From Beam Us Up, Madam Speaker
By John Edgell, CQ Politics, August 13, 2009
Brace yourselves. In about three weeks, the world is about to get a little wackier and a little louder, and don’t say you weren’t forewarned.
Former Congressman James A. Traficant Jr., Youngtown Ohio’s finest, is to be released from the Rochester, Minn. federal medical center on Sept. 2, after completing his sentence for his April 2002 conviction for racketeering, bribery and fraud.
For most convicted felons, returning home after seven years locked away to a hero’s welcome is most unlikely. But most ex-cons aren’t Traficant, the onetime presidential candidate with an almost mythical standing in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley region, who will be greeted with “Welcome Home, Jimbo” and a sold-out tribute dinner of 1,200 people in his honor.
There aren’t many larger-than-life characters left in American politics, especially notorious ones such as Traficant, a hero to many, who deliberately flaunt conventional norms and are unafraid of embarrassing themselves. He’s the second House member expelled since the Civil War, who received a hero’s send-off going to the pokey, and a hero’s welcome getting out too.
Have expulsion and a federal felony conviction become a potential platform for a political comeback? Go figure.
Best known for his loopy and theatrical ‘one minute’ House floor speeches – “Beam Me Up, Mr. Speaker” — the pro-labor, pro-school-prayer ex-county sheriff railed on such topics as burping cows and space toilets.
Of course, Traficant wasn’t the first or last member of Congress to exploit demagogic rhetoric to gain the spotlight, but he surely elevated it to a higher level, if not orbit.
Who else other than Traficant could represent themselves in a federal courtroom, convince a jury and gain an acquittal after being caught red-handed with audiotape evidence showing he took $160,000 in bribes from two Mafia bosses? In doing so, Traficant became the only person to represent himself against a federal RICO case and win. (Of course, Traficant’s record as a defense lawyer wasn’t perfect.)
And then Traficant ran for Congress in the next election – up against Ronald Reagan’s re-election coattails – and beat handily a Republican incumbent and despite being outspent seven-fold.
Traficant may not have wanted to be a freak show , but, hey, he hung around with people like ‘Charlie the Crab’ and couldn’t help himself most of the time. You don’t hire as your top staffer one of the good fellas who delivered $100,000 in bribes from the Pittsburgh arm of the mob, at least not by accident.
And his constituents loved him for it: In 1992, ‘Jimbo’ received the third-highest vote total of congressional candidates.
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