Faith

CUMMING, Iowa — The hardened boys who came of age in this dirt-poor farm hamlet during the 1950s had no illusions about their place in the world. Their extended Irish families taught them a reality as cold and brutal as a Midwest winter’s morning. They faced life at the bottom of the heap.

Within the Harkin clan, whose numbers teemed through the countryside, Tom Harkin and his family had it worst of all. His mother had died when he was 10 years old. An older half-brother was deaf. Tom was packed off on a lonely odyssey to live first with one half-sister, then another. When he returned four years later, his father, a struggling miner-turned-handyman, offered little solace. “If you’re waiting for somebody to give you something,” Patrick Harkin said, “you’re gonna be sitting in a rocking chair all your life.”

Beyond Cumming–a blur of weathered trailers and clapboard houses 20 miles south of Des Moines–lay hostile country. Norwalk, the nearest town, was resented, a symbol of everything Cumming was not. Norwalk’s farmers, Methodists and Republicans, prospered. Cumming, an enclave of Irish Catholics and Democrats, seemed locked in perpetual decline.

Only on Halloween nights did Cumming exact a measure of vengeance. Its teen-age sons stole into Norwalk, waiting until the streets were deserted. Then they tipped over outhouses. They blocked roads with bales of hay. They took wagons apart and reassembled them atop grain elevators. When the boys from Cumming swaggered home, Tom Harkin was often among them.

The victories were brief; adolescent pranks that are now faint memories. But Harkin’s Halloween nights served as a rudimentary political awakening, the first taste of what it was like to get even with his betters.

His harsh rites of passage in American Gothic country shaped a career that has taken him from a victory in a 1974 congressional race to a U.S. Senate seat and has now propelled him into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Those formative years continue to cast a shadow, having left Harkin with a class-conscious mind-set and a deep well of ambition, searing him with the belief that conflict breeds opportunity.

“Life was a struggle,” he says, echoing his father’s homespun philosophy. “You worked hard, you didn’t agonize over your situation. And when things didn’t turn out, well, then you carried on until you got another chance.”

That ethos–and Harkin’s stubborn triumph as a self-made man–might seem a blueprint for the making of a conservative. But coming to adulthood amid the John F. Kennedy generation, Harkin emerged an unabashed liberal. He seeks change through partisan combat, maintaining an abiding faith in the corn-belt populist causes he has championed all his life. And he tempers his idealism with a gut instinct for electoral survival.

As a presidential campaigner, Harkin flaunts heartland roots and hardball tactics that unnerve opponents. In the presidential race, he has been a scornful rhetorician, sarcastically damning President Bush as “George Herbert Hoover Bush” and primary foes as “microwave Democrats.” His voice trembles when he is on an emotional roll, eerily reminiscent of Hubert H. Humphrey’s excitable quaver. Quoting the Bible (Corinthians), Harkin likens himself to a trumpeter, insisting his message–a beneficent federal government combined with hard-eyed leadership–will produce “a strong, certain sound” to lead his party into battle.

“He’s got a raging forest fire in his belly,” says Roger Jepsen, a Bush Administration official who lost his Senate seat to Harkin in 1984.

Harkin decided to run for the White House early last year, telling intimates during the Gulf War that Bush’s soaring popularity ratings would not last and that a worsening recession was the best chance for an “old-fashioned Democrat” to compete and win.

“I don’t have deep pockets,” he says. “I don’t have a famous name . . . but I’ve got some pretty deep feelings and beliefs, and it seems to me this is a good time to see if other people have them, too.”

Clings to the Past

In an era when many Democrats are trying to forge a new synthesis to retake the White House, Harkin embraces the past. He cherishes the party’s whistle-stop vestiges, quotes dead presidents, mines ideas in the successes of past administrations. Just this past Friday night, on a nationally televised debate, he called for “a new New Deal.”

Harkin also politicizes his own past, using stories about his family’s hard luck to etch human faces on issues important to him. But in his eagerness to draw parallels, some critics say, Harkin has stretched and distorted details of his life and accomplishments. The examples, they contend, range from his record as a Vietnam-era airman to the importance of the role he plays in Congress.

Such questions about Harkin’s credibility reflect deeper concerns about the kind of leader he would make. Detractors say his combativeness and preoccupation with old ideas would be liabilities in a president.

