Tom Harkin, a Democrat first elected to the House in 1974 and the Senate in 1984, is a pugnacious progressive who brings the attitude of the aggrieved outsider to his work. He surprised political observers when he told The Associated Press on Jan. 26, 2013 that he would not seek a sixth term in 2014. “It’s just time to step aside,” he said.
Harkin grew up poor in a rural town; his father was a coal miner, and his mother, a Slovenian immigrant, died when he was just 10. He worked his way through college and law school before spending five years in the Navy during the 1960s ferrying planes out of Vietnam for repair. In 1970, as an aide to Democratic Rep. Neal Smith of Iowa, Harkin returned to Vietnam and discovered the infamous “tiger cages.” America’s allies, the South Vietnamese, used these underground cells to hold and torture prisoners of war. (A young Harkin slipped past prison guards on a guided tour to confirm the existence of the secret cells.)
Two years later, Harkin ran for a House seat and lost narrowly; he tried again in 1974 and won. In that campaign, he invented “work days,” a concept widely imitated since: He spent a day working at each of a dozen local jobs to better understand people’s experiences. He held the seat with solid percentages in four re-election contests. In 1984, he challenged Republican Sen. Roger Jepsen in the midst of a farm depression in Iowa. Harkin’s support of subsidies for farmers contrasted Jepsen’s advocacy of free market solutions to economic woes. Jepsen was also vulnerable going into his first re-election. He had voted in favor of selling Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft to Saudi Arabia after professing loyalty to Israel, which staunchly opposed the sale. He also came across as arrogant for claiming special privileges as a senator after being stopped for driving alone in high-occupancy vehicle lanes on the highway. Harkin won with 55% of the vote.
Harkin took over the reins of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in September 2009 after the death of longtime committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. The move gave Harkin substantial impact on health policy and the Obama administration’s health care initiative. After Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye died in December 2012, Harkin had the opportunity to chair the Appropriations Committee, but chose to stay at HELP. He chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Education, giving him enormous power over both the policy and purse strings of a sizeable segment of the government.
More than two decades after running for president, Harkin still does not lack ambition. He introduced the sweeping “Rebuild America Act” in March 2012 to great fanfare from liberals. The measure combined many of his legislative priorities – overhauling the tax code, boosting spending on infrastructure and other areas, implementing fair-trade laws, and refashioning laws and regulations affecting middle-class families. At the same time, Harkin proposed a new privately-run pension plan to function as a supplement to defined-contribution plans. With President Obama signaling a greater inclination toward liberalism in his second term, Harkin is expected to push for the White House to adopt many of his ideas. “We’re not getting to the root of our problem,” he said in unveiling the Rebuild America Act. “We need a more serious dialogue about the essence of our economy.” His interest in protecting the middle class led him to become one of just eight senators to oppose the New Year’s Day 2013 “fiscal cliff” budget compromise, which he said didn’t adequately address job creation for that demographic.
On a more practical level, Harkin was able to move a number of bipartisan bills out of his committee in the 112th Congress (2011-12). Among them was the first rewrite of the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law since Congress began trying to overhaul the original law. The bill, which was co-sponsored by HELP ranking Republican Michael Enzi of Wyoming in September 2011, was developed after Harkin and other lawmakers became irked that the Obama administration was granting waivers to states on some of No Child Left Behind’s key provisions. School groups said they were pleased that the Harkin-Enzi legislation reduced the federal role in school accountability, but civil rights and business groups joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan in criticizing it, and it went no further in the Senate. Another committee-approved bill required the National Cancer Institute to establish individual scientific frameworks to address rare and deadly forms of cancer.
Harkin long has had a hand in health care issues. Two of his sisters died from breast cancer and one brother died from thyroid cancer; another brother became deaf at age 9. Harkin was a key player in shaping the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, a major achievement and one that required a bipartisan coalition to overcome resistance to the cost and qualms about the real-world fallout of the regulations. On Appropriations, Harkin worked with his then Republican counterpart, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to double the budget for the National Institutes of Health over five years. He has been a prominent supporter of alternative medicine, prompted by his own experience taking bee-pollen capsules to successfully cure his allergies. He was instrumental in establishing an Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in 1992. He also strongly backs preventative medicine, and added a provision to the 2010 health care overhaul for a new interagency council to develop a national strategy for such efforts while boosting doctor training and insurance coverage of preventive services.
Harkin was chairman of the Agriculture Committee from June 2001 to January 2003, an advantageous assignment for a senator from a farm state. He regained the post in January 2007 when Democrats took control of the Senate (although he gave it up to take over the HELP Committee). In both stints, Harkin controlled the gavel during reauthorization of the all-important farm bill. He steered to passage the 2002 farm measure, a considerable achievement because he fashioned a bill to restore subsidies phased out by the Republicans’ 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. The legislation ultimately increased but limited subsidies for grain and cotton, and doubled the money for conservation over 10 years.
Farm exports are important to Iowa, and Harkin, despite his warm feelings for labor unions, voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and for normalizing trade relations with China in 2000. Unions generally oppose free trade agreements as a threat to domestic jobs. For the 2007 bill, key negotiations shifted to farm-state members of the Senate Finance Committee. Harkin’s critics said he was too protective of his pet programs. But eventually most of his programs were included in the bill: federal support for ethanol, more money for nutrition programs, modest caps on subsidies, and a renamed Conservation Stewardship Program. He enthusiastically backed the 2012 Senate-passed bill, which extended a requirement he championed that requires federal agencies to give a preference to bio-based products in making procurement decisions.
