“When a member of the House moves over to the Senate,
he
raises the IQ of both bodies.”
U. S. Senator (R-IL)
It’s too bad we don’t have more of the Dirksen kind of
pol in Washington today.
I’m not saying “The Wizard of Ooze” was my all-time favorite
senator. In fact, he died before I became really politically aware, and my
personal political convictions have changed more or less entirely since the
Dirksen era.
The thing is, the high-profile senator from Illinois was a
realistic, rather straight-talking politician who did a reasonable, fairly
persistent imitation of caring about the vital interests of our nation and the
public good.
Dirksen supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Civil Rights
acts of the 1960s, the Vietnam War and organized prayer in public schools. He
was a conservative on economic issues, but was generally considered to be in
the “moderate” camp. Probably he would feel uncomfortable in a Republican
caucus today.
I don’t mean to lionize Dirksen, he was a politician, he
served in Congress for more than three decades, he was a crony and a log-roller.
He applied the lash sweetly with his quote about the IQ
fallout of a House member moving to the
Senate.
He just forgot to mention that the opposite is also true.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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