Minnesota: Eighth District

Rep. James Oberstar (D)

James Oberstar (D) Elected 1974, 17th term up
Born:	09-10-1934, Chisholm
Home:	Chisholm
Education:	St. Thomas Col., B.A. 1956, Col. of Europe, Bruges, Belgium, M.A. 1957
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Jean)
Professional Career:	Navy civilian language teacher, Haiti, 1959–63; A.A., U.S. Rep. John Blatnik, 1963–74; A.A., U.S. House Public Works Cmte., 1971–74.
DC Office	2365 RHOB, 20515 202-225-6211 Fax: 202-225-0699 Website: www.house.gov/oberstar
State Offices	Brainerd:218-828-4400; Chisholm:218-254-5761; Duluth:218-727-7474; North Branch:651-277-1234;
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In the 1860s, prospectors in the Arrowhead region of the new state of Minnesota, northwest of Lake Superior in the low hills of the Mesabi Range, happened upon the nation’s largest veins of iron ore; they moved on, looking for gold. But in the 1880s, Duluth banker George Stone and Philadelphia financier Charlemagne Tower started mining the Iron Range and created the northern end of the lifeline of American heavy industry. South from the Range run rail lines to the port of Duluth, nestled on dramatic bluffs over the always cold and, for long months every winter, frozen waters of Lake Superior—one of the most beautiful settings for a city in North America, and there is similar beauty on the North Shore of Lake Superior for the 150 miles from Duluth to the Canadian border. Duluth was a grain-shipping rival of Chicago and the premier iron ore port. Its city plan was drawn up by Daniel Burnham and its splendid turn-of-the-century buildings still celebrate the triumph of technology and civilization over wilderness and the elements. Millions of tons of ore have been dug out of the Range, loaded into rail cars for the ride to Duluth, and into Great Lakes freighters for shipment to Cleveland, Gary, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Buffalo.

For most of the last century, in this land where the Arctic winds blow down over the Canadian Shield’s thousands of inland lakes, about 100,000 people have lived on the Iron Range and another 100,000 in Duluth, most of them the products of America’s 1880–1924 wave of immigration: Italians, Poles, Serbs and Croats, Jews, Swedes and Finns. In this punishing environment, they worked to the point of exhaustion, built solid houses with staunch central heating and wore layers of warm clothing to survive the winter: it got down to 54 below on the Range in January 2005. Life was rough: The work was hard, the hours long and the pay low. The churches, a separate one for each ethnic group, were the main community institutions. Living conditions improved vastly in the decades of great economic growth after World War II, but life remains rough-hewn today, and there is still economic distress. As iron mines and steel factories got more efficient they needed fewer workers; employment is well below its 1970s peak. As water fills abandoned open-pit mines and factories close and mines are shut down, the Iron Range looks bleaker. Duluth’s population was down to 85,000 in 2005, and the Iron Range’s was about the same. But all is not moribund. Northwest Airlines, with an $840 million investment from state government in 1993, built a repair facility in Duluth and a reservations center in the Iron Range. The port of Duluth still ships large quantities of grain, and in the late 1990s a new taconite and steelmaking factory was built—the first big new plant in more than 20 years. And up in Chisholm in the Range, Cleveland Cliffs, after settling a strike, announced a plant expansion in September 2004, the first one in these parts since the 1970s. There is a Greyhound Museum in Hibbing, where in 1914 an entrepreneur started transporting people in unsaleable open-air Hupmobiles, an enterprise that eventually became the Greyhound Bus Company. People here have made the best of the frozen climate: Nearby Eveleth boasts the world’s longest hockey stick, 107 feet long, carved from aspen and aimed at a 700-pound puck; the severe winters of International Falls in Koochiching County have given rise to a cold weather testing industry—this is where automakers test a car’s performance under extreme winter conditions.

