It was March, and Jim Cooper, his wife and kids were in Colorado on a skiing trip. Only days before, the 5th District congressional seat—which includes Nashville and parts of Wilson and Cheatham counties—had become open. When the ski lifts would open every morning, Cooper would wave goodbye to his family and walk back inside the hotel. For hours, he would hit the telephones, soliciting support for a congressional bid back home in Nashville.
At the end of the trip, he knew he had a huge problem: the phone bill.
From his involvement in telecommunications issues as a former congressman, he understood that profit margins on long-distance hotel calls are “one of the classic rip-offs for hotels.” Estimating he had made “about 600 calls,” he approached the front desk. There, he began negotiations. The manager got involved. In the end, a bill that might have been in the thousands of dollars was settled for a measly $10.
Meanwhile, the calls, he says, had been worth it. “The consensus was clear I should run for Congress.”
If you believe in allegory, the tale speaks volumes. First, the number of telephone calls Cooper made shortly after congressman Bob Clement announced his plans to run for the U.S. Senate were, indeed, mind-blowing. If his opponents didn’t know exactly what to expect from Cooper, it was clear that he didn’t plan on skating into office by virtue of his prior political experience or his personal wealth.
Second, as the story shows, Cooper is no idiot. He has a wonkish appreciation of technical issues that can sometimes confound lesser mortals. “I don’t think anyone has ever challenged me on my knowledge,” Cooper says in his matter-of-fact drone.
Third, Cooper has a strong pro-consumer bent and, in fact, had once introduced a bill to crack down on abuses in the long-distance telephone business, including calls placed from hotels. When Cooper approached that hotel clerk, he was not only tilting against one little hotel but an entire rotten system.
Fourth and finally, Cooper is a self-confessed nerd. As the snow fell outside on pristine slopes, in the glorious mountain air, he was not tempted. What excited Cooper instead was the prospect of returning to the game in Washington, the clash of ideas and all that. “I’m literally the only person in this race who has the experience to walk into the House of Representatives and help immediately. Nobody else can even pretend to do that. It’s all because I have prior experience and I have a good heart.”
In the race to succeed Clement, Cooper—who until recently was working in investment banking—is in a tight race with current sheriff Gayle Ray. With virtually no record of legislation to examine, Ray is difficult to cipher. Cooper, however, has cast over 5,000 votes, having previously served in Congress for 12 years from the rural 4th Congressional District.
It is precisely Cooper’s record—and interpretations thereof—that is causing the fur to fly. Cooper is actively fending off accusations that he is a conservative. The 5th Congressional District is a safe Democratic seat, and proving his Democratic Party bona fides has become important.
“During his 12 years in Congress, Cooper compiled a very conservative, sometimes erratic voting record,” claimed a recent mailing sponsored by Emily’s List, a well-financed national political group that backs women candidates, including Ray. “I agree with that statement,” Ray herself says of the Emily’s List mailing. In a May 9 story, the Nashville Scene’s own liberal columnist, Bruce Barry, described Cooper as “remarkably conservative and on some issues deserving of the right-wing tag.” The Barry story itself has become a campaign piece for Ray’s staffers, who say they have worn out fax machines sending it around.
All this has Cooper claiming that his record has been transmogrified. “I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal,” he says. He also offers himself up as “a moderate Democrat who supported Clinton 75 percent of the time.”
Cooper spokesman Mike Kopp says the attacks from critics—including Ray—“are an attempt to tear down Jim, and Ray is certainly twisting his record.” Kopp also says that the likely voter in what may be a low turnout Democratic Primary on Aug. 1 will be 60-plus-years-old, concerned about Social Security and health care, and in line with Cooper’s moderate—not conservative—voting record.
Cooper himself says he doesn’t want to make any attack on Ray in particular, saying that “Ray has better experience running the Nashville jail system. I have better experience in Congress.”
Jim Cooper was elected to Congress in 1982 at the tender age of 28. In that race, which drew national attention, he defeated Cissy Baker, the daughter of Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker.
