With Pressler’s defeat, Senate chair goes to John McCain
The general election that tempered the Republican revolution in Congress ended with the defeat of a powerful senator who led the 1994 attack on public broadcasting.
Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), former chairman of the Commerce Committee, lost his seat after a long, negative campaign in which Democratic challenger Tim Johnson painted his opponent as out of touch with his constituents, according to South Dakotans who observed the campaign. Voters came to connect Pressler's leadership on the 1996 Telecom Act with their rising cable TV and telephone bills.
Pressler's ouster opens up the Commerce Committee chairmanship to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), another tough critic of public broadcasting. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the only senator on Commerce with more seniority than McCain, is expected to chair the Appropriations Committee.
In recent years McCain has pushed legislation to freeze CPB funding, railed against a liberal bias in programming, and held up the confirmation of Alan Sagner's appointment to the CPB Board. (Sagner recently was elected CPB chairman.) McCain also favors auctions of the digital TV spectrum.
As Commerce Committee chairman, the senator presents a "major challenge to public broadcasting," said John Lawson, a lobbyist on edtech issues.
Chuck Allen, g.m. of KAET in Phoenix, offered a different assessment of McCain's chairmanship. "If we can pull ourselves together for long enough to work with him, I would predict support," he said. But he noted that McCain does not suffer fools gladly, and he will not abide what Allen described as the field's "extremely well-known seven dwarfs act"' of factional infighting.
"We tend to look for saviors who will overlook our petty bickering and do our job for us," Allen added. "This Congress isn't going to do it."
Lawson predicted that Stevens, as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, will be a key ally in resolving public broadcasters' dilemna over how to fund their conversion to digital television. Stevens, a "not uncritical friend" of the field, was the "foremost advocate" of full congressional funding for the public broadcasting satellite replacement project, he recalled.
In the House, Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.) will continue to chair the appropriations subcommittee responsible for CPB funding. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), a former Democrat who switched his party affiliation in the last Congress, will chair the House telecom subcommittee.
Telecom bill hurt Pressler
It was the telecom bill that contributed most heavily to Pressler's downfall, not his unpopular push to privatize public broadcasting.
Pressler used the telecom bill as "evidence of his leadership and authority," recalled Ted Brockish, editorial page editor of the Rapid City Journal. "Johnson used it as proof that Pressler didn't really have South Dakotan consumers' best interests at heart."
Disclosures about the telecom industry's contributions to Pressler's campaign, depictions of his lifestyle as lavish, and allegations that the senator is gay, also came into play during the race. The senator's stance on public broadcasting, which he later backed away from, never came up, according to Brockish.
But Helen Cromwell, owner of the HillTop Cafe, who distributed the bumper sticker "Let's Keep PBS and 'Privatize' Pressler," said the senator's attack influenced the race "somewhat." The red-white-and-blue stickers were mailed to contributors to the Johnson campaign, and generated support from outside the state, she said.
Web page posted Dec. 17, 1996; corrected, March 12, 1999
Copyright 1996 by Current Publishing Committee