Throughout this decade, Harkin has been the Senate’s leading advocate of better nutrition and fitness for children, and he is a crusader against childhood obesity. A bill he sponsored in 2006 would have removed candy bars, french fries, ice cream bars, and non-diet soft drinks from schools. He achieved many of his goals in 2010 with the enactment into law of a child nutrition bill that gave the Agriculture Department authority to set nutrition standards for foods sold in school vending machines as well as at snack bars and cafeterias. During the 2010 lame-duck session, he also played a central role in getting into law a food safety bill that some supporters had abandoned any hope of passing. Harkin and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., won admiration from consumer activists for steering the measure around a variety of Republican objections and parliamentary obstacles.
Harkin has had more difficulty with another of his leading priorities—the Employee Free Choice Act, the so-called “card check” bill to require an employer to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign union authorization cards in place of holding secret ballot elections. He devoted much of 2009 and 2010 trying in vain to win the support of skeptical centrist Democrats The Republican takeover of the House in 2011 appeared to have indefinitely shelved the bill, but Harkin has promised unions he won’t give up. At the same time, he invested energy in another cause that had trouble picking up bipartisan support—reforming the Senate’s filibuster rules. He first took on the idea in 1995, and in 2010 joined New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen on a resolution to set diminishing vote benchmarks to end filibusters until the level finally hits a simple majority of 51. In 2011 and 2013, he joined New Mexico Democrat Tom Udall and Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley in unsuccessfully proposing a series of changes that included requiring senators to actually talk at length on the floor if they filibuster rather than the current practice of simply threatening to filibuster.
On foreign policy, Harkin’s views have been shaped by the Vietnam War. He was a vocal opponent of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s and of the Persian Gulf War resolution in 1991. But he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 1998, when President Clinton sought it and again in 2002, when President George W. Bush requested congressional approval to use force against Iraq. But as the violence continued, Harkin said in 2003, it “may not be Vietnam, but, boy, it sure smells like it.” In 2004, he said abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq reminded him of the tiger cages in Vietnam, and concluded, “It’s time to fire the secretary of Defense.” In 2008, Harkin was one of only two senators who opposed the nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to take over the U.S. Central Command. He was also one of just 18 senators to back Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold’s ill-fated attempt in May 2010 to require Obama to submit a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. When Obama in 2011 proposed withdrawing all troops by 2014, Harkin said the plan wasn’t nearly aggressive enough. At the same time, the senator in March 2012 blasted the Pentagon’s decision to cut hundreds of jobs at the Air National Guard’s 132nd Fighter Wing based in Des Moines.
As an appropriator, Harkin is generous to Iowa and defended spending earmarks before the Senate ban took effect in 2011. As he said in November 2006, “I happen to be a supporter of earmarks, unabashedly. But I don’t call them earmarks. It is ‘congressional directed spending.'” In 2010, according to watchdog groups, Harkin ranked fifth among senators in winning earmarks, procuring or helping to procure more than $267 million for his state. One of his initiatives drew attention in March 2009 when several Republicans complained about $1.7 million for swine odor and manure management research at Iowa State University. Harkin invited one of the Republicans, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, to visit Iowa farms to smell the problem firsthand.
Harkin has been a major force in Iowa politics. He takes advantage of his state’s critical role in presidential elections, hosting an annual steak fry that is a required stop for Democratic candidates for all the national media attention it commands. His fervent stands on issues and his hard-edged campaigning give him a large base of loyal supporters as well as strong detractors. In his career, he has beaten no fewer than five members of Congress while rarely topping 55% of the vote. He ran for president in 1992. With Trumanesque zest, Harkin preached that incumbent President George H.W. Bush and the Republicans helped only the rich and that government must get involved to help the poor and middle class. Organized labor withheld an early endorsement despite his 90%-plus AFL-CIO voting record—a great tactical victory for rival Bill Clinton, then the Arkansas governor. Harkin’s sweep of the Iowa caucuses on Feb.10 was mostly discounted as a home-field advantage. He finished with only 10% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and when he got just 7% in South Carolina on March 7, he quit the race.
In 2002, Harkin faced a serious challenge from Rep. Greg Ganske, a Des Moines plastic surgeon and Republican who had upset 36-year incumbent Neal Smith for a House seat in 1994. Ganske argued that his work in the House regulating health maintenance organizations showed that he could find bipartisan solutions to problems. Harkin attacked Ganske for supporting Republican proposals to partially privatize the Social Security fund and touted passage of the farm bill. Polls showed the race fairly close in the summer. Harkin had far more money and, for the first time, the endorsement of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation. He won 54%-44%.
He breezed to re-election in 2008. Despite early speculation, Iowa’s two Republican House members, Tom Latham and Steve King, declined to challenge Harkin. Instead, he ran against political neophyte Christopher Reed, a small-business owner who raised little money and had scant name recognition. Harkin won 63%-37%. He was considered a heavy favorite for re-election in 2014, and at the time of his decision to retire, he already had raised $2.7 million for the effort.