Supporters counter that Harkin’s unshakable commitment to the verities of Democratic liberalism and his willingness to defend that philosophy tooth-and-nail have been his strengths, making him a formidable candidate and an effective legislator; in essence, a liberal’s Ronald Reagan.

A stern, flinty vision out of a Matthew Brady plate, Harkin, 52, insists his passion is mistaken for anger, yet he is loath to dwell on inner motivation. He is most at ease in his Colonial-style suburban Virginia home with his wife, a Washington lawyer, their two daughters and a small circle of friends and advisers. “I’m not one,” he says, “to sit and stew day after day about who and what I am.”

The portrait that emerges from Harkin’s own words, as well as from dozens of friends, associates and enemies, is of a man whose roots cradle, anchor and imprison him. As Harkin surveys the American landscape of the 1990s, it is always through Cumming’s black-and-white lens.

Heart of the Heartland

Southwest Iowa is the heart of the heart of the country.

It is a place of flat fields and grain silos, manure-stained work shoes and bib overalls, turkey hunts and steak frys. In summer, the air is alive with the buzz of combines. In winter, the machines lay idle in frozen corn stubble. Painter Grant Wood used area farmers–taciturn men with worn faces–as models for his Depression-era American portraits.

Scattered along the farmland’s fringe are ghostly earthen reminders that the region also once had an industrial base–coal mines, most of them sealed for decades, where miners toiled in black dust. In Cumming, it was the Orilla mine that lured outsiders.

Cumming has changed little over the years. Most of its 150 residents scrape by on low-paying jobs or on relief. A stunted water tower, barely higher than jack pines, marks the town for passersby. Visitors to American Legion Post 562 are warned: “Parking for Irish only. All others will be towed.”

That attitude “sounds mean and parochial,” says Robert W. Pratt, a Des Moines lawyer and Harkin intimate, “but it makes life more manageable for the people on the bottom. That’s where Tom comes from.”

It is how Patrick Harkin and his wife, Frances Bercic, dealt with the world. They met in Cumming in the late 1920s. He was a gaunt Irish miner at Orilla, she a Slovenian emigre whose first husband died, leaving two girls and a boy. The pair married in 1927, moving into a cramped one-story bungalow where they had three more boys. Thomas Richard Harkin, the youngest, was born on Nov. 19, 1939.

Weeks after his birth, the infant was scalded as his mother sterilized fruit jars. While he howled in pain, his frantic parents tried to decide what to do. There was no doctor in Cumming, and on the father’s pittance of a paycheck, a trip to a Des Moines hospital was out of the question.

“His two older sisters carried him around for days on a pillow so his raw skin wouldn’t touch anything,” recalls first cousin Martin Harkin. “That’s how poor they were.”

As a young child, Tom Harkin filtered out his poverty. The rest of the family was less sheltered. Frank, his deaf half-brother, had to be sent to a school for the disabled. Then the mine closed. All Patrick Harkin had to show for his years underground were frequent bouts of pneumonia. It was the start of black lung disease that would eventually kill him.

The father is described by neighbors as an austere man who wore wire-rim spectacles, argued during poker hands and brewed potent, illegal beer in his basement. “He felt the same way we all did,” says Joseph Kirvin, a longtime neighbor. “It was the Irish against the world.”

Frances Harkin, a willowy woman with a cleft chin inherited by her sons, pushed her brood to study hard. One fall day in 1950, she came in from gathering eggs, lay down on the couch and passed out, dying two days later of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her husband and the older siblings decided Tom should move into his sister’s home in Rock Springs, Wyo.

“Dad felt Tom needed someone to mother him and his sister could do it best,” says John Harkin, an older brother. Tom Harkin prefers not to dwell on what he felt inside.

In Rock Springs–another bleak mining town–folks rarely got along with their neighbors, least of all the miners’ children. Harkin, new in town, was fresh prey. “I just remember kids picking on me all the time and, by God, I had to stick up for myself and fight back,” he says.

Returning after three years in Rock Springs and a year with another sister in Dexter, Iowa, Tom Harkin was no longer the family’s baby. His father, now in his 60s, eked out a living from odd jobs. The boy had to pay his own way. Working after school and during summers, Harkin pruned weeds from bean fields, baled hay, hammered railroad ties, sweated under the sun with highway crews.

On school days, he caught long rides to Dowling High, a weathered brick Catholic school in Des Moines. Dowling’s pupils divided into a pecking order. At the top were affluent Irish kids from the westside of Des Moines. Then came poorer Italians. At the bottom were the country boys. Harkin was rarely taunted, but his sense of exclusion, already seeded by Cumming’s rivalry with Norwalk, intensified at Dowling.