A resident of Shelbyville during his congressional days, Cooper grew up in decidedly genteel circumstances. Prentice Cooper, his father, was governor of Tennessee from 1939 to 1945. Cooper went away to an Eastern prep school, Groton, and followed that up with a degree from the University of North Carolina (he finished in three years), a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University and a degree from Harvard Law School.
National Journal, which chronicles the doings of congressmen, described Cooper in 1984 as “no back-slapping pol” and “not a fiery speaker,” but said he could “demonstrate his intelligence without seeming to talk down to people.” In the book The System, which chronicles the early-1990s health care debate in which Cooper played a major role, David Broder and Haynes Johnson described him as “highly educated, somewhat snooty, untouched by personal experience with economic privation, thoroughly comfortable in the worlds of business, finance and the professions, and almost as skeptical of governmental bureaucracy as his Republican neighbors.”
Cooper had been in Congress only two years when he began charting a stunningly independent path. By 1984 he had bucked his party by voting for the MX missile and, with two other Tennessee Democratic congressmen, against the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet National Journal also noted Cooper had steered clear of the Reagan coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans as well. “The only other Tennessee Democrat who did that was Harold Ford of Memphis, who is black,” it wrote.
For 12 years, Cooper’s votes ranged from all ends of the spectrum but fell into the Democratic column more often than not. One of the conventional barometers of a Democratic congressman is his Americans for Democratic Action rating, 100 being a pristine liberal, 0 being a perfect right-winger. Cooper averaged a 54 in 12 years. Bob Clement has averaged a 59.
On several issues, liberals would have a hard time faulting Cooper. On abortion, he was as pro-choice as any congressman could legitimately be, scoring 100 percent on Planned Parenthood’s recent candidate questionnaire, according to the organization’s local office. On the environment, Cooper also gets very positive reviews. In the mid-’80s, he helped steer a clean-air compromise through the crucial House Energy and Commerce committee, where fights had been raging between congressmen from the industrial Midwest and environmentalist representatives from California. The compromise set the stage for the Clean Air Act of 1990. “I had one of the best environmental records of anyone in the Southeastern United States and one of the best in the country,” Cooper claims. Meanwhile, Katy McGinty, who was the top environmental advisor to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, has endorsed Cooper, as have numerous other local environmentalists.
Cooper did not shy from taking stances that were tough to handle in his old congressional district, which is one of the more rural in the nation. Despite a number of tobacco farmers in his district, he railed against smoking. As well, he opposed the National Rifle Association and voted for several gun control measures, despite some strong gun-rights sentiment from his constituents.
Meanwhile, other votes or stances are drawing criticism, and Cooper defends them mightily.
In 1990, he sponsored a bill to crack down on people who burn the American flag. Such a measure is precisely one of those issues that upsets the civil libertarian crowd, who believe in rights to free expression, no matter how odious the expression.
But Cooper says he had a great reason for proposing the bill, and it wasn’t about flag burning. At the time, there was considerable sentiment to amend the Constitution to prevent burning the flag. That, however, was a clear threat to the First Amendment, which guarantees free expression. In an effort to block the possible amendment, liberals approached Cooper about proposing a bill to do the same thing. “It was a way to avoid amending the Constitution,” confirms Morton H. Halperin, who was then head of the ACLU office in Washington. “We encouraged Cooper and others to introduce that bill. Much more liberal members sponsored a similar bill for similar reasons.” In fact, Cooper voted against a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning in 1990.
In the mid-’90s, Cooper was a serious player in the Clinton administration’s attempt to provide universal health insurance. During his 12 years in Congress, this was the issue that thrust Cooper into prime time. Ultimately, no plan passed—and some on the more liberal edge of the world blame him for having caused the issue to tank. But an equally prevalent view is that the Clinton plan was unwieldy, excessive and too intrusive. Cooper, naturally, shares this view.
The big differences between the Clinton and Cooper plans reveal a consistent thread in Cooper’s ideology: trust in competitive markets. Cooper was at the forefront in favoring so-called “managed competition.” Large groups of customers would be pooled together into big cooperatives, and networks of hospitals, doctors and insurers would compete to get their business. People would then have a menu of options from various medical providers from which to choose. This competition would likely keep insurance and health costs low.
