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Kentucky: Junior Senator Sen. Jim Bunning (R) Last Updated July 10, 2003
Jim Bunning, a Republican elected to the Senate in 1998, is the first player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame to serve in Congress. Bunning grew up in Northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He started in minor league baseball in 1950, but at his father's insistence finished high school and college. He made the majors in 1956 and the next year became the only pitcher to strike out Ted Williams three times in one game. Bunning threw a no-hitter for the Detroit Tigers in 1958 and pitched a perfect game for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1964; he also played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Los Angeles Dodgers. He retired in 1971 with a 224-184 record, a 3.24 ERA and 2,855 strikeouts; he was the second pitcher (Cy Young was the first) to achieve 1,000 strikeouts and 100 wins in both the American and the National Leagues. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in August 1996. He is a family man, with nine children (two sets of twins) and at last count 35 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren; his son David Bunning, after 10 years as a federal prosecutor, was unanimously confirmed as a federal judge in February 2002 (despite a persnickety report by the American Bar Association that complained he had only 10, not 12 years of experience, and had attended the University of Kentucky Law School). Jim Bunning and fellow pitcher Robin Roberts set up the Major League Baseball Players Association and hired Marvin Miller in 1966, when the minimum player salary was $6,000; in 2002, however, he was criticizing the players for not accepting a salary cap, the big metro area teams for not accepting revenue sharing and the owners for not opening their books. "If they do strike, we'll never recover baseball as you and I know it." He has long been in favor of repealing baseball's exemption from the antitrust laws. The skill, energy and aggressiveness he showed in baseball--Bunning registered one of the highest totals in baseball history for hitting batters --he brought to politics in his native northern Kentucky. He was elected to the Fort Thomas City Council in 1977, to the state Senate in 1979, and won a respectable 44% against Martha Layne Collins in the 1983 race for governor (the best showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate between 1971 and 1999). When incumbent 4th District Congressman Gene Snyder retired in 1986, Bunning won the seat with 55% of the vote. Bunning showed great impatience with the ways of doing business in the Democratic House. He served six years on the ethics committee, starting off in March 1992 by leading the charge against the House bank overdraft scandal, and ending in January 1997 by resigning from the committee out of disgust with the partisanship of ranking Democrat Jim McDermott. In September 1993 he called Bill Clinton ''the most corrupt, the most amoral, the most despicable person I've ever seen in the presidency.'' When Republicans became the majority, Bunning had achievements as a legislator. He chaired the Social Security Subcommittee for two terms, and sponsored two major changes--raising the earnings limit for Social Security recipients up to $30,000 by 2002, and the law making the Social Security Administration an independent agency. In February 1997, Senator Wendell Ford announced he would retire in 1998, and Bunning, with typical aggressiveness, made plans to run for his seat. Three Democrats ran serious campaigns for the nomination. Louisville cable TV entrepreneur Charlie Owen spent $6.6 million of his own money and ran ads attacking the other two. Lieutenant Governor Steve Henry spent $500,000 of his own money and counted on his Louisville base and Owensboro roots. The third candidate was Lexington Congressman Scotty Baesler, who had less money but other advantages: He was popular in his Republican-leaning 6th District, he is a tobacco farmer and he was still known as a star on one of Adolph Rupp's University of Kentucky basketball teams in the early 1960s. Baesler won the May primary with 34% of the vote, to 29% for Owen and 28% for Henry. Baesler emerged from the primary ahead of Bunning in the polls but out of money; Bunning, with extensive help from Senator Mitch McConnell, had plenty of money. Bunning ran an ad showing actors thanking Baesler, in Spanish and (with subtitles) Chinese, for voting for NAFTA and for MFN with China. This was perhaps the country's closest race for months. And, despite Kentucky's early poll closing times and rapid count, it was not until late in the evening that Bunning was declared the winner. His margin was 49.7%-49.2%, or 6,766 votes. Baesler carried normally Republican Lexington, but only by 54%-46%. Bunning carried the three counties of Northern Kentucky by 70%-29%; his margin there was 34,791 votes, more than five times his statewide margin, and more than Baesler's Lexington and Louisville margins put together. Bunning has compiled one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate. His bill allowing disabled people to continue getting Medicaid or Medicare after getting a job was passed. He has long pressed for making foster care stipends exempt from income tax; he got such a provision in the tax bill vetoed by Clinton in 1999 and in the stimulus package George W. Bush signed in March 2002. He cautioned Alan Greenspan against quenching the flames of the economy and when he did lower interest rates in July 2001, Bunning said he was six months too late. In July 2002 he cast lone votes against the confirmation of two Fed members who, he said, hadn't satisfied him they would be independent of Greenspan. On the Armed Services Committee in 2001 and 2002, he expressed admiration for General Tommy Franks's "unbelievable accomplishments in Afghanistan," but then testily asked, "Why were so many people able to flee Afghanistan that were Al Qaeda and/or Taliban?" In December 2002 he gave up the seat on Armed Services for one on Finance. Bunning has worked on many Kentucky issues, sponsoring a bill to distribute $1.2 billion from the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund directly to Kentucky and other coal mining states and passing a bill to compensate TVA for mineral rights transferred to the Daniel Boone National Forest; this prevented coal mining in forest lands. Bunning's seat comes up in 2004, and for a long time everyone assumed that he would run against Governor Paul Patton, scheduled to leave office after his second term in December 2003. The relationship between the two seemed to resemble those between Henry Clay and some of his rivals that ended up in duels. But in September 2002 Patton admitted that he had had an affair with a nursing home operator who sued him that month for sexual harassment; she accused him of sending in state inspectors to close down her business after she broke off the affair. Patton, after denying the affair, admitted it after the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that phone records showed 440 calls from his office to her home or business; a few days later he announced, unsurprisingly, that he would not run for the Senate. That left ace pitcher Bunning running against pinch-hitting Democrats. Mentioned as candidates in early 2003 were Charlie Owen, running that year as Attorney General Ben Chandler's running mate in the 2003 governor primary; Lieutenant Governor Steve Henry, who did not run for governor in part because the federal government was suing him for Medicare overbillings; and state Treasurer Jonathan Miller, a former staffer for Al Gore, who ran sixth out of seven candidates in the 1998 6th District House primary with 11% of the vote. Congressman Ken Lucas in early 2003 said he would renege on his pledge to limit himself to three terms and run for reelection to the House rather than run against Bunning. In January 2003 Bunning had already raised $1 million and seemed a strong favorite for reelection.
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