“Some of the priests were always buttering up the rich kids,” says Chuck Hanrahan, a boyhood friend. “They wouldn’t give us the time of day. That kind of thing just burned Tom up.” Says Harkin: “They treated us like hicks.”

In class, he kept his resentment hidden. Like his older brothers, Harkin, an honor student, planned to study civil engineering, and after his senior year he followed them to Iowa State University on an ROTC scholarship.

“Politics,” he recalls, “was the furthest thing from my mind.”

The telescopic lens of a surveyor’s level gave Harkin his first sense of the world beyond Iowa. Using the instrument for a college class one day in September, 1959, he sighted a crowd, then the squat figure of Nikita S. Khrushchev. Harkin had been only dimly aware that the Soviet leader had come to the campus as part of a whirlwind U.S. tour. “They seemed to be having a lot more excitement than I was,” he recalls.

Kennedy Attraction

But it took the lure of military life and the election of John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race to jolt Harkin into abandoning his somnolent path toward an engineering degree. He returned from a summer on a Navy air base in Florida determined to become a fighter pilot. And after Kennedy’s election, “any of us (Catholics) who had ever tasted prejudice had to feel that the last barrier was gone.”

Harkin fell in with a group of students close to history professor E. B. Smith, an intellectual Democrat in the Adlai E. Stevenson II mold. When Smith ran for Iowa governor in 1962, Harkin volunteered. It was a lost cause, but he came away from a half-year of barnstorming smitten with campaign work.

“It was seat-of-the-pants politics.” says John Fitzpatrick, the strategist for Harkin’s presidential campaign and a former political science professor. “He had just got his flying license, and here he was, flying Smith into these small-town airports. It had to be intoxicating.”

Graduating with a government degree, Harkin’s military commitment kept him from using his new political connections. He was sent to Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba and put on flight duty, shadowing Soviet MIGs. From 1965 to 1967, he served at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, testing and flying repaired aircraft damaged in Vietnam. He flew F-8s, the Navy’s nimble greyhounds, and learned to handle F-4s, fast, but lethally sluggish at high speeds.

Plaudits as Pilot

Harkin mastered both planes and won loyalty from his enlisted crew. “He was the best pilot I flew with over there,” says Charles Hart, a Los Angeles aircraft firm employee who spent four years as a navigator at Atsugi. “He had great reactions and judgment . . . and he took great care of his troops. When he says he’s for the working man, he’s for real.”

During Harkin’s two years at Atsugi, Hart says, the young pilot made at least 15 trips to the war zone. “We usually stayed a few hours,” Hart says. “Just long enough to catch a flight out.” Harkin’s brief stays, mostly in Da Nang, became an issue years later when political rivals claimed he exaggerated his Vietnam experience on his resume.

Hart and James Glavin, a former Atsugi pilot now living in Kansas City, insist that though Harkin was never under fire, his war years were anything but cushy. The test flights to determine whether the repaired jets were battle-worthy, Glavin says, “were damned necessary for the war effort.”

On one F-4 flight at 45,000 feet, both engines stalled out. Harkin calmly waited until he could reignite, taking the plane down safely, Hart recalls. Another time, assigned to ferry an F-8 to the Philippines, Harkin was grounded because of a bad cold. The pilot who replaced him stopped in Okinawa to refuel. On liftoff, Hart says, the plane malfunctioned. Its fuel tank ripped away and was sucked into an engine. The ensuing fireball killed the pilot.

Allure of Sailing

“Anyone who thinks we had it easy is fooling himself,” Harkin says flatly.

Still, Harkin had enough leave time to sail a catamaran he and another pilot ordered from a Japanese boat builder with visions of sailing around the world. (Harkin now keeps a sailboat in a Bahamas vacation cabin he built several years ago and, at home, drives a white Corvette.)

His ambitious sailing plans were interrupted by budding romance. On a weekend trip to Tokyo, he met and pursued a Minnesota woman after hearing her flat Midwest accent. Ruth Raduenz, a strong-willed farm child with a literature degree, was on vacation from her job running an enlisted men’s club in Korea. Outside the Buddhist temple where they met, Harkin pressed her for a date. They married in Iowa a year later, in 1968.

