Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) is known more for his unassuming style and swing-vote potential than his deal-making savvy.
But as the Senate struggles for a bipartisan consensus on Iraq, Pryor has become a major player.
The Iraq Study Group proposal that seized the spotlight this month, expanding the war debate beyond timelines, is indicative of Pryor’s rising influence. While Sens. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) were the public faces of the bipartisan push, Pryor was the force that brought the two together.
“Both of them were saying similar things, but they didn’t know that I was talking to both,” Pryor said last week in an interview with The Hill.
Pryor’s matchmaking set up an alliance between Salazar, an ally of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Alexander, a confidant of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), that upended both parties’ Iraq messages. Both leaders are eager to define opponents by their support for withdrawal schedules, but Pryor believes they are missing the mark.
“What I think is better about this approach than what’s going on the floor is the [Iraq Study Group] bill was never designed to just be a timetable,” Pryor said. “A timetable, in my view — and I hate to say this, and I don’t mean to say this in a negative way against my colleagues — is an over-simplistic approach to a very complicated problem.”
Pryor’s congressional career is marked by bold and independent moves that come cloaked in his affable personality.
Targeted by Republicans during contentious votes on estate-tax repeal as well as constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage and flag-burning, Pryor voted with his party on each one. During two pivotal March votes on the war, Pryor was the only Democrat to oppose setting a binding timeline for troop pullout, though he has returned to the majority fold for the latest Iraq showdowns.
Alexander hailed Pryor for his willingness to collaborate with the GOP on a pragmatic Iraq strategy despite taking heat from other Democrats.
“To his great credit, he let Salazar take the lead” on the Iraq Study Group proposal even as both Democrats worked equally hard to line up support, Alexander said in a brief interview. “He wasn’t worried about whose name was on top.”
Alexander pointed out the uncanny similarity between the 14-strong band of senators backing the Iraq bill over the objections of their leaders and the Gang of 14, the famous bulwark against the “nuclear option” that Pryor helped found in 2005. In both cases, Pryor reached out to Alexander after hearing the Republican offer a thread of consensus in a floor speech — and in both cases, the resulting efforts proved pivotal.
Could Pryor and his cosponsors lead a new Gang of 14 to stave off partisan apocalypse over the war? The former state attorney general, whose father, David, represented Arkansas for more than two decades, is searching for an opening.
“I wouldn’t be completely honest with you if I said I haven’t been talking with a few folks about that, what that would look like,” Pryor said. “I don’t know if that same type of model would apply today.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), another Gang of 14 alumnus, echoed Alexander’s assessment of Pryor’s under-the-radar skills.
“On the inside, I think he is looked at as a leader,” Nelson said. “If you’re building a consensus, he’s always one you go to, to see if he can support you.”
Despite reaching across the aisle on Iraq, Pryor has few kind words for President Bush’s record. He has weighed in already on next year’s White House race, endorsing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Pryor predicted that Clinton would avoid the fate of former Vice President Al Gore, who failed to carry his Southern home state in 2000.
“I think she’ll win the Democratic nomination, and I think she’ll carry the state in the fall,” he said, burnishing Clinton’s credentials as former first lady of Arkansas and defending her from critics in the party’s center: “She is more centrist than her critics give her credit for.”
As he stumps for Clinton, however, Pryor is preparing for a hard-fought campaign of his own next year. He has yet to draw a strong opponent, but quipped, “That’ll change. Once people get wind of the way I’ve been voting …”
One vote that is likely to attract attention on the campaign trail is opposition to Bush’s 2003 tax cuts. Pryor voted last year to extend those tax cuts. Asked to explain those votes, Pryor said, “I feel like his economic policy has basically been a one-trick pony, and that’s tax cuts. … I’ve been voting under the circumstances of the budget environment we’re in and whether I think some of the tax cuts make sense. … I try to look at those all individually and make my own judgment on those.”
Pryor said he is proud of his record in Washington: “One of the things that has really helped me politically with my state is that when I ran for the Senate, I told people exactly what I was going to do. I said … ‘I’m proud to be a Democrat but I’m not always going to just blindly support the Democrat[ic] side.’”
In the meantime, the only Democrat to unseat a Senate incumbent in 2002 has raised money at a torrid pace, taking in $1.7 million in the first quarter of this year and slightly more than $1 million in the second quarter. Pryor said his maverick tendency on Iraq has created no tension with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its chairman, Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.).
But Pryor quietly challenged Schumer’s reading of the midterm tea leaves. He described vaulting into the majority as “overrated” and disputed the notion that successful withdrawal from Iraq would cement Democratic control.
“I don’t think there’s a clear mandate for the Democrats,” Pryor said. “I heard some people say we won these elections to get us out of Iraq; I don’t really agree with that. You have to look at all the races, and every race turned on something different.”
Pryor has made his mark on several other high-stakes issues during the first leg of the 110th Congress. He led the charge to strengthen product-safety rules in the wake of Chinese import recalls and joined Michigan’s senators in a strong but unsuccessful effort to shield the auto industry from some ill effects of a fuel-economy standard hike.
“After the ’06 elections, the expectations were really high because of the national political momentum, which was really strong for the Democrats,” Pryor said. Noting the party’s talented crop of Senate freshmen, he predicted a strong future for Democrats in the South and West.
“But I hope people have kind of adjusted their expectations,” he added, “because you’ve seen what Harry Reid’s filed, 43 cloture motions [as of July 13]. So you know, it’s just we’re kind of back in the trench warfare mode — which I don’t like.”
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