Saxby Chambliss has a year left in the world’s largest — and cushiest — finger trap. A place where the harder you try to pull on a solution, the more immobilized you become.
“Fourteen-and-a-half months,” he quickly corrected a visitor. Not that he’s counting.
All right, fair point. But in slightly more than 12 months, we could be finished with what’s likely to be the hardest-fought general election contest in Georgia since Chambliss wrested his Senate seat from Democrat Max Cleland in 2002.
And the man from Moultrie, on his first visit home since the end of the federal shutdown, sees trouble ahead for his party — and perhaps for the eight Republicans now signed up to replace him.
The Senate doesn’t need another Ted Cruz in the Senate — Rand Paul might be the better model — he said in an interview. Either way, Chambliss said, Republicans in the race for his seat need to raise their eyes and look beyond the Affordable Care Act.
“We’re a year out from the 2014 election, a year in which we think we’ve got a real opportunity to retake the Senate and an election year that’s kind of a platform for jumping into 2016,” Chambliss said. “And we’ve got a brand problem. And we’ve got to fix it.”
Both he and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson had opposed the 16-day shutdown, which Chambliss said did nothing but underline the absence of a Republican message that clicks with voters. And the time to fill in that blank is running short.
“Normally, once you get into January of an election year, things come to a grinding halt. But if all we’re going to do is take shots at the president next year, that won’t fix it. We’ve got to be for things. We’ve got to have some positive agendas,” Chambliss said. “We’ve got to pick our battles, and if we don’t win, we have to be on the right side of them.”
Maybe something along a mini-version of the Contract With America, the senator posited — harkening to a Newt Gingrich strategy from the 1990s. Immigration reform might serve, but it carries a risk. “The right immigration bill will be very positive for us. The wrong immigration will not,” he said. And getting any version out of the House will be a tough battle.
Clearly, Chambliss is looking for someone to carry the torch when it comes to finding a way to pay down the nation’s $16 trillion federal debt. He and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, are picking up the pieces of their bipartisan Gang of Six effort, which had been shut down by the shutdown. “Mark and I are going to meet with [House Speaker John Boehner] next week to toss out some ideas,” he said.
I asked Chambliss whether he had any message for the eight Republicans running for his seat — who will be asked to weigh in when the next debt-ceiling/federal budget debate arrives with the turn of the calendar.
“My advice to all of them is, look, the No. 1 issue we’ve got is fiscal responsibility. You’ve got to engage on that. At some point, we’re going to get beyond Obamacare. It’s either going to collapse, or the president is going to keep going – and it will take care of itself,” he replied.
“But you’ve got to engage on fiscal issues, and you’ve got to engage on national security,” Chambliss said. “In Georgia, those are the two issues that people care about.”
Yet candidates in the race to replace him can’t help but see the honors being heaped upon Ted Cruz, the rookie senator from Texas who spurred on the “defund-Obamacare” shutdown with a 23-hour filibuster. I asked Chambliss specifically whether the U.S. Senate needed another member like him.
He hesitated a moment — and then gave a firm “no.”
“To Ted’s credit, he picked an issue, and he got out front, and he led on it. That’s what’s being a policymaker is about,” Chambliss said. “I happen to disagree with his strategy.”
Within the Senate GOP conference, he said, even Cruz sympathizers would ask the Texas senator to lay out the endgame. “He never could explain how we were going to win, other than to say we’re going to kick the president in the teeth,” Chambliss said. “You can do that to a point. After that, it starts kicking back. I don’t think we need more of that philosophy in the Senate.”
But Chambliss had a different take on the Senate’s other Republican rabble-rouser, Rand Paul of Kentucky — who put on a highly popular filibuster last spring to wring out a White House admission that it would be wrong to use drones to target an American on U.S. soil.
“Rand’s issue was valid. Rand’s issue was legitimate. It was an issue I had concerns about. I called the White House and said: ‘You guys are nuts. He’s going to beat the hell out of you on this,’ ” Chambliss said.
The Georgia senator noted that Paul actually won his point. Like Cruz, Paul voted to put the shutdown in motion, and he opposed the deal that ended it. But the Kentucky senator didn’t obstruct efforts by his GOP colleagues to bring the fiasco to a close, Chambliss said.
“He was constructive. Rand has matured a lot. And I think that showed in this process,” Chambliss said.
In other words, his message to next year’s GOP field boils down to this: Less Texas, more Kentucky.
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