Now an attorney, Ruth Harkin juggles mothering two daughters, Amy, 15, and Jenny, 10, and a career as a lobbyist with the influential Washington law firm once headed by political insider–and now Moscow ambassador–Robert S. Strauss. She is her husband’s closest adviser. John Frew, Harkin’s former Senate campaign manager, calls her “the smartest political spouse in the country. She’s lawyerly and gives timely, savvy advice.”

The couple spoke nothing of politics on their first dates. “He’d do so many funny little things,” his wife recalls. “On our second date, he made all these elaborate plans (for both of them) to climb Mt. Fuji. And I barely knew the guy.”

They stayed in touch by letter after she returned to Korea. She found a thoughtful, keen mind behind the airman’s Top Gun swagger. He began confiding doubts about the war. Harkin still supported its aims, but fellow pilots’ tales of botched operations and sorties over civilian targets had made him cynical about its progress.

“We all had anger about the way the war was being run,” Chuck Hart recalls.

Vietnam became the central focus of Harkin’s fledgling political career, the source of his first major controversy and the dominant issue of his early campaigns.

Moves to Capital

After a series of unfulfilled political jobs in Iowa, Harkin decided he needed Washington experience. Moving there with his wife in 1970, he was hired as an aide to Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa), whom Harkin had worked for during an earlier reelection campaign. Smith, known for his quiet influence in the House, then found Harkin a job as a staffer with a House committee studying the Vietnam War. Flying to Saigon that June with the committee, Harkin and two other congressmen went to the town of Con Son, where the government ran a prison for political opponents. The party talked their way into the compound and found 500 emaciated inmates shackled inside five-foot high “tiger cages.”

Recording the squalid scene by camera and on tape, Harkin gave the evidence to Smith. But on the plane back, Harkin wrote later in the Progressive magazine, he learned that the committee planned to make only a minor reference to the prison. In Washington, Harkin confronted Smith in the House parking lot and “grabbed the film and tape” from the congressman’s car trunk. Fired by the committee for insubordination after calling its report a “whitewash,” Harkin sold his photographs to Life magazine for $10,000, using the money to attend Catholic University law school.

Harkin’s friends and foes agree the incident was a telling one, an indicator of the aggressive conduct that continues to divide those who know him into opposing camps. Admirers paint him as a principled loner who identifies with underdogs and takes on political Goliaths.

“He’s able to relate to people who feel they don’t have any worth, who need someone to stand up for them,” says Rep. Lane Evans, (D-Ind.), who works with Harkin in the Populist Caucus, an affiliation of liberal Midwest Democratic congressmen.

‘Inch Deep, Mile Wide’

Harkin’s critics–not only GOP opponents, but some Democratic colleagues–say he is an ineffectual legislator given to grandstanding and motivated by publicity. “Beyond his farm-belt circle, he’s just not a key player in Congress,” says a former Democratic House member who requested anonymity. Says William Scherle, Harkin’s first GOP congressional conquest: “Tom Harkin is like the Platte River. He’s an inch deep and a mile wide.”

Harkin tested the waters to run against Scherle when he returned to Iowa in 1972 and became a lobbyist for a Des Moines Legal Aid office. Robert Pratt, who worked there, says Harkin sewed up support on the “rubber chicken” political dinner circuit and appeared at peace rallies–a stern figure in pyramid sideburns and wide ties, totally opposed to the war.

Scherle beat Harkin that year (though the challenger’s 45% total was considered respectable amid Richard M. Nixon’s landslide). Harkin blames his loss on trying to sound like a Kennedy clone. “I tried to be urbane and highbrow and intellectual and it didn’t work,” he says.

The night he lost, Harkin ranted for more than an hour at campaign workers, blaming them for failing to get out the vote, says Pratt, one of his volunteers. Intimates say Harkin is often easily angered, but rarely holds grudges. “He had every right to bitch,” Pratt says. “Those people didn’t do their jobs.”

Two years later, it was Scherle who raged. Harkin was among 75 Democrats first elected in 1974 as a national backlash to the Watergate scandal. Harkin credits his victory to “being myself,” learning farmers’ concerns and simplifying his approach. He now often shows up at small town events in jeans, flannel shirts and work boots.

The campaign was a model for later battles. Harkin criss-crossed the district and was miserly with campaign funds. Former press spokesman Phil Roeder recalls Harkin dawdling for a half-hour at a pharmacy jewelry rack before replacing a broken watch with a new $9 model.

