Orrin G. Hatch: From Carpetbagger to Teabagger in only 35 years.
On the web today at MSNBC, Mark Murray writes: "Move over Kay Bailey Hutchison, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, and Jim Webb. The latest U.S. senator to announce that he/she won't run for re-election in 2012: Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (R)." So many US Senators are announcing their retirements, so many world leaders are not running for “re-election” when their current terms expire, but that trend stops cold dead in its tracks with Orange Hatch.
But the irrepressible senior Senator from Pittsburgh, er, Utah, has a $2.5 Million war-chest, and has cozied up to the Tea Party movement in an effort to outlast even the late Strom Thurmond in the Senate. Hatch has already outlasted Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian strongman, who is announcing today that he’s resigning after nearly 30 years as dictator. Mubarak succeeded Anwar Sadat who was assassinated in 1981 as revenge for his peace deal with Israel.
Oddly enough, my life crossed paths with Sadat, Hatch and Patricia Hearst in early 1978.
My senior year at South High School in Salt Lake City, I managed to be one of two winners of the highly contested William Randolph Hearst – United States Senate Youth Program scholarship, which included an all-expenses paid trip to Washington, DC and a week of meeting with the world’s movers and shakers. We met Helen Thomas while she was still a respected journalist (and people still read newspapers), met George McGovern, then VP “Fritz” Mondale, generals at the Pentagon, spies at the CIA (when the freeway exit sign still read “Shoe Factory”) and I got to ask a question of Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court.
We lunched with our Senators (Hatch and Jake Garn) and visited the White House, where we fully expected to meet with President Jimmy Carter, as every sitting president had met with the Hearst Delegates, as we were known, since John F. Kennedy met with the first group, which included a scraggly kid from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. But something was oddly different when we got to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Instead of the President of the United States, we were met by Roslyn Carter, the ever-gracious first lady, who shook all 102 hands of the nation’s future old people, and the buzz started around the group: President Carter was preparing to receive a guest. Anwar Sadat was coming to meet the future Nobel Peace prize winner to formulate his own Nobel Prize winning peace agreement with Israel. And that was too damned important, so we got the consolation prize. Our hosts for this event, Mr. and Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst, the parents of then-imprisoned Patty Hearst, were miffed and insulted by the snub.
Of course, the rest is “history” or sociology or Islamic studies or whatever you want to call it, and several months later, the resulting Camp David Accords has provided the foundation for peace and stability between long-term rivals, and to Sadat’s demise at the hands of his own trusted officers. Mubarak lost part of an earlobe in the machine gun attack that killed Sadat, and today he loses all of Egypt.
But back to Orrin Hatch, the guy who originally was from Pittsburgh, moved to Utah and practiced anti-trust litigation with my old friend Lowell Summerhays, then ran for US Senate on the strength of accusing Frank Moss of having been in Washington too long, at 18 years. When Hatch runs again next year, he will have served 36 years of chameleon principled politics, and will be something like 112 years old.
Ahh, but we still have that lunch together in ’78.
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