WASHINGTON -- Out on the stump, Barbara Ann Mikulski sometimes trips over key phrases, and her blurry "l"s and "r"s complicate an already strong East Baltimore accent. What animates her, and what propels her listeners, is not eloquence but the seeming force of her conviction.
Not quite 5 feet tall, a bit jowly and two years past 60, Mikulski somehow stands out by the virtue of being unremarkable. After almost 30 years in public life, including a dozen in the U.S. Senate, voters still call her by her first name and claim her as one of their own: an unflinching outsider championing the little guy.
"She is tremendous," said Mary Alice Marks, a Democrat from Frederick who recently caught sight of Mikulski on a damp day at the Monocacy Dam. Mikulski stood in a yellow rain slicker near an immaculately groomed Hillary Rodham Clinton and self-deprecatingly compared herself to a school crossing guard. "There is only one lady like her in the country," Marks said, "but she tells it like it is."
The Maryland Democrat draws heavily on that blunt-spoken, populist image as she makes her bid for a third six-year term in the Senate against a pack of political unknowns. Yet that's not the Mikulski her colleagues see in Washington, where she is regarded as a shrewd player in the cutthroat game of power politics.
Mikulski doesn't fight the system. She works the system. She is the system -- working the process to get what she wants, shedding her relatively liberal views when they prove inconvenient and deftly courting the special interests who bankroll re-election campaigns.
"If she were a 6-foot white guy, would she be as noteworthy?" asked Stuart Rothenberg, a Washington-based political analyst, describing most of Mikulski's Senate colleagues. "Barbara Mikulski definitely is an insider. She is atypical purely on the basis of looks."
Her political horse-swapping has alienated a few former supporters, such as J. G. Bell of Pittsboro, N.C. In January, the Mikulski campaign contributor read a magazine article by Sen. Dale Bumpers, an Arkansas Democrat, that was highly critical of federal subsidies to companies that conduct mining on federal lands in Western states. Mikulski voted for the continued subsidy, which is backed by many Western senators.
"I know what Barbara has to do -- she has to trade her vote for something that's more important to Maryland," said Bell, a retiree who contributes to liberal candidates active on issues affecting women and the environment. "I thought, 'OK, Barbara, you'll get no more money from me.' "
Doing what's necessary
But Mikulski's ability to work the system -- which she uses most often to collect pork barrel projects for Maryland -- cements her popularity with some conservative constituents who might otherwise object to her advocacy for women's rights, abortion rights and union causes.
"She is so demonstrably good for the state that regardless of what political [stripe] you are, it's hard to imagine being against what she's done," said Baltimore banker H. Furlong Baldwin, a prominent Republican who nonetheless contributes to Mikulski campaigns. "She's delivered the goods."
In a pair of recent interviews, Mikulski said she has been able to juggle her interest in women's rights and abortion rights in the Senate with a keen focus on the more parochial, bread-and-butter concerns of her constituents. "I did it all," she said.
Characteristically prickly, and unreflective about her years in Washington, Mikulski also contended that she has not changed since entering the House of Representatives in 1977.
"I am consistent, whether it was working in my father's grocery store as a kid, to doing volunteer work in high school and college, to doing social work and what I'm doing now," Mikulski said.
Yet Mikulski, like Maryland and much of the nation, seems to have listed to the right over the past few years.
In her earliest days in politics, she clearly could be found in the liberal wing of her party. Eighteen years ago, while still a member of the House, Mikulski bucked the Democratic Party leadership to support Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a primary battle against President Jimmy Carter, whom she considered insufficiently attentive to the needs of the poor. For a brief stretch during the early 1980s, applicants for jobs in her office were judged on the degree to which they agreed with the feminist writings of a Marxist academic, then a close Mikulski friend.
Senator has mellowed
Nowadays, while still capable of an occasional anti-Republican tirade, Mikulski has emerged as a fixture in the nation's political establishment. She is currently the third highest official in the Senate's Democratic leadership. And her chief of staff is Shaila R. Aery, who served as higher education secretary for Republican Sen. Christopher S. Bond when he was governor of Missouri.
Mikulski painstakingly solicits the favor of ethnic conservatives, feminists, union members, educators, veterans and senior citizens -- the "everyday people" who make up her core voting constituencies. But she is also a big hit among the major business interests -- particularly financial institutions and defense and aerospace contractors -- who are among the biggest contributors to her campaign kitty, now at more than $1.67 million.
Those donations are in no small measure a tribute to Mikulski's successful relationship with Bond, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on which she is the senior Democrat. Their partnership has enabled her to leave Washington with such election-year goodies as $10 million for a Baltimore-based FBI initiative against online child pornography and $10 million to continue production of an aircraft anti-missile jamming system built in Linthicum that the U.S. Navy doesn't want.
Among particularly grateful donors are the residents of Huntsville, Ala., the construction site for the NASA space station, which Mikulski has kept in steady cash despite complaints from Bumpers and others about rampant cost overruns. On a single day -- last New Year's Eve -- the Marylander's campaign registered $10,000 in gifts from Huntsville.
As she speaks to voters, Mikulski maintains that she is driven by the same Democratic ideals that first propelled her into politics.
"We are not chameleon Democrats," Mikulski said last month, thumping the lectern with her fists as she spoke to the Montgomery County Women's Suburban Democratic Club. "We do not read polls to see who we are, what we should be, and what we stand for. We have core Democratic values and we have the right themes."
Yet, on a series of social issues -- some of them substantive, some symbolic -- Mikulski has proceeded far more gingerly than her rhetoric would suggest.
Some votes surprising
In August 1996, the former social worker voted to cut off welfare benefits to families after two years -- a key initiative of congressional Republicans. Mikulski cast the vote -- she now characterizes it as "a hand up instead of a handout" -- despite provisions that she called too punishing at the time.
A month later, Mikulski voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which would prohibit same-sex marriages -- although she took to the Senate floor to denounce the legislation and the politics that drove it.
Mikulski says those votes prove her independence from knee-jerk liberal ideology. But some supporters were taken aback. "I know those were difficult votes for her. She really cares about people, especially people who don't have a voice," said Lisa Kinnard, a lawyer who left Mikulski's staff earlier this year.
The senator's colleagues understand this balancing act well.
"The first law of nature is self-preservation, and you can't find any place that's truer than politics," remarked Bumpers, who said he is not immune from such pressures. "You watch your backside and take care of your constituents."
Mikulski has been so diligent at sewing up loyalties and scaring off credible challengers that she's now in the midst of a two-week vacation out of state with friends -- although the August congressional recess is typically considered by incumbents to be a prime opportunity to campaign for re-election.
As Mikulski seeks to connect with Marylanders, she dances at an ethnic festival, cooks crab cakes on public television, makes the rounds at senior citizen centers, almost always with a pithy line and a smile.
She rarely reveals at home the temper -- often unleashed on aides -- that earned her the title of second-meanest senator in a recent poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian magazine.
Mikulski says she's no more demanding of her staff than she is of herself.
Her supporters get the message.
"I can meet her down at Jimmy's [restaurant in Fells Point] and go around to talk to her, whatever the issue," said George Perdikakis, a former Baltimore official who first came to know Mikulski when she was a City Council member in the early 1970s. "And she will sit down and listen to me. I wish that we had many more like her."
Pub Date: 8/24/98