Early in the ’74 campaign against Scherle, Harkin alleged that the incumbent had committed election infractions. They included the charge that Scherle had violated federal “franking” laws–regulations governing congressional mailings–by sending out overly large postcards to constituents. This was not the kind of restrained behavior GOP politicians in Iowa expected from Democrats, known for fielding intellectual moralists. Harkin fought. Hard.

“Anyone who goes into a campaign with him expecting any civility or rules is in for trouble,” says Jepsen, the Republican who lost his Senate seat to Harkin in 1984 and is now chairman of the National Credit Union Administration.

He Strikes First

When Harkin took on Jepsen in 1984, his campaign was again marked by preemptive strikes. Harkin, who had consistently voted as a congressman for social programs spurned by the Reagan Administration, expected the incumbent to use his record as an issue. So Harkin struck first, using television ads to label Jepsen as “Red Ink Roger” for his votes to raise the defense budget–a move Jepsen now acknowledges blunted his use of the spending issue.

The abortion issue also threatened to paint Harkin, a pro-choice advocate, into a corner. For much of the campaign against Jepsen, he was tailed by pro-life demonstrators. Convinced Jepsen was behind the protests, Harkin’s campaign sent out a blizzard of mailers the day before the election, making the spurious claim that the incumbent believed rape victims who had abortions “should be put to death.”

Harkin has no regrets. “It just frustrated the hell out of them,” he says, satisfied.

Tom Synhorst, a political consultant who ran the Senate campaign of Rep. Tom Tauke, Harkin’s most recent GOP victim in 1990, says that the two campaigns showed that Harkin “has a real knack for muddying the debate.”

His greatest flaw, foes say, is his selective exaggeration of his own past. Among a litany of complaints, they single out his military resume as his most grievous distortion. Scherle claims Harkin often told college audiences in 1972 that he was a “fighter pilot. He would describe skirmishes and everything else. Hell, he wasn’t in combat.”

Harkin was quoted in a book by Washington Post political writer David Broder as telling a congressional Vietnam Veterans’ Caucus in 1979 that “one year I was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions.” And in an April 1, 1980, statement carried in the Congressional Record, Harkin identified himself as a “Vietnam veteran in Congress.”

A Troubling Issue

Denying that he tries to mislead, Harkin has been scrupulous during the presidential race about his tour of duty. But he has been less than forthright on other matters. He has often cited the layoff of his deaf half-brother, Frank, as an example of how American workers too often are left “on the trash heap.” In emotional speeches that never fail to hush audiences, Harkin recounts how a union-busting campaign in the mid-1970s cost Frank Harkin his machinist’s job despite 23 years’ seniority. In the story’s climax, Harkin tells how his half-brother was reduced to taking a night job cleaning toilets in a shopping mall.

Harkin leaves the impression that his half-brother never rebounded from his job loss. In fact, Harkin helped Frank find a government job as a sorter at the Des Moines Post Office, getting him to apply under a hiring program for the disabled. Frank Harkin retired with a full pension in 1988. “I knew about the program and got him involved in it,” Harkin allows.

Similarly, in stump speeches, Harkin has described his father as a “yellow dog Democrat” and implied that his childhood home was a strong party household. But Harkin’s brother, John, recalls few family political discussions–”We didn’t talk about politics around the dinner table,” he says–and adds that Patrick Harkin was not an active party member. Even Tom Harkin acknowledges that his father was as much a supporter of Catholic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin and Communist-baiter Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy as he was a Franklin D. Roosevelt man.

Harkin dismisses doubts about his credibility as “all politics” and suggests that the press is “suckered” into reporting on the matter.

“These Republicans, they love to stick it to you and run dirty campaigns,” Harkin says. “But once you do it to them, oh my goodness, their skins are as thin as a piece of paper.”

Harkin’s partisan battles extend into his legislative career. As a senator, Harkin has consistently opposed Reagan and Bush administration bills. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action group rates his record on their agenda second only to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Last September, Harkin tried to play legislative Robin Hood with Bush’s defense budget, proposing to transfer $3 billion in military funding to social programs. Although the move would have breached the deficit-reduction compromise previously agreed to by both houses of Congress, Harkin insists that “the money was just sitting there. And I said, ‘Let’s take it out of defense and put it to good use.’ ”

The measure lost by a 69-28 vote.

