Waving enthusiastically at cars that whizzed by on a busy Anne Arundel County thoroughfare last week, state Sen. Andy Harris looked every bit the genial doctor-turned-politician.
With each honking horn - and there were quite a few - he offered a thumbs-up and a broad smile as he stood next to his black Ford pickup, just in front of a glaring yellow sign promoting his candidacy for Maryland's 1st Congressional District.
But the eager grin fixed on his face didn't keep him from unleashing a barrage of critiques of his main rivals in Tuesday's Republican primary. Nine-term incumbent Wayne T. Gilchrest "is not conservative enough" to represent the district, he offered, unsolicited. And state Sen. E.J. Pipkin "is the most liberal Republican" in that chamber, he said, still smiling and waving at the cars that passed by.
Harris, who has built a reputation as one of the most conservative Republicans in Annapolis, was in his element while sign-waving Monday on Ritchie Highway, doing exactly what he has done in his past three state Senate elections: cheerfully tearing down opponents with clinical skill, a tactic that has led him to one comfortable victory after another.
Yet his race to unseat Gilchrest, a moderate former schoolteacher and Vietnam veteran, might be his toughest test yet. Even Harris admits that taking on an incumbent has been more taxing than the nearly 100-hour work weeks he had to pull after graduating from medical school.
But Harris offered no apologies for running a bare-knuckles campaign.
"You can't possibly overcome the advantage of incumbency without talking about your opponent's record," he said in a later interview. "When you're the challenger, if you're not an aggressive campaigner, you don't win."
Harris loves a fight, and he has some experience taking on incumbents. On his way to handily defeating F. Vernon Boozer, a well-respected Senate minority leader at the time, he ran such a hard-nosed campaign that Boozer refused to give him a congratulatory call on election night.
During 10 years in the Senate, Harris hasn't shied away from combat, either. His GOP cohorts in the Senate regard him as one of the most skillful lawmakers in the art of the filibuster. When opposing bills on stem cell research funding or gay rights, he took to reading court rulings or biology texts about DNA.
And although he was usually a reliable vote for Republican former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., he broke ranks with him occasionally, most notably by voting against a more than 11 percent spending increase in the fiscal 2007 budget.
Ehrlich has endorsed him in the congressional race.
Despite those conservative bona fides, Pipkin has turned one aspect of Harris' legislative record into a potential vulnerability: his vote to authorize the deregulation of state electricity markets. Taking questions from seniors at a GOP event in Anne Arundel County on Monday, Harris nearly lost the room when he began to talk about deregulation.
"You blew it," one man said, interrupting him as did many others who attended.
"Yes, we did," he admitted, before saying the market needs to be re-regulated.
Harris is a first-generation American, the son of a Ukrainian mother and Hungarian father, who both fled Communist rule to move to Queens, N.Y., in 1950. Born in 1957, he eventually made his way to Maryland for undergraduate and medical degrees at the Johns Hopkins University, where he went on to teach and practice as an obstetric anesthesiologist.
Married with five children, Harris is a Catholic who eschews campaigning on Sunday mornings so he can go to Mass with his family. He's also a car lover and speaks proudly about having rebuilt the engine of a Jeep with his eldest son, Joe.
All of that has taken a back seat to campaigning, he admitted, although Harris said he hopes things would settle down somewhat if he won and could run as an incumbent.
If all goes well, Harris said, he will have another unlikely victory under his belt.
bradley.olson@baltsun.com