The Recyclers' Representative

By Paul Belden

Paul Belden is associate editor of Scrap.

When U.S. Rep. Blanche Lambert Lincoln learned recently that she and her husband, Steve, were pregnant with twins, the Arkansas Democrat decided that the two jobs of representing her constituents and caring for her coming newborns might be one job too many. So, regretfully, she sent out the news that she wouldn’t be running for re-election in 1996.

For America’s recyclers, this comes as something of a blow. In her two terms in Congress, Lincoln has been one of the scrap industry’s most passionate champions of Superfund relief for recyclers, twice introducing legislation that would free legitimate recycling transactions from Superfund liability. 

Although no one can predict whether the current bill, HR 820, also known as the Superfund Recycling Equity Act of 1995, will pass anytime soon (politics reigns supreme in an election year; just look at the budget battles), it clearly enjoys widespread support. It has already attracted more than 140 cosponsors from both parties and from all parts of the ideological spectrum, and it has been rolled into the House’s overall Superfund reauthorization bill.

“It’s an incredible achievement,” says Mark Reiter, ISRI’s manager of legislative and international affairs. “This bill has drawn the support of both the most conservative and the most liberal members of Congress.” And that simply could not have happened without the forceful advocacy of Blanche Lambert Lincoln and the effective work of her staff, especially Legislative Director Mindy Byrns O’Brien, he says. “I really don’t think any other representative or key staffer could have attracted this sort of support from both sides of the aisle.”

Why did Lincoln take on this issue? “It’s just common sense to me,” she says. “I’m a big believer in recycling, and I also believe that government exists to help people be more productive and do a better job in their lives. It shouldn’t be an obstacle to them.”

There’s also the fact that she felt a certain kinship with the predominantly family-oriented scrap industry. Lincoln’s family—the Lamberts of Helena, Ark.—has farmed the same rural corner of the state for seven generations, and family is the most important touchstone in her life. She senses a similar quality in recyclers.

“These businesses are mostly family-owned and family-operated, and they’re run by folks who have built something and are proud of what they’ve done,” she says. “These are people who are willing to work hard. They know you don’t get something for nothing. To me, that’s the true American spirit.”

Upset of the Year

If Lincoln sounds more down-to-earth than you might expect of a politician, maybe that’s because she never gave much thought to being a politician before she suddenly was one. 

Running for office certainly wasn’t on her mind when she first came to Washington, D.C., in 1982 after graduating from the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va. Her plan at the time was to work on Capitol Hill for a year or so, then go on to medical school.

Instead, she got sidetracked by what a longtime friend describes as her incurable curiosity, a trait she readily acknowledges. “That’s my nature. Plop me down in an empty room with four bare walls to look at, and I’ll find something to be intrigued about,” she says. “It sure makes life a heck of a lot more fun.”

What intrigued her when she arrived in Washington was government and the legislative process. Starting out as a receptionist in the office of her hometown congressman, Rep. Bill Alexander, she went on to find work as a legislative researcher and lobbyist for several local lobbying firms. Over the next eight years, she gradually developed an expertise in energy issues and earned a reputation as an effective mover of legislation.

Then, on a hot summer’s day in 1991, while lunching with a colleague, she boiled over in frustration at what she saw as “just a lack of common sense on the issues I was working on.” Then and there, she and her friend decided to make a list of what was important to them and what they thought they could do about it.

Lincoln’s list ended up with two items on it: “Number one, I wanted to accomplish something that really worked to help people. Number two, I wanted to do something for my hometown and my family.”

It was at that point that the idea of running for Congress occurred to her. At first, it seemed nothing more than an idle thought, and a comical one at that. She was only 31, after all, and she had no experience even volunteering on a political campaign, much less organizing one. Lincoln and her friend had a laugh, then they finished their lunches and went back to work. 