A tireless crusader on foreign human rights issues, Harkin has traveled on several high profile fact-finding trips to Latin America–brushing aside Republican criticism that he is a meddler. On a trip to Chile to look into allegations that opponents of the military government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet were being murdered and imprisoned, Harkin wound up in “yelling matches” with a Chilean air force general, said former Rep. Toby Moffett of Connecticut, who also went.

“This was at a time when bodies are floating in the river,” said an admiring Moffett. “Tom kept saying, ‘Where are all the missing people?’ Maybe he wasn’t diplomatic, but someone had to speak up for those people.”

Among his legislative accomplishments, Harkin is proudest of his shepherding of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill he pushed as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee. The act mandated sweeping new legal protections and public access for the disabled, winning Harkin a reputation as their voice in the Senate. He even gave part of his final floor speech in sign language.

“He held the coalition together,” says Patrisha Wright, executive director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund. “And he didn’t get on the bandwagon at the last minute. He’s always been there.”

Yet despite Harkin’s identification with the bill, both Wright and Senate sources say that Sen. Kennedy was just as instrumental in getting consensus for the bill and guiding it to passage. And when the legislation was first introduced in 1988, congressional sources note, the original Senate sponsor was former Connecticut Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.–not Harkin.

“If you listen to him, he’s the father of it,” a knowledgeable Democrat says. “He takes credit for it in public, but the rest of us had to keep it alive in private. He was an emotional catalyst, sure, but that hurt us as much as helped us.”

Harkin’s maverick stands have alienated legislators on both sides of the aisle. Early last year, he introduced a resolution requiring congressional authorization for the Gulf War–against the wishes of ranking Senate Democrats who wanted to take a more cautious route during a period when President Bush had overwhelming popular support.

Harkin acknowledges that Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) was “a little bit” annoyed at his public show of mutiny. But he says “no punishment came from it.”

Sticks With Causes

His willingness to stick with issues long after they have become lost causes is also a hallmark of Harkin’s legislative style. Aides in both parties say he is effective in wearing down opponents by offering up minor amendments and stalling late-night hearings when other legislators are impatient to adjourn–though they add that Harkin has muted this style a bit since ascending to prominent roles on several Senate committees.

Critics point to his legislative track record as evidence that Harkin is too much the ideologue to make an effective national leader. “He’s totally pragmatic in trying to get elected,” Jepsen says. “But looking at him as a (member of Congress), you wonder whether he’d be able to work with people.”

Harkin’s supporters minimize that portrait as one-dimensional, insisting Harkin has matured over the years. “He can be persistent,” says former Michigan Rep. William Brodhead. “In that sense, he’s our Reagan. But he’s shown that he can be practical when he needs to be.”

In his office, Harkin keeps a rubber stamp marked, “Bullshit,” a reminder of the petty concerns that have obstructed him during his career. Early in the presidential race, he used the word frequently as a graphic symbol of his–and voters’–frustration with the American scene. But Harkin toned down its use after audiences–often, elderly voters–were offended.

“I guess I can hit people in the face sometimes,” he says, only slightly ruefully.

Lately, on the campaign trail, he has been hitting again. Mired deep in the polls, yet publicly unruffled by his standings, Harkin has taken on opponents as if the mere act of being ornery might win him the presidency.

He realizes it will take a profound political shift not only among Democrats, but among American voters, for his campaign to succeed. But with a faltering economy, he says, “the timing is right for a Harry S. Truman-type of a populist to get through to the American people.”

After a dozen years of Republican rule, he banks on the assumption that the country is ripe for a return to the vision put forth by his holy trinity of Democrats–Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy. As the self-proclaimed messenger of that vision, Harkin sees little need to tailor it for what many in his own party see as a different era.

His role, as he has seen it throughout his 18 years in elected office, is to nudge that vision forward through the tough, partisan conflict he relishes.

And then?

“I’ve always believed that people vote first with their hearts and then, if you’re lucky, with their minds,” he says. “But you’ve got to reach their hearts first. That’s what I’m trying to do–talk to people on a gut level.

“Once you’ve done that,” he says, “the rest should follow.”

A Candidacy Shaped by Early Struggles

Background

Born: Nov. 19, 1939, Cumming, Iowa.

Education: Iowa State University (1962). Catholic University of America Law School (1972).

Military Service: U.S. Navy pilot, 1962-1967, stationed in Cuba and Japan.

Family: Married since 1968 to the former Ruth Raduenz. Two daughters, Amy, 15, and Jenny, 10.

