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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Barbara Mikulski, Maryland's junior senator, was first elected to the House in 1976 and to the Senate in 1986. She has with deep roots in immigrant, urban America and a fascination for the new technology and jobs growing in edge cities and beyond; she is a person who doesn't look anything like a traditional politician but who has become a savvy Senate insider. Her roots are in east Baltimore, where her Polish immigrant grandparents ran a bakery and her father a grocery store; she graduated from Mount St. Agnes College and got a social work degree at the University of Maryland. Mikulski got a job as a social worker and got her start in politics as organizing community groups to stop a highway from going through Highlandtown. She won, and in the process was elected to the Baltimore City Council in 1971. She ran for the Senate in 1974, and got a respectable 43% against incumbent Charles Mathias; when Paul Sarbanes ran for the other Senate seat in 1976, Mikulski ran for his 3d District House seat and won. Ten years later, she gave up that safe seat for what seemed like a chancy Senate race. She won handily, with 50% in the primary to 31% for Montgomery County Congressman Michael Barnes and 14% for Governor Harry Hughes. In the general, she beat Linda Chavez 61%-39%. She still lives in Baltimore and commutes to Washington; from her Baltimore office in Fells Point, the original port area, she can see where the highway she stopped would have gone through. Mikulski is loud and brash, humorous and warm, brusque and aggressive when she feels it is necessary, curious and thoughtful when encountering another new part of the world. She was the first woman elected to the Senate whose husband or father did not serve in high office and every two years since 1992 she has held workshops for new women senators. In her first term, she won a seat on the Appropriations Committee; within two years, she was chairman of a subcommittee, handling housing, space and veterans' programs. Now she is ranking Democrat on the Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee. Mikulski is the Senate's chief superintendent of the space program and an enthusiast for space exploration. She has paid close attention to the Goddard Space Center, the Wallops Flight Facility and Johns Hopkins's Applied Science Lab in Maryland, and secured them additional funding on occasion. She has vowed to continue to raise funds for a mission to Pluto, the only unexplored plant in the solar system, stating, "Pluto is a bargain at less than $500 million." She called the Hubble space telescope "the most successful NASA program since Apollo" and in January 2004 attacked NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe for his decision to let the project die; in September 2004 she and Kay Bailey Hutchison moved to add $800 million to NASA's appropriation to repair the Space Shuttle fleet and service the Hubble space telescope. On domestic policy, Mikulski is a liberal who insists that ''where there are rights there are responsibilities'' and has criticized fellow Democrats for being ''angst-addicted.'' She has battled against the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act, which encourages the contracting out of government work to private firms. She voted against higher CAFE standards--there are still auto assembly plants in Maryland--and, mindful of her Polish heritage, urged that Poles be allowed into the United States without visas. She has worked with other appropriators on projects in their states as well as her own. "When it comes to helping a senator who has an authentic need, I don't play politics. I solve problems." In 2004 she helped to fund over $1 billion of Maryland projects, including highways, HOPE VI mixed housing, homeland security at the Port of Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay cleanup, research on oyster bed reseeding and a crab hatchery at the University of Maryland. Former Republican Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley of Baltimore County has said, "Her presence on the Appropriations Committee in that capacity that she's in is extremely vital to the state of Maryland." Mikulski is the senior woman in the Senate and has pushed many of what might be called women's issues--mammography clinic standards and homemaker IRAs, retaining a guaranteed benefit with inflation protection in Social Security reform. In the late 1980s she demanded that NIH include women in its medical protocols and in 1988 she succeeded in getting spousal impoverishment clauses into Medicaid. She was the chief Senate co-sponsor with John Chafee and his son and successor Lincoln Chafee of the 2000 breast cancer bill, which provided Medicaid financing of mammograms and Pap tests; she was denied a White House signing ceremony because the chief House sponsor was Rick Lazio, Hillary Rodham Clinton's opponent in the New York Senate race. Mikulski's skills are not just political. She coauthored Capitol Offense and Capitol Venture, mystery novels featuring freshman Senator Eleanor "Norie" Gorzack of Pennsylvania. Mikulski's toughest Senate election was her first, which she won fairly easily against strong competition. In 1992 and 1998 she was re-elected with 71%, first against Alan Keyes, a former Reagan appointee who later ran for president twice and in 2004 ran for the Senate in Illinois, and then against Ross Pierpont, a genial 81-year-old physician who had run for office and lost 14 times. In 2004 she faced a more serious challenger in state Senator E. J. Pipkin, a Dundalk native who made millions as a bond trader on Wall Street and returned to live on the Eastern Shore. He opposed Governor Parris Glendening's plan to deposit dredge spoils in Chesapeake Bay and in 2002 spent $600,000 of his own money to beat a veteran state senator 62%-37%. In 2004 he put $1 million of his own money into his race against Mikulski. He argued that Mikulski's voting record was far to the left ("Who knew?" asked his spots) and that she had not done enough for Chesapeake Bay. Mikulski still outspent him 2-1 in Maryland's most expensive Senate race and won 65%-34%, somewhat less than her margins in 1992 and 1998. Pipkin carried his state Senate district (his term is four years and so he didn't have to give up the seat), two counties in western Maryland and two exurban Baltimore counties.
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