Looking Back: A Promising But Failed Political Career

An interesting new book about a once young and inspiring congressman

LANSING, MI -- Bob Carr was a congressman for eight terms and a fixture on the Michigan political scene for three decades.

He started out as an anti-war, pro-reform liberal. But as the years went on, he moved to the right, in the end voting against things, such as environmental legislation, he once championed.

Carr after politics: Older and perhaps wiser

Finally, in 1994, he ran for the U.S. Senate, lost badly, and largely disappeared from the public eye till August 2024, when he died a painful death from throat cancer.

His story is intriguing: Did his opinions honestly change, or did he cynically sell out to forces he once opposed? “Who is this guy, really?” a political reporter asked late in Carr’s career.

Dave Dempsey, the author of an excellent biography of Bill Milliken, the state’s longest-serving governor, attempts to answer that in a new book available on Amazon, From Rebel to Realist: The Career and Legacy of U.S. Congressman Bob Carr.

There’s much here that is fascinating. Though Carr was elected to Congress nine times, I have always thought his finest hour was the night in 1972 he lost his first race for Congress, when he scored a stunning victory in defeat.

Here’s what happened. The Lansing area had been represented for many years by one Charles Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer and a former IRS agent known mostly for a nasty temper. The area was seen as a safe Republican district, and on top of that, in 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee was George McGovern.

The election was shaping up as a Republican landslide, and the Democratic nomination for the congressional seat should have been worthless. But out of nowhere emerged Bob Carr, a handsome, tall 29-year-old with tousled thick black hair and a Mark Spitz mustache.

Election Night was a shocker.

Chamberlain almost lost. He had 97,666 votes to 95,209 for Carr. The next day, surrounded by supporters, an exultant Carr announced he would run in 1974. Chamberlain could see what was coming, and soon said he wouldn’t run again.

Everyone, including Carr, assumed the seat would be his by default. But then, another surprise. The Republican nominee, a young lawyer named Cliff Taylor (later a Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court) almost beat the heir apparent during a huge post-Watergate Democratic wave, losing by only 647 votes. Had the new congressman taken victory for granted?

In any event, he made an immediate splash in Washington as part of the reform-minded class of “Watergate babies,” the 76 new Democratic congressmen who arrived in 1975. Carr publicly called for the ouster of F. Edward Hebert, longtime chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and Hebert and three other committee chairs were soon deposed.

But Carr made an even bigger impact in his first months in office when he called for a caucus vote on President Gerald Ford’s request for military aid to the U.S-backed government in Cambodia, which, like South Vietnam, was about to fall to the Communists.

The caucus vote made it clear that President Ford couldn’t possibly get the aid package passed, and it was dropped.

Carr easily won his next two elections, but then lost his seat in the 1980 Reagan landslide, something that happened to dozens of other Democratic congressmen, including Toledo’s Lud Ashley.

But unlike Ashley, Carr campaigned furiously and reclaimed his seat in 1982. There he stayed for a dozen years, gradually seeming to become more conservative. The Almanac of American Politics labeled him a “lone wolf,” who had few allies either in Washington or Lansing. Then, in 1994, he ran for a rare open seat in the U.S. Senate. The Democratic primary was a bitter three-way race, and Carr squeaked to victory.

But the fall campaign was brutal. That was the year of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” and Republicans captured both houses of Congress. Perhaps any Democrat would have lost that year, but Carr didn’t offer much rationale for his campaign.

From Rebel to Realist does its best to justify Carr’s career, but as well-written as it is, I found that unpersuasive, though the book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the era.

And it contains one interesting revelation. Brown University Professor Richard Arenberg, a former congressional aide, concluded that in many ways the brash reforms that Bob Carr’s class brought to Congress, such as greatly limiting the power of the committee chairs tended to make Speakers of the House and political parties far more powerful. Allowing proceedings to be televised, another of Carr’s early causes has led to grandstanding by would-be demagogues.

The law of unintended consequences is, it seems, alive and well.

-30-