Salena Zito:
"This longtime Democrat left his party after it demanded that he sign a pledge to support only its candidates.
Local and national Democrats branded him as an extremist, out of touch with constituents; the press judged him to be “dead meat” in the 1970 campaign to win back his U.S. Senate seat.
Undeterred, Harry Byrd Jr. – namesake son of the legendary boss of Virginia’s then-dominant Democrats – beat the odds and won re-election. Not once but twice.
“It was a contentious time,” Byrd now says. “Then again, everyone thinks they are living in the most contentious times ever. Well, they really aren’t, are they?”
The longest-living former senator at age 97, Byrd still resides in his hometown of Winchester, Va., within walking distance of one of his beloved newspapers, the Winchester Star.
He served eight terms in Virginia’s senate before being appointed to his ailing father’s U.S. Senate seat.
He won that seat outright a year later, but the undercurrents of change already were building among Democrats.
“Liberals began … winning local elections in the primaries over moderate and fiscally conservative Democrats,” Byrd said of that shift. “You could just see it coming in successive primary elections, and that was in the ’60s.
“Now, the party is barely recognizable.”
He scoffs at the notion that this is the country’s worst-ever time, but passionately agrees we’re heading in a dangerous direction.
He served in the Senate under four U.S. presidents; he was close friends with Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, liked Clinton, but “never much cared for Carter.”
After his switch to independent, he still caucused with Senate Democrats but “no one ever took my vote for granted.” A staunch fiscal conservative, he introduced balanced-budget legislation four years in a row requiring that “total outlays of the federal government shall not exceed its receipts,” he said.
“Congress approved it, then promptly ignored it.”...." (Read more? Click title)
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