Word: republican
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Watergate, which ruined so many Republican reputations, added luster to his. As a member of the Senate Watergate committee, he appeared daily on television, sharply probing the President's men with courtroom techniques. Occasionally, his pronouncements lighted up the murky scene. "There are animals crashing around in the forest," he once remarked. "I can hear them, but I can't see them." Though some critics grumbled that he was too friendly with the Nixon White House early in the hearings, he emerged as a national figure and a front runner for Vice President on the 1976 Republican ticket...
Feeling he had been misused, Baker bounced back fast. He made a dramatic entry into the race for Senate minority leader in 1977 and beat out the favored Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan. He proved surprisingly effective in a generally thankless job, welding the independent-minded Republican Senate barons into a cohesive opposition without making enemies. Says Nevada's G.O.P. Senator Paul Laxalt, Ronald Reagan's campaign chairman: "Nobody has a bad word to say about Howard...
Baker's Republican critics say that he compromises too much for his own good, that he is not partisan enough to rally the party faithful or to damage the Democrats. As a skilled photographer, Baker realizes that he must get his sometimes fuzzy political image into sharper focus. During the uproar over the Soviet brigade in Cuba, he attacked Carter for not responding vigorously, but then refused to say what action he felt should have been taken. "He doesn't want his hands tied," says his campaign manager, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar. "He will have to do better...
...showed up at a G.O.P. forum in Portland, Me., where Bush won so much support with a blood-stirring campaign speech that he narrowly upset Baker in a presidential straw vote. The Tennessean had been expected to win because he had the backing of the state's popular Republican Senator William Cohen. Baker cannot afford many more such defeats if he is to build the kind of national consensus that he has so skillfully crafted in the Senate's smaller world...
...fair and balanced appraisal," said Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, the senior Republican on the Senate subcommittee on nuclear regulation. Said Colorado Democrat Gary Hart, the subcommittee chairman: "It substitutes close scrutiny and hard criticism for the gloss and platitudes of past studies...