The 8th Congressional District of Minnesota includes Duluth and the Iron Range, plus much of the north woods and lake country to the west and south; it moves all the way south to the boundaries of the Twin Cities metro area, to Isanti and Chisago Counties, where young families are building new homes near pleasant old lakeside towns. While the Iron Range grows only sluggishly, there has been vigorous population growth in the southern and western counties in the district, as young families move out farther from the Twin Cities core and older Minnesotans move farther north to enjoy life on the lakes. This district has been a bulwark of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party since it was formed in 1944, and has been considered safely Democratic for years. But there are signs of change. The fast-growing counties in the south and west have trended toward Republicans, while Duluth and the Iron Range remain Democratic though issues like gun control and environmental restrictions have sometimes moved opinion toward the Republicans. George W. Bush lost the 8th District to Al Gore by only 49%-44%, a much smaller margin than his father’s 60%-40% loss 12 years earlier. Bush campaigned on the Iron Range in July 2004 but the DFL came back some distance: John Kerry won here 53%-46%.

The congressman from the 8th District is Jim Oberstar, a Democrat first elected in 1974—“part scholar and part Iron Range street fighter, part pothole-filling ward healer and part workaholic,” in the words of the St. Paul Pioneer Press—and chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Oberstar grew up in the Iron Range city of Chisholm, where his father was an iron miner and union official, who sent him off to St. Thomas College with $2,500 saved in quarters at the Slovenian National Benefit Society; Oberstar has been known to sing polka songs in Slovenian at a House Democratic retreat. He studied French in college and in Belgium; for four years he was a civilian employee of the U.S. Naval Mission to Haiti, teaching French and Creole to Marines, and French and English to Haitians (he also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian and Spanish). Then, in 1963, at 29, he landed a job as chief of staff to Congressman John Blatnik in Washington: he has been working for the 8th District for more than four decades. When Blatnik retired in 1974, Oberstar won a primary over Tony Perpich, brother of Governor Rudy Perpich.

Oberstar’s views are in the liberal Catholic tradition. He believes in an economically active government and has little faith in economic markets. He was long dubious about American military involvement abroad, especially in Central America, but favored the 1994 deployment in Haiti. He voted against the Iraq war resolution in October 2002 and has decried the results of U.S. intervention there since. He is an opponent of abortion and a backer of adoption, sponsoring bills to insure family and medical leave and dependent deductions for families in the process of adopting; when he first proposed a $1,500 adoption tax deduction in the 1970s he was laughed out of Ways and Means, but now, thanks in large part to his effort, there is a $5,000 tax credit.

From this North Country district, Oberstar has been a supporter of local hunting and fishing activities and of the steel industry. When normal trade relations with China came before the House, he tried to get an amendment of the 1974 trade act that would treat steel slab imports as a direct threat to taconite miners; when the administration wasn’t interested, he voted against the bill. He was disappointed by George W. Bush’s steel tariffs in March 2002, because imported semi-finished slab steel, which competes with Minnesota’s taconite, was not subject to the 30% top duty until imports reached 5.4 million tons, 77% of previous levels.

From October 1995 to January 2007, Oberstar was ranking minority member on Transportation and Infrastructure—a position of real power. The committee has a long tradition of bipartisanship, and of sponsoring members’ roads (and, since 1994, other transportation) projects; it has 75 members, the largest in the House and maybe the largest legislative committee anywhere. For six years Oberstar and Chairman Bud Shuster worked to make it more powerful than ever. Their great monument was the May 1998 TEA-21 transportation bill, with $217 billion in spending, including $10 billion in projects earmarked by members. Back when Oberstar’s boss John Blatnik was chairman, the committee’s power was threatened by an alliance of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives; by 1998 it was carrying all before it. Another reason: the 1991 ISTEA, of which 1998’s TEA-21 was the reauthorization, included spending for mass transit, bicycle trails and pollution control research, at the option of states or House members. This has helped win the support of many liberals; Oberstar himself is a bicycling enthusiast, proud of logging 2,700 miles a year in Washington, Duluth, on the Range and in the Tour de Frog in St. Cloud. One special project is Safe Routes to School, grants for sidewalks, bike paths and safe crossings to encourage kids to walk to school; Oberstar had relentlessly pushed for more and has pushed spending up from an initial $20 million to $612 million over five years in 2006. The purpose is to encourage fitness and reduce childhood obesity. “I would say in time it will be the best thing I’ve ever done.” In April 2004 Oberstar and the new Transportation Chairman, Don Young, persuaded the House to pass a $275 billion, six-year bill; the Senate in February 2004 passed a $318 billion bill. The White House insisted on capping spending at $256 billion, and the result was that no bill was passed in 2003 and 2004. Oberstar and Young were unfazed. In March 2005, after Bush threatened to veto a bill calling for more than $284 billion, the House passed a bill for that amount by a vote of 417–9. Finally, in July 2005 both houses passed a $286 billion act, with $24 billion for more than 6,000 earmarked projects and Bush signed it two weeks later. He defended the earmarks when they came under criticism. “They were part of the committee record for everybody to see. They weren’t put in at midnight.” And he defended Don Young’s “bridge to nowhere.” “That was his determination,” said Oberstar. “It came out of Alaska’s allocation, not out of the general revenues of the federal government.”

