The record shows that Henry Arnold Waxman was born 70 years ago in Boyle Heights. Less documented is the widely held belief that he was delivered as a fully formed politician.
Washington reporters have noted that the L.A. Democrat “is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball — a natural.”
“The Scariest Guy in Town,” Time magazine headlined. And Ralph Nader observed, “Henry is the only argument against term limits. He’s the only guy who doesn’t burn out, or wear out, or sell out.”
Even Republican legislators grant that Waxman is “tougher than a boiled owl,” according to former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming), and an entire Google category is devoted to Waxman’s nose. One especially acidic Internet critic described Waxman as “a partisan pit bull with an insatiable appetite for headlines.”
Waxman figures that such criticism comes with the territory, although he does not particularly enjoy cracks about his looks and his 5-foot-5 height. “I learned that if I can’t impress them by my size, I’ve got to have the better argument,” he said recently.
The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia (now Moldova), and the son of ardent trade unionists, Waxman showed his political leanings early on when a junior high school teacher confiscated the Adlai Stevenson button he wore to class.
Now, as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman is the key player in pushing President Obama’s agenda on health care, environment, including climate change, and consumer protection through the legislative obstacle course.
After six years in the California State Assembly, Waxman was first elected to Congress in 1974, one of the post-Nixon class of Watergate Babies, and has never been defeated — or even seriously challenged — since.
After nearly 35 years on Capitol Hill, he has distilled his accumulated experience and insights into his first book, “The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works” (Grand Central Publishing), written with Joshua Green.
Waxman discussed the major points of his book during a lengthy interview in his small, plain district office on Third Street near La Cienega Boulevard, following an update on the current situation.
The appointment fell on Columbus Day, and, alone in his office, the chairman opened the door and fetched a visitor a glass of water.
As Waxman sat with his back toward a large, sixth-floor window, the visitor pointed out the sudden appearance of a window cleaner outside. Waxman turned around and noted dryly, “These Republicans will stop at nothing to keep an eye on me.”
For the last few months, Waxman has been a major figure in advancing Obama’s health care legislation, which his committee passed. He is an unabashed supporter of the president.
“I believe that the president has done an excellent job on domestic issues,” he said. “It is easier to work around the edges of a national problem, but you can’t accomplish big things that way. He is a very inspiring leader.”
Waxman is more reserved on Obama’s record vis-à-vis Israel and the Middle East.
“I think the president has moved in the right direction, but in a somewhat clumsy way,” he said.
While Waxman agrees that Israel should stop the expansion of settlements, he observed that “it was inappropriate for him to publicly make such a demand on Israel without asking for reciprocity from the Arab side.”
Waxman also judged that part of the Obama address to the Muslim world from Cairo had been poorly handled.
“I think his intention was to bring the Arabs into the peace process, but I regret that he seemed to buy into the erroneous argument that Israel was created solely to make European amends for the Holocaust,” Waxman said.
He countered that Jews have a long historical right to their homeland, and the legitimacy of such claims are not based on the Holocaust.
With all that, Waxman believes that there is no reason for Israel to worry that it might be abandoned by Washington.
“Israel is America’s most important ally in the world, and certainly in the Middle East,” he said. “The American commitment to Israel is absolutely clear.”
Waxman’s own support for Israel is imprinted in his voting record and goes beyond ideology and politics. His daughter, Shai, her husband and their three children made aliyah (immigration to Israel) some years ago and now live in Moshav Neve-Ilan, about 12 miles west of Jerusalem.
Turning to another topic, Waxman does not buy into the proposition that American Jews have lost some of their old zest for politics.
“The point is that up to the 1960s, Jews mainly worked behind the political scenes but rarely ran for office,” he said. “When I was elected in 1974, I became the first Jewish congressman from Southern California.”
Now there are seven representatives.
“Whenever I face a hard fight on a public cause, Jews tend to be the hardest-working supporters,” Waxman said.
Asked whether he had encountered any anti-Semitism in Congress, especially in light of his tenacity during floor debates and committee hearings, and in taking on the body’s sacred seniority system, Waxman pondered the question for a while. He recalled that during his decades-long struggle against the tobacco industry, he once described its lobby as the most powerful in Congress.
He was confronted by a Southern representative, who riposted that, on the contrary, it was the Jewish AIPAC lobby that was the most influential.
While the unvarnished racism and anti-Semitism of such Mississippi solons as John Rankin and Theodore G. Bilbo, who blatantly slurred Jews and African Americans during floor debates, are no longer acceptable, this does not mean that the old prejudices have vanished entirely.
Waxman recalls Rep. Norman Sisisky, a Democratic Jewish congressman from Virginia, whom he and everyone else assumed to be gentile. As such, the Virginian got an earful of his colleagues’ jokes and remarks, and he told Waxman, “You don’t realize how much anti-Semitism there still is.”
On the other hand, as Waxman’s prominence has risen, favor-seekers frequently make it a point to mention that some of their best friends are Jews.
In visits to foreign capitals, Waxman often runs into the widely held conviction that Jews dominate the U.S. government and most of the rest of the country.
This delusion sometimes works for the good, and Waxman believes that it played an important role in persuading the old Soviet regime to let refuseniks and other Jews leave the country.
Perhaps the most sobering conclusion in Waxman’s book is that “Congress is designed to stop things, not build them,” adding in the interview, “It is much easier to kill a bill than to pass it.”
Nevertheless, his own career is proof that this built-in inertia can be overcome by what “The Congressional Minyan,” the book about the Jewish representatives in Congress, describes as Waxman’s “hard work, knowing the issues and parliamentary procedures better than anyone else; a genius for fundraising [whose proceeds he largely distributes judiciously among Democratic candidates]; and a great deal of patience, persistence and perspicacity.”
It is Waxman’s good fortune that he is so unassailable in the affluent, liberal and heavily Jewish 30th district, which stretches from his Beverly-Fairfax base to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica; he can spend most of his time on national and international concerns.
But he must also keep an eye on city and state issues and has been pushing, with his long-range tenacity, for the subway-to-the-sea project to ease Los Angeles traffic woes.
Despite his deeply rooted belief in the legislative process, he now views the functioning of the current state Assembly and Senate with a sense of despair.
“Sacramento is dysfunctional, antiquated and, due to term limits, largely inexperienced,” he declared.
An example of his slow-but-sure approach in Congress is the first climate control bill, which he introduced in 1992 and which is only now getting serious consideration.
His relentless battles for anti-smoking and anti-pollution legislation, his dramatic oversight hearings on U.S. aid corruption in Iraq and his prying open the Bush administration’s secrecy have become the stuff of legend inside the Beltway.
Waxman strongly believes in finding friends in unlikely places, even among bedrock Republicans, observing that “today’s opponent may be tomorrow’s ally.”
But even his faith in bipartisanship has been shaken of late by what he considers the adamant Republican opposition to health care reform.
He has no illusion about the importance of that particular battle, adding, “If we can’t pass good health care legislation, the Democrats will lose in the 2010 House and Senate elections.”