Idaho's next senator

Perry Swisher

Former state legislator

The deadline for this column was only hours away when Idaho's political scene exploded with word of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's disorderly conduct arrest and plea in a Minnesota airport facility earlier in the summer.

Odds had been against an early Craig retirement in speculation about a re-election bid. Whatever events will have occurred between now and publication of this piece, the immediate impact is a virtually universal assumption Idaho will elect a new senator next year.

Jim Risch served spectacularly if briefly as acting governor last year and surprisingly opted for a return to the lieutenant governorship in the 2006 election. Will he undertake to succeed Craig? Or would new Gov. C.L. Butch Otter appoint Risch for the interim if Craig resigns in a Republican search to restore order? Or might Risch repeat his ascension from lieutenant governor and appoint Otter to the Senate? Sitting Gov. Charles Gossett's lieutenant governor Arnold Williams did that with Gossett 42 long years ago.

Or will veteran Second District Congressman Mike Simpson assert his Republican "seniority" just as now-junior Sen. Mike Crapo did when Crapo left the House to succeed Dirk Kempthorne, who opted to succeed the retiring Gov. Phil Batt in 1998.

Every name I've mentioned so far is a Republican except for the decades-ago Democratic minuet in the last century which ended in 1946 defeats for both Gossett and Williams. This could be a sea change.

Former First District Congressman Larry LaRocco has been campaigning all summer for the Democratic nomination, amid presumptions he would be confronting Craig, whom the odds seemed to favor. Does the Minnesota event suddenly elevate LaRocco to the major contender for the Senate? Or if a Craig departure eventuates for 2008, will that spawn a new Democratic contender?

National polls indicate that Congress as an institution is in disfavor with nearly 80 percent of the voters. Constituents aren't as sanguine as all that about their own members of Congress. Nevertheless, such lopsided disfavor for incumbents in general bespeaks a times as seminal as the 1994 Republican congressional sweep, the 1980 Ronald Reagan triumph, the 1952 Eisenhower year or the 1932 onset of the New Deal.

This is the moment for advocates of change to savor profound change in a state whose congressional contests have been soporific since the death of Sen. Frank Church. But Idaho drew national attention early on with the Mormon-baiting Sen. Fred Dubois, subsequently with William E. Borah, the lion of Idaho, and then with Church who ranked as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

Could the congressional slope blossom again? Not with a Borah or a Church, not in the near landscape. But the yawning over 2008 has already stopped. Not excepting this column, the opportunities to predict what the long-slumbering Idaho electorate will do now are many, and almost all of our assumptions are likely to be confounded.

My impairment by a fall and a sprained arm recently was compounded by mechanical failure. I don't write on a computer screen as most journalists do nowadays -- as most who write do in fact. I cling in my ancientness to the beautiful keys of the unsurpassed IBM Selectric.

When mine broke down a few days ago, I confirmed that IBM no longer manufactures them. The service expert who tends mine is already resorting to the purchasing of parts IBM no longer makes. That can't last forever.

A majority of major law firms, in Boise and therefore I assume elsewhere on the legal scene, either own or have access to functioning IBM Selectrics to turn out those letters and those exterior addresses on envelopes they want to look like a million dollars.

More than the Ford Model T, the IBM Selectric was a classic. Some entrepreneur should put together an IPO to raise the money to buy the rights to restore that machine to life. The computers are a miracle but they're not a dream and they demean the art of writing.

When a young beginner, I'm sure I smiled at those old timers in the newsroom who wrote their stories with pencils on yellow pads before they or some typist ran them through a Royal or an Underwood. I'm not smiling any more. I'm hanging on by my fingernails.

Swisher is a veteran Idaho newsman, former state legislator and a retired Idaho Public Utilities Commission member. You can write to him at 8660 Oakmont Drive, Boise, ID 83704.