Oberstar once chaired Transportation’s Aviation Subcommittee and remains involved in aviation issues. He was one of the architects of the airline bailout bill in fall 2001 and strongly pushed for federal employees in airport security. He worked hard for the state investment in Northwest Airlines, but criticized the company when it cut jobs in Duluth below the agreed on level in early 2004; by December most of the jobs were restored. Despite Northwest’s Minnesota presence, he came out in December 2006 for awarding a new route to China to United, flying out of Washington, rather than Northwest, flying out of Detroit. In June 2006 the House adopted an Oberstar amendment by 291–137 to continue barring foreign companies from owning more than 25% of U.S. airline stock. In November 2006 he came out against plans backed by the Bush administration and many airlines to fund the FAA entirely on user fees based on miles flown, with a quasi-governmental commission making spending decisions on air traffic control management and other matters. “There are some functions government must undertake in the public interest.” After a 70-year-old bicyclist left his vintage Raleigh in  a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport terminal and maintenance personnel destroyed it, Oberstar called for bicycle parking spaces in airports and said he would insert “bicycle storage” grants in the next FAA authorization. After JetBlue left dozens of passenger-filled planes on the ground for 10 hours in February 2007, Oberstar called for hearings on flight delays.  

The 2005 transportation act included $495 million in earmarks in Minnesota, about one-quarter in the 8th District, and overall a 41% increase in federal aid. But not all of it has been spent as he would like. He was angered when Governor Tim Pawlenty vetoed a gas tax increase and in February 2007 he urged the legislature, with both houses controlled by the DFL, to raise it. Since 2001 he has worked to upgrade U.S. 53, which runs from Duluth through the Iron Range to the Canadian border. He succeded in getting a dangerous interchange and railroad overpass rebuilt. But the state DOT has been unwilling to spend the $50 million he earmarked to widen 20 miles north of the Iron Range to four lanes and to add passing lanes in the remaining 70 miles to the Canadian border at International Falls. He was aroused particularly by the account of a former aide who witnessed a fatal crash on the road in the 1990s. “People in greater Minnesota have a right to live and have safe highways, and if the state DOT won’t see to those needs, then I am their state representative and I am going to take care of them, by God.” On another issue, he has called for more dredging of the Great Lakes, since lake levels have fallen in recent years, and called for a new fleet of short ships on the Great Lakes. 

Oberstar won tough primaries in 1980 and 1984, the latter after briefly running for the Senate. Oberstar’s one political setback came in 1984, when he ran for the Senate but was denied endorsement by the liberal DFL convention. In the 8th District he has been reelected by very wide margins; longtime DFL voters may be moving away from Democrats higher up on the ticket, but they remain faithful to Oberstar. Former 6th District Congressman and one-term Senator Rod Grams, a resident of Isanti County in the southern part of the district, challenged him in 2006 and ran slightly better than other Republicans, but Oberstar won 64%-34%, carrying every county. He is the longest-serving member of Congress from Minnesota ever.

Committees

• Transportation & Infrastructure (Chmn. of 41 D).
  

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: D + 4
• Area size: 32,419 square miles
• Urban Population: 37.4%
• Rural Population: 62.6%
• Population 2000: 614,935
• Population 2005 (est): 643,193
• Median Income: $37,911
• Poverty Status: 10.4%
• Military Veterans: 16.2%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 94.6% White; 0.5% Black; 0.4% Asian; 2.5% Native Am.; 0.0% Hawaiian; 1.0% Two+ races; 0.0% Other; 0.8% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 20.2% German%; 10.8% Norwegian%; 9.6% Swedish%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 28.9%; White collar 52.9%; Gray collar 18.2%;