Ousted Dem on sitting out the 112th: ‘There’ll be an emptiness’

He has a new hip along with several other body parts, he’s proud of what he accomplished during 18 terms in Congress and he’s looking forward to his next career, but Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) can’t hide the fact that he’ll miss being where the action is when the 112th Congress convenes on Wednesday.
 
“I will find it very difficult to be detached, to be an outside observer of things,” the 76-year-old outgoing chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said in an interview Tuesday as he prepared to become an ordinary citizen after nearly a half-century in public life, including 36 years as a member and 12 as a staffer.
 
“I will miss immensely the excitement — for me every day it was the excitement of going to the office,” Oberstar said on his last day as a member after casting nearly 21,400 votes. “There was always an agenda for that day, but there was also always the unexpected, things you just never knew what was going to happen. … There’ll be an emptiness, an emptiness.”
 
He added, “I wish I were a part of it. So many people told me it’s better not to be in this Congress because it’s going to be ugly, it’s going to be bitter, but that’s when seasoning and experience are needed. I would [relish] the opportunity to counter what I think will be the excesses in this Congress. But that’s not going to happen.”
 
Oberstar, the longest-serving member of Congress in Minnesota history, recalled seeking the advice of his mentor, the late Rep. John Blatnik, after succeeding him in January 1975. “I said, ‘John’ — it was the first time I called him that, it was always ‘Mr. Chairman’ or ‘Boss’ – ‘let’s have lunch and talk things over,’ and he said, ‘Jim, you know there’s a new life out there. There’s a blue sky, not those artificial lights, and the bells don’t ring.’
 
“And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I hope I don’t have to do that for a long time.’ And I didn’t, and it’s been such a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. But I’ll miss that intensity and purposefulness, that kind of unstructured structure, if you will. No matter what the agenda was, something was going to turn it around each day, and that made each day exciting. So yes, I’ll look on the opening of the new Congress with a wistfulness.”
 
Oberstar was one of the most prominent victims of the Republican tsunami of 2010. He was blindsided by a political unknown, Chip Cravaack, a 51-year-old former Navy captain who overcame Oberstar’s 4-to-1 cash advantage and captured a seat that had been in Democratic hands since 1947. Oberstar said he hasn’t spoken to Cravaack since the election, and made it clear he has no desire to.
 
Asked if he saw his defeat coming, Oberstar said he told his staff after President Obama’s inauguration, “ ‘The next two years are going to be very difficult, and we’re going to have to undertake some very challenging issues and have some very tough votes like healthcare reform and a stimulus package.’ I said, ‘These are things I’m prepared to vote for and they’ll be controversial, so be prepared, it’s going to be a tough year.’ But I didn’t fully realize how tough it would be.”
 
Oberstar, the first Minnesota Democrat to endorse Obama, said he thinks Obama “did remarkably well” in his first two years, but added, “I think somewhere along the line he lost the message war. I don’t know how to evaluate that, but I will say that he was on the trail the latter part of 2009 and then 2010, making the case for job creation and stimulus, and benefits of healthcare reform, and there was the perception and the reality that the needle hadn’t moved on unemployment, and that Democrats hadn’t turned the country around.”
 
He also credited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) with outmaneuvering Obama and congressional Democrats. “I think Obama was playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and McConnell was using black-belt karate and kicked the daylights out of him. When Mitch McConnell is very brazen about saying his purpose is to deny Barack Obama a second term, then how do you translate that into cooperation?”
 
Oberstar called the new Speaker, Ohio’s John Boehner, “very astute, a pragmatic, hands-on person,” but predicted he will have more trouble with his own party than with Democrats. “You have 25 or 30 of the new Republicans who campaigned on opposing everything, that compromise is failure, so you have an incoming group of ideologues for whom purity is more important than governance.”
 
As for his own future, Oberstar said he will be a guest scholar at the Center for Transportation Studies at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and is considering “at least a half-dozen offers” of consulting jobs in the transportation field and in international affairs. But he said he will not be a lobbyist.
 
Oberstar, who once taught English in Haiti and is the only member of Congress who speaks Creole, said he will continue his involvement in Haiti relief efforts. He said he told former President Clinton, a special envoy to Haiti, “ ‘I’m available to help in whatever way I can with your mission in Haiti,’ and he said, ‘We’ll call on you.’ ”
 
Oberstar concluded the interview by noting that his fellow Minnesota Democrat, former Rep. Martin Sabo, who retired in 2008, “sent me a Christmas card with a note that ‘there’s life outside the dome.’ And he didn’t mean the Metrodome.”