Oberstar boxes up five decades in Congress

WASHINGTON - The memories pile high on Jim Oberstar's desk in a cluttered office across Independence Avenue from the U.S. Capitol.

The congressman's 18th term doesn't expire until Jan. 3. But House rules require the Minnesota Democrat to clear out his spacious third-floor digs by noon Wednesday, partly to ready for the incoming 84-member GOP freshman class.

Among the piles of books, reports, photos and random bits of paper collected over a 48-year congressional career -- 36 of them as the representative from northern Minnesota -- one stack of freshly printed paper leaves a few stitches in Oberstar's heart.

It's a 775-page, multi-year, national transportation plan that never became law.

"It's my great unfinished work," says Oberstar, his 76-year-old hands caressing the bill, for which a debt-ridden Congress never could find the needed half-trillion dollars.

For now, the papers go into boxes stacked 4-feet high in his emptying suite in the Rayburn House Office Building. Some are headed for the archives. Others will go down to the basement, where the outgoing Transportation Committee chairman will be consigned to temporary quarters.

"You're looking at the detritus of history," Oberstar said with some sadness about the boxes he's been filling since his surprising defeat Nov. 2 to upstart Republican Chip Cravaack, a medically retired pilot and stay-at-home dad.

Those and other mementos reflect the friends in high places Oberstar cultivated since he took office in 1975. He had taken over from his political mentor, the late John Blatnik, a fellow Iron Ranger who taught him how to promote public works bills and whose staff he served on.

The biggest trophy in Oberstar's office is a grandfather clock given to him not by any powerful lobbying group, but by a high school shop class in International Falls, Minn.

'It's Lyndon, the president!'

There are also the framed pens and letters documenting his dealings with presidents as far back as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who sometimes called on Saturdays introducing himself only as "Lyndon." Once, when Oberstar failed to recognize the famously raspy voice, Johnson loudly reminded him "Goddammit. It's Lyndon, the president!"

Five decades of memories also include the time Oberstar, a devotee of Democratic-Farmer-Labor founder Hubert Humphrey, got past a skeptical Johnson operative at the 1964 national convention by telling him that DFL stood for "Democrats for Lyndon."

If his critics say he spent too much time in Washington, Oberstar fixes part of the blame for today's hyper-partisan politics on the modern practice of weekly commuting to Congress. The days when lawmakers moved to D.C. -- as Oberstar did -- also meant "your families moved here and you got to work things out in social settings, as well as in committee settings," he said.

Those days are no more, replaced by the kind of polarization that saw Oberstar shouted down at a debate in Duluth.

Now all that's behind him, like his official portrait in the Transportation Committee's hearing room. Painted by Minneapolis artist Leslie Bowman, the portrait provided a touch of nostalgia as Oberstar wrapped up a final briefing with Capitol reporters.

"Before I get tears in my eyes," he said, "I will stop."