WASHINGTON - On Capitol Hill, it is often said that the essential ingredient of politics is timing. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes has learned how true that is.
As the theme of corporate responsibility has catapulted to the top of Washington's agenda, it has also emerged as a topic Democrats hope to use to regain control of the entire Congress. And Sarbanes - a quiet, detail-oriented Democrat known more for policy-heavy testimony than for pithy sound bites - has been swept up in the tide.
The dean of Maryland's delegation, at age 69 and in his 32nd year of a congressional career spent mostly behind the scenes, has suddenly become a major presence on TV news programs, in newspaper headlines and on the national political scene.
After a year as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sarbanes is poised to win passage of an accounting overhaul bill that he drafted behind closed doors in a quiet, bipartisan process. Now, that measure is being aired in a public and highly charged atmosphere.
The Senate is expected early next week to pass the bill overwhelmingly. It would create criminal penalties for securities fraud, force executives and corporate boards to assume legal responsibility for financial statements, and create an independent board to oversee the accounting industry.
"The man and the issue have met at a crucial time," said former Sen. George J. Mitchell, a Maine Democrat who was majority leader from 1989 to 1995 and was a close Sarbanes ally.
For Sarbanes, whose methodical ways have at times elicited grumbles from fellow Democrats and whose media-shy style has earned him a reputation as being gruff and morose, the bill's passage will be a vindication.
After the revelations last fall about Enron's collapse, members of both parties held scandal hearings that drew clusters of TV news cameras and led top executives to plead the Fifth. By contrast, Sarbanes held day upon painstaking day of policy hearings - 10 in all - that attracted few but C-SPAN.
Sen. Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat who, as a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, knows the complexities of corporate accounting, calls the Sarbanes hearings "about as effective a seminar on basic finance accounting and corporate responsibility that you can have."
Many Democrats privately groused that Sarbanes' slow pace was allowing momentum on the politically ripe issue to slip away. But his strategy of refining the legislative details and building support from both parties paid off for the Democrats once the pace of the corporate scandals quickened. Democrats had their fully formed bill they could rally around. And Republicans found themselves scrambling to endorse it.
"Senator Sarbanes has done a masterful job in working with Republicans and Democrats alike in dealing with all of those issues," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, said this week.
Ed Yingling, chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, which has been generally supportive of the bill, said: "There were questions about his style and how aggressive he would be, and there was some concern among Democratic partisans that they might have lost some momentum on it."
"But as the weeks have passed, the timing could not be more perfect. Here you have a bill that is regarded as a well-vetted product ready to go to the floor at the right time."
Sarbanes was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1970 and rose to prominence during the Watergate scandal. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he drafted the most important article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon, charging him with obstruction of justice.
Since then, he has been thrust into some of the most intense policy debates of the past two decades. Yet the senator has labored in relative obscurity, in part because the stars never quite aligned in his favor.
After years of accruing seniority - the source of all power in the Senate - on the Banking Committee, Sarbanes was in line for its chairmanship upon the retirement of Sen. Donald W. Riegle Jr., a Michigan Democrat, in 1994. But his chance was lost that year when the Republicans won control of the Senate.
"The timing's always been off for him," said Christine Sarbanes, the senator's wife of 42 years, whom he met when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and she was studying Roman history there.
Christine Sarbanes, who watched her husband most of Wednesday from the Senate Visitors' Gallery, said, "Now he's the chairman of a major committee, and there's this major crisis, and he's in the right place at the right time."
Sarbanes' colleagues on the Banking Committee praise the work he has done in assembling the bill. But some of them suggest that he, like any chairman in charge of a high-profile issue, owes much of his prominence to happenstance.
"In financial services modernization, was it me, or was it the gods? A lot of it was the gods," Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, the top Republican on the Banking Committee, said, referring to a 1999 law he helped pass. That law lifted rules that had barred banks, brokerages and insurers from expanding into each other's businesses.
"Paul has worked hard on it. I think he's taken it seriously. But the reason we're here is because of this continuous flood of news about a fundamental problem that we need to fix."
This flood has meant more public events for Sarbanes in the past several weeks than in many years. He regards those appearances as a duty.
"It's relevant to the job I'm doing, so therefore it's important that I do it," Sarbanes says.
Some speak of having been puzzled over the years by Sarbanes, who despite a widely recognized intellect - he has degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard - has often been viewed as reticent and oddly passive, hesitant to apply his legislative skills.
"He's always been this independent, aloof kind of guy - he just seems diffident," says a banking lobbyist who asked not to be named. "He can be very tenacious, and he can be a bulldog when he wants to be. It's just that he doesn't seem to want to be that often."
Sarbanes has also frustrated Democratic leaders who think he should use his position to advance his party's election-year fortunes. He has been slow, for example, to move through his committee a bill to increase the amount of bank deposits that are federally insured.
That bill was sponsored by Sen. Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat who is considered vulnerable in the November elections. Banking is a major industry in South Dakota, where small bankers are pushing for changes in deposit insurance.
Yet those who have long observed Sarbanes say it would be a mistake to call him apolitical. Though he tends to reach across party lines to write legislation, he is by no means a moderate. A man who can speak forcefully on partisan issues when called on to do so, Sarbanes reflects Maryland's liberal leanings.
Unlike many in Congress, Sarbanes avoids the carnival of Washington political events and fund-raisers that dominate politicians' evenings during the week. He instead returns each night to his Baltimore home.
These days, Sarbanes is staying late on the Senate floor as debate on the accounting bill stretches on. And he has been staying with friends in Northern Virginia instead of trekking home. It is one way in which the debate over corporate responsibility has altered his lifestyle.
"This is the issue of the day," said Rep. Michael N. Castle, a Delaware Republican who has worked with Sarbanes. "My sense is that he has been processing this and working on this, and is at the right place at the right time."