24 Years of House Work … and the Place is Still a Mess. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1998 by Clara Bingham

By Pat Schroeder Andrews McMeel, $24.95

Until recently, whenever I tuned into CBS on Saturday to find Susan Molinari presiding over the pastel banality of the "Morning News" set, I couldn't resist thinking that her decision to quit Congress had been a cop-out. But that was before I read the memoir she has written with Elinor Burkett, Representative Mom. Now I know that taking the morning anchor job was her first real act of independence. Susan Molinari's grandfather, father, and husband were all politicians. Before she inherited her father's Staten Island congressional seat at the age of 32, Molinari had previously held just one job outside of politics, as a cocktail waitress one summer in college. For Molinari, entering politics was, as she puts it, the "path of least resistance" Television is her first real breakout.

As for Pat Schroeder, I still do a double take when I see her quoted as president of the Association of American Publishers. Protecting intellectual property rights and encouraging parents to read to their children hardly seems the encore I had expected from feminism's most valuable player in Congress. But Schroeder's new memoir makes it clear that she chose to bail out for just the opposite reason Molinari did. While Molinari needed to rebel against her upbringing, Schroeder needed to take a break from a long career of rebellion. At 55, she had grown tired of the fight.

The congresswomen from Staten Island and Denver left the Hill within six months of each other in 1997, and in less than a year have turned out books to tell their stories. Schroeder served in the House for 24 years; Molinari, seven. Schroeder, a liberal Democrat, is 18 years older than Molinari, a moderate Republican. Yet the two women have striking similarities. Although they belonged to different political parties, they both worked hard for many of the same women's issues: family leave, child care, violence against women, sexual harassment, and abortion rights. They were the most colorful, high profile, quotable women on the Hill in the 1990s. Both brought a refreshing amount of energy, humor, and irreverence to their jobs. In their absence, Congress is a noticeably blander place.

As masters of the sound bite, Schroeder and Molinari are good communicators. If they are deep thinkers, they aren't sharing their thoughts, only their complaints. As Molinari writes of being a blonde female politician: "We seem to get pigeonholed as lightweights.... There I'd be, in a war zone in Bosnia, and some reporter -- usually female -- would comment on how I was dressed, then turn to my male colleague for answers to questions of substance" Yet these breezily written books are short on substance and analysis, long on self-congratulation and hubris. Schroeder, to her credit, seems to have written her book herself. Molinari enlisted Burkett, author of The Right Women: A Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America.

The truth is, Susan Molinari and Patricia Schroeder are both very, very goofy. Molinari makes a point of recording that at the after-party celebrating her first marriage she wore a pair of high-top sneakers decorated with white lace. The night she won her congressional seat, she danced on tabletops to "Love Shack." Then, trying to decide whether to run for governor, she found herself seconds away from a crucial meeting with a cheap plastic hairbrush tangled in her hair. "How," she wondered, "am I going to convince people that I'm qualified to be governor of New York with a brush sticking out of my hair?" Panicking, she took a pair of scissors and cut the brush -- and a patch of hair -- off the top of her head.

Schroeder wore an Easter bunny suit to China. She claims to have eaten 4,500 bean burritos and calls former President Bush and Vice President Quayle members of the "lucky sperm club." It just doesn't get much sillier than these two -- at least in politics. But there is something to their goofiness. It's irreverent and nonconformist, and while Schroeder and Molinari aren't Thelma and Louise, both have free spirits.

Both tell tales of bucking the system. As a freshman member of the Armed Services Committee, Schroeder defied the powers that be by talking to Redbook magazine about the humiliations she suffered under the chairmanship of Edward Hebert, a sexist bully. Schroeder says her colleagues permanently shunned her after she became the only member of Congress to support Shirley Davis in her sexual discrimination suit against Louisiana Democrat Otto Passman.

Early in her career, Molinari broke from her party and President Bush by arguing forcefully for the Family and Medical Leave Bill. Molinari's speech followed Republican Fred Grandy's, who had reminded his colleagues that it was Small Business Week. Molinari concluded with, "Don't, forget that this isn't just Small Business Week. Sunday is Mother's Day." Fred Grandy didn't speak to her for a year.

Neither woman pulls her punches when it comes to the Speaker of the House. Molinari paints Gingrich as nothing short of an incompetent, delusional megalomaniac. Her behind-the-scenes description of last summer's failed coup attempt against the speaker reveals a world of ruthless backstabbing and deft double-crossing that would make Machiavelli proud. Molinari says Gingrich compared himself to Napoleon, FDR, Churchill, and Eisenhower and was overwhelmed by his own grandiosity. When Gingrich's four top henchmen, among them Molinari's husband, Bill Paxon, Republican congressman from Buffalo, NY., arranged an "intervention" to tell the speaker that he had to shape up, Gingrich dissolved into a rage. "People all over the world are listening to us, watching what we are doing. I'm at the center of a worldwide revolution," he huffed, turning to Paxon, adding, "You will never understand that, Bill." After the coup, Paxon was forced to resign from the Republican leadership and would later announce his plans to retire from Congress.