 25 went on to college. Lobbyists who encountered Lautenberg in Washington either loved him or hated him.

Travis Plunkett of the Consumer Federation of America called Lautenberg "one of the most consumer-friendly senators" in the country, in part because of Lautenberg's work on gun control issues that the federation supports. The American Conservative Union listed Lautenberg among the "worst and dimmest" senators, the flip side of its "best and brightest" list.

"He's bad on gun safety, bad on arts funding, bad on missile defense, bad on taxes, bad on the estate tax," said Ian Walters, communications director for the conservative group. "He's pretty much bad on everything as far as we're concerned."

In his 18-year career, Lautenberg voted the way the conservative union wanted him to vote just 6 percent of the time. Conversely, the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action gave Lautenberg a 94 rating for the same period.

Business groups gave Lautenberg mediocre ratings. A spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business called his voting record "pretty awful," while a U.S. Chamber of Commerce spokesman chided Lautenberg for consistently opposing measures that would limit how much plaintiffs could collect from liability lawsuits.

"He certainly has not recognized the importance of limiting the avarice of trial lawyers," said chamber spokesman Eric Wolfschlager.

Lautenberg also ran afoul of advocates for smaller government and lower taxes such as the National Taxpayers Union, which found Lautenberg voted the way it wanted, on average, just 27 percent of the time.

"It suggests the voting record of a lawmaker who opposes most tax reductions, supports most increases in appropriations, and stridently opposes limitation and reform measures on both taxes and spending," said NTU spokesman Pete Sepp.

Lautenberg voted against amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget, for example. Today, he takes credit for shepherding a Clinton budget bill through Congress that ended decades of deficit spending in 1997. But in 1993, concerns about an upcoming reelection fight and the anti-tax fervor in New Jersey at the time led Lautenberg to vote against former President Bill Clinton's tax increases that made balancing the budget possible.

Lautenberg criticizes the 10-year tax reduction plan Bush enacted in 2001, especially the provision that phases out inheritance taxes by the end of the decade. In campaign speeches, he cites the tax cuts and recent corporate scandals as evidence that Republicans are siding with the wealthy over the working class.

"People at the top not only skim the cream, but practically the whole bottle, and leave the rest of the people to struggle along and see their pensions disappear," said Lautenberg, who had an adjusted gross income of $863,989 last year and a total federal tax bill of $228,675.

He stopped short, however, of saying he would vote to stop the future installments of the tax cuts from taking effect. And aside from mentioning that he has endowed a chair in business ethics at Columbia University, he is vague about what he would like to see done to improve corporate behavior. As he seeks an unexpected fourth term, Lautenberg is focusing on his record and his differences with Forrester rather than making many promises about what he'll do. But he does say he'll remain committed to the goals he pursued in his previous 18 years, which he said were focused on making sure children were safe and healthy and had the same opportunities he did. Lautenberg recalled a visit to a fourth-grade class in Cliffside Park, where he asked the students how many had parents who were born outside the United States.

"Twenty-five of the 27 kids raised their hand. And then I raised my hand, and they looked at me quizzically," said Lautenberg, whose mother came from Russia and father from Poland. "I told them you too can become a U.S. senator. The fact that your parents brought you here does not diminish the fact that you're a citizen, and this country belongs to you."