Heidi Alexander: “I come to the floor to talk about Doug Bailey. Doug Bailey died last week at age 79. The New York Times reported on…”

“I come to the floor to talk about Doug Bailey. Doug Bailey died last week at age 79. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Doug Bailey helped define the role of political consultant in the 1960s and 1970s and that he founded the Hotline. He was much more than that to me and to countless others for whom he was an example of how to live a public life. I am aware that when offering a eulogy it is good form to speak more of the deceased than of oneself, but that is hard to do with Doug because he cared so much about everyone he met and everyone he worked with. I first met Doug Bailey in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977. I was here for a few months working with Howard Baker, the former Senator from Tennessee, who had just been elected to be the Republican leader of this body. He asked me to come work for him. I think part of that was to console me, to let me lick my wounds for having lost the Governor's race a couple years earlier in Tennessee. There wasn't much prospect for a political future for me then because the Nashville Tennessean had written that there wouldn't be a Republican Governor in Tennessee for another 50 years. So I was here in Washington, and while I was here I became energized by the Republican Senators. It looked to me as though Jimmy Carter was already in trouble, and my friend Wyatt Stewart introduced me to Doug Bailey.…”