Meanwhile, under the Clinton plan, every business in America had to offer health insurance, amounting to “universal coverage.” The Cooper plan required “universal access,” which fell short of requiring businesses to pony up. The congressman had significant bipartisan support for his bill. The Clintons, meanwhile, would not work with Cooper, and ultimately the mobilizing Newt Gingrich foot soldiers sank everything.
To this day, Cooper has squirrelly relations with labor largely because of his health care plan. As well, women’s groups claim his plan would not have funded pap smears and mammograms, as the Clinton plan would have. In fact, Cooper’s plan didn’t itemize any health care services to be provided. The level of services would have been established by an independent panel. In addition, Cooper’s plan would have established an office of women’s health research at the National Institutes of Health.
If liberals are upset with him, the record shows that Cooper is actually drawn to the little guy quite often. While in Congress, he railed against cable television companies that charged exorbitant fees. The little guy principle also drew him into repeated clashes with regional telephone companies in the early ’90s for what he considered excessive pricing.
Meanwhile, Cooper’s conservative ideology is irrefutable on other issues. On the death penalty, he has voted in favor of expanding its use for particular drug crimes. When he left Congress and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1994 against Fred Thompson, Cooper was quoted by The Tennessean as saying U.S. District Judge John Nixon of Nashville “may need to be impeached” for failing to enforce the death penalty. The statement angered death penalty opponents and other defenders of the judge.
Cooper was one of only a handful of congressmen to vote against the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), which he describes today as one of the most “poorly drafted bills” he ever read. He says the ADA has wound up being the “lawyer’s relief act” because the language in the measure is so unclear and the Supreme Court is so frequently having to hear litigation to determine its intent. Cooper also voted against an early version of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows people to take paid time off to care for family members who have undergone particular medical procedures. He later voted for another version of the bill during the Clinton administration. Cooper also voted against increasing the minimum wage by $1.20 an hour. Yet he voted for an alternative 90-cent-an-hour increase.
As for budget matters, the facts bear out that Cooper is hawkish about the deficit. He voted for the late-’80s income tax increase designed to curb the deficit under former President Bush. He also voted for the Clinton tax increase in 1993 and says he would have voted against current President Bush’s tax cuts last year.
Cooper has been running television ads nonstop for one month now, and they will remain on air until election day. His campaign is clearly the best financed—he says the race will cost more than $1 million, and he won’t say how much of his own money he’s putting in it.
Should he be elected, Cooper says health care is still on his screen, although comprehensive reform is probably out of the question. Nonetheless, he’s still upset at insurance companies for skimming only the healthiest candidates for coverage, and he thinks drug companies should be targeted for charging unrealistically high prices for medicine. He also thinks the government should consider getting into the business of long-term care insurance for seniors. He argues that few congressmen can understand the complex issues related to health care today, and for proof that he is up to the task, he points to the fact that he teaches a course in health care policy at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.
For anyone looking for a quick and easy guide to what kind of congressman Cooper would be, the record is quite unpredictable. But there are certain guideposts. He is obviously willing to go after businesses that occupy an unlevel playing field, are monopolistic or are allowed by law to charge excessive prices to consumers. At the same time, he’s a huge fan of small business—“Eighty percent of Americans are employed by small business,” he says—and wants to avoid saddling them with unnecessary regulations. This probably explains the reasoning behind his “no” votes on the ADA and Family and Medical Leave Act. Cooper can be a bleeding heart on social issues and almost always steers clear of amending the Constitution, but his death penalty advocacy is clear and strong.
It is fair to say that, compared to the dozen or so Tennesseans who have served in Congress over the last 20 years, Cooper ranked among the tops at being a player in the national debate. Nashville voters may not agree with every one of his votes, but, as Cooper says, having him in Congress would ensure having someone in the middle of the action.
“When I was there before, I had more clout than some people with more seniority,” he says. “Now I would at least have as much knowledge.”
