Congressman Clueless
A year after East Texas voters elected political novice Steve Stockman to fight in Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution, Stockman’s harebrained ideas and headline—making gaffes have made him the laughingstock of his own party.
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“TIP O’NEILL ONCE SAID THAT ALL POLITICS is local,” Steve Stockman remarked, citing the familiar bromide as he strode through the tunnels underneath the Capitol buildings to cast a vote on the House floor, “but to me, all politics is personal.” It was later that same morning, and his gloom had cleared, along with his sinuses. “Did I get invited to your office Christmas party?” he ribbed a fellow congressman, who looked queasy at the thought. Stockman was pleased that the freshman congressmen came off well—that is, not crazy—on Nightline and that another news report actually suggested that Gingrich was now beholden to them. Revitalized, the rookies planned to meet later in the day to press their balanced-budget plan. Stockman’s step was as light as a jig; for him, the shutdown equaled progress.
From Stockman’s overwhelmingly negative news clippings, it is possible to picture him as a combination of Joe McCarthy, Pat Robertson, and Rambo, but to spend the day with him is to see how much closer he is to Jim Carrey. As those somber Depression and World War II veterans have been eclipsed by baby boomers in government, a new kind of political archetype has emerged: the politician as adolescent. Along with Clinton, the great vacillator, and Gingrich, the great pouter, now there is Stockman, the cutup. Energetic and wisecracking, Stockman never met a stranger—“He’s a nice guy,” is his favorite compliment. (The president, who belongs to another clique, is by definition not a nice guy.) His diet consists mainly of junk food. His speech is full of teenage colloquialisms—“She’s gonna jolt him, dude,” he said of a staff member’s current girlfriend—and his attention span is ephemeral. “I felt books were too old,” he said of the “ferocious reading” he did in his twenties. “Magazines were quicker with the information. By the time a book was published, it was not current.” His intellect has been shaped by TV. “Ritalin—that’s my next crusade,” he said, inspired by a television show on the drawbacks of the attention-deficit disorder drug.
Substantive questions are the setup for a joke. Asked for his stand on managed care, the centerpiece of both parties’ health-care reform packages, Stockman winked and said, “We’re workin’ on it.” Asked whether he believed that he and Gingrich had effected a revolution: “That depends on whether we’re here or not in ten months,” he quipped. When Stockman avowed that all politics is personal, he meant it quite literally—all things that have touched his life. And because his experience has been narrow, his politics are too. Health care? International monetary systems? Regulating burgeoning telecommunications networks? “My core value is the belief in the American family and the belief that they make better decisions than I make for other people,” he said. Few who study Stockman’s background could disagree.
Back in his office a few hours later, Stockman was, again, expansive. He had worked through lunch in conference with other freshmen, unperturbed that the shutdown had hit home. “My wife works at NASA, and she’s furloughed,” he said, hanging up from a phone call. But in solidarity with his freshman colleagues, he had refused to give ground to the president. “What makes you think [Clinton is] gonna keep his promise?” Stockman said he had asked them when Clinton briefly appeared willing to compromise. “I grew up on the street, and I know when we’re being hustled.”
Stockman’s experience “on the street” had only recently become public. It was revealed shortly after the election that in his twenties the Michigan native had spent about six months living at the Fort Worth Water Gardens, too broke and ashamed to ask a Texas relative for help. Stockman now describes that period as an introspective one that led to new questions and newfound maturity (“Why am I here? Is there more to life than partying?”), but the metaphor of homelessness can be applied to his life as a whole. Theoretically, voters turned out Jack Brooks because he was too much of an insider; what they got was his polar opposite: a lost man.
Like so many people who came to Texas in the late seventies and early eighties, Steve Stockman was a refugee from the Rust Belt. He was the fourth of six children born to two Michigan schoolteachers, who were evangelical Christians. Stockman has often described himself as the family black sheep; uninterested in academics, he dropped out of college. “I subscribed to the partying syndrome,” he said. He drove junkers, painting one with house paint so his friends could carve their names into it. Stockman spent more than one weekend in jail for traffic violations, and once, after a girlfriend hid Valium in his underwear before he was incarcerated, he was charged with possession of a controlled substance, a felony that was later dropped. His legal problems had no effect on his social life: Stockman, joking, told a Dallas Morning News reporter that he always had his share of “hot-looking babes. I was the studerino.” He was the quintessential good-time guy: For the flight to his sister’s wedding, Stockman showed up wearing a T-shirt and a bathing suit.
Friends married and started careers, but Stockman remained stuck in party mode. He lived briefly with a brother in Madison, Wisconsin, but even his brother finally had to evict him. After spending one cold night in a bus stop, he decided to head for warmer climes. “So,” he told the Morning News, “I took a bus to Texas.” It was there, at the age of 23, that he “hit bottom,” sharing the Water Gardens with drug-abusing war veterans and the mentally ill.
The story of Stockman’s life takes on the gloss of maturity at this point. “There’s a program on The Learning Channel that talks about significant time changes in history,” Stockman said. “I realized I couldn’t follow the philosophy of the sixties. Living free—there’s no such thing.” In 1980 he moved to Houston and worked at various odd jobs. At one time he ran a business called Stephen S. Studios in a sexually oriented section of Montrose, a fact that has given opponents no end of pleasure. (“It was a house-painting business,” Stockman said, exasperated.) Then, in 1984, while eating pizza and channel surfing with his girlfriend, Patti Ferguson, Stockman caught the Reverend John Bisagno of the First Baptist Church of Houston delivering a sermon. Thanks to the urging of his wife-to-be—and the help of cable TV—Steve Stockman put his life in Jesus’ hands.
Married in 1988, the former life-of-the-party got serious, eventually graduating from the University of Houston–Clear Lake. With his new resolve, Stockman joined the local chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas, moving through the ranks to become state chairman. Perhaps it is merely consistent that Stockman’s inspiration to run for office came from watching TV: He maintains that he was angered by Jack Brooks’s mistreatment of Reagan-era renegade Oliver North during televised congressional hearings. But Stockman’s political ambitions got their biggest boost from an advertisement that ran on radio and in newspapers at the time. A company calling itself the United States Citizens Association was offering to “help finance and provide expert campaign help to public-minded candidates who will run against Jack Brooks.” The ads were actually financed by the Suarez Corporation, a controversial mail-order business that had targeted Brooks after he attempted to regulate the industry. Bent on revenge, the company kicked in $80,000 in what it called a loan for Stockman to run against him. Unfortunately for Suarez, he lost the primary in 1990. But the candidate was hooked—and, coincidentally, he had nothing else to do. With evangelical churches providing organization, Stockman won the Republican primary in 1992, and in 1994 he challenged Brooks again.
One more time, Stockman, who ran a shoestring campaign from his garage, owed a momentous transformation in his life to outside forces: a change in the political climate. Owing to social and economic pressures exploited by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, the country was balkanizing. East Texas was not immune: Even though Brooks possessed unparalleled power in the House and had graced his district with countless jobs, his constituents decided that he was ineffective and out of touch. The fact that he allowed a bronze statue of himself to be erected at Lamar University was proof that he had become too grand; his support of Clinton’s crime bill, which contained stiff gun-control provisions, was an insult to a region that—as was oft repeated—had more gun dealers than did the state of New York. It was, in fact, gun owners who became devoted to Stockman, even though he admitted that he had never owned a gun. “But I am interested in personal freedom,” stressed Stockman, as he headed to Washington with 52 percent of the vote.
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