But the thought kept popping up. Run for Congress? Why not?
With Lincoln, the question “Why not?” isn’t left hanging in the air for long. Her friends agree on that point. “One of the things about Blanche is she’s always eager to try new things. That’s part of what makes her such an interesting person,” says Emily Shaw, a Washington friend who has known her for years. Lincoln is, after all, a woman who learned to fly an airplane at the age of 18, from a local cropduster.

So she ran for Congress. And won. It was hailed as the upset of the year.

Barnstorming Arkansas

In part, she was lucky. Her opponent in the Democratic primary—her former boss, Alexander—had created problems for himself by bouncing a lot of checks on his House bank account. Then again, she was running in a district that had sent only two different people to the House of Representatives over the previous 50 years, and she still beat the incumbent soundly—61 to 39 percent.

As you might expect from a person so family-oriented, her campaign relied on relatives. “For the first eight or nine months, it was just my mother and me,” she recalls. Then the rest of the clan got involved. Scores of relatives made posters, stuffed envelopes, called voters, handed out flyers, and generally turned the wrenches of the campaign, taking care of the small, tiring, yet necessary tasks by which a campaign is bolted together.

Then her godfather came on board, and things really started to roar. He had his own ideas about the proper way to conduct a campaign for national office. Papering the outside of his motor home with American flags and blown-up photographs of his goddaughter, he barnstormed across Arkansas with Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” blaring from the P.A. system. The tour built name recognition for the new candidate with puzzled motorists in four counties. After the media charged the campaign with sexism, the song was dropped in favor of Sousa marches. But the band played on.

“It was a classic type of grass roots campaign,” recalls Walter Wright, a Little Rock attorney and observer of the Arkansas political scene. “She has a number of enthusiastic relatives.”

It wasn’t only her relatives who were having fun. Lincoln is a woman whom a longtime friend describes as having “never met a stranger in her life.” Her personality—a combination of straight-shooter directness and southern-belle charm—makes her a natural for the campaign trail. Stumping from one end of her district to the other, visiting minimills, fish farms, and factories “was the time of my life,” she says.

Making Her Mark

The fun hasn’t abated in the years since. Her staffers say they like working for someone so young and hip, someone who likes to boogie and who plays 10,000 Maniacs at the office. 

Politically, although Lincoln says she is and will be “a Democrat ’til the day I die,” her record leans to the conservative side of her party. She is one of the founders, for instance, of “The Coalition,” a bipartisan group of moderate legislators which, over the past year, has acted as a bridge of sorts between the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress.

More than anything, though, her record suggests an independent streak as wide and stubborn as the Mississippi River on the delta of which she spent her formative years. In 45 minutes of recent conversation, a note of contempt entered her voice only once: when she described how a colleague had told her that he couldn’t vote for an amendment she was sponsoring—an amendment he claimed to support—because House Speaker Newt Gingrich was against it. “Does the Speaker represent your district?” she had asked the man. Recalling the scene, her voice was sharp and cold.

She’s earned the right to be contemptuous of spinelessness; she herself has not shrunk from bucking her own party’s leaders, not even with the pressure on and the cameras popping. Last year, when Democrats staged a walkout from a policy hearing to protest the Republican strategy of limiting debate on Medicare reform, Lincoln was the only Democrat to remain in the room.

Such independence apparently comes from what Lincoln describes as her guiding philosophy: common sense. And her involvement with the recycling issue is probably as good an example of this philosophy in action as anything in her career.

There are only four or five scrap recyclers in her district, according to Sam Hummelstein, president of Hummelstein Iron & Metal Inc. (Jonesboro, Ark.), one of those recyclers. So it’s not as if she took on this fight because she thought she would get something in return.

It was Hummelstein, actually, who first explained to Lincoln the damaging effect that Superfund has on recycling efforts. It was early in her first term when they had the conversation, and “she didn’t hesitate,” Hummelstein recalls. “She said, ‘Y’all need help, and I’m going to help you.’ Then she went out and became a real factor. We’re going to miss her.”

For her part, Lincoln says her departure from Congress won’t mean an end to her involvement with the recycling issue. “My father always said one of my best attributes was that my voice carried,” she says. “I’ll still be out there.” •