Career: Elected 5th District Iowa congressman, 1974. Served five terms. Elected Iowa senator, 1984, and reelected, 1990.

Campaign Themes

Short Term:

* Support legislation requiring companies to adopt policies providing up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave for childbirth, adoption or serious illness.

* Increase funding for the Head Start program.

* Support legislation giving workers the right to strike without fear of losing their jobs.

* Oppose “fast-track” consideration of U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement.

* Push legislation instructing U.S. members of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to oppose aid for countries spending more on their militaries than on development.

Long Term:

* Eliminate the trade deficit within four years.

* Provide college education for any American who agrees to serve a stint in a new national volunteer force.

* Order defense cuts that would save $420 billion over the next decade, investing much of it in economic rebuilding and renewal of the nation’s infrastructure.

* Reduce the number of American troops stationed in Europe to 25,000 from 280,000.

* Cut the number of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,000 from 12,000 (contingent on agreement of a similar reduction by Russia).

* Create a national health care plan by June, 1993, guaranteeing affordable coverage for all Americans. Specifics of the plan have not yet been provided.

I come from a family of priests and devoted Catholics. Catholicism is the blood in my veins. My father was not a disciplinarian, but if you lived under his roof you went to church. Saturday evening or Sunday morning, didn’t matter, you went. My four siblings and I were not miscreants, but we drank beer and sneaked out, and I was once cited for stealing liquor. I can’t recall my father ever yelling at me for anything other than missing Mass.

My great-uncle Dan was a diocesan priest at St. Charles Borromeo in Drexel Hill, Pa. Dan was a fire-and-brimstone hard-liner. Every Thursday we’d gather as a family for a roast beef dinner at my grandmother’s house. Dan would drink Manhattans — plenty — and if someone expressed a view of God contrary to his own, he’d say, “It’s awfully hot down there.” “There” meant hell. My uncle Ed, my mother’s eldest brother, was an Augustinian. Patient, compassionate, inclusive, Ed’s God was very different from Dan’s. While discussing God, Ed would quote Michael Himes, “There is nothing we can do to make God not love us,” and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, “Mercy, within Mercy, within Mercy.”

Sports was in my family too — basketball, specifically — and I came to view Dan and Ed as head and assistant coach, respectively. The head coach shouting harsh critiques from the sideline, the assistant coach there to put his arm around you when you made it, crestfallen and ashamed, back to the bench. I loved them both, but I aligned with Ed’s view of God. Dan passed away a decade ago. Ed has since left the priesthood and married a kind and patient woman named Kathy. Over the years, Ed’s views on God have changed drastically. We meet for dinner once a month to talk about life and faith, and it was during one of our conversations that “Task” was born.

Mark Ruffalo in “Task.”

(Peter Kramer / HBO)

Tom Brandis, played by the singular Mark Ruffalo, is a former priest-turned-FBI agent who has lost his faith. Everything he held as truth in his life has come crashing down in the wake of a family tragedy. Tom believes he was called by God to adopt two children, Emily and Ethan. Adopting these children has resulted in the death of his wife, Susan. Matricide. What kind of God allows that? I have struggled with my Catholic faith over the years, but nothing has perplexed me more than the idea of suffering. The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, “If God is God, He is not good / If God is good, He is not God.” The message is clear: If God is God, the author of everything, then He created evil and suffering and therefore cannot be good.

In “Task,” I wanted to explore a crisis of faith with honesty and without easy answers, because that is exactly how I have found my own faith journey — arduous and circuitous. I believe in God, but I find that belief tested daily. Faith and religion are separable. Tom’s journey in “Task” is a journey of faith. In the fifth episode, Tom is kidnapped by the criminal Robbie Prendergast, played by the brilliant Tom Pelphrey. During a long and tense car ride to the Poconos, Robbie tells Tom that he doesn’t believe in God. Never has. God is an idea conjured to make life bearable. “There’s nothing after this life,” Robbie says. Tom doesn’t argue. His own beliefs have veered in that direction. The car pulls into a secluded, wooded area. Facing death, Tom suddenly wants to call his son, Ethan, and forgive him. Robbie doesn’t allow it. Instead, he walks Tom to the edge of the woods, tells him he’s a decent man, and sets him free. Because Robbie has his own plan: to sacrifice his life in the hopes of providing a better one for his family. It’s through Robbie’s act of mercy that Tom regains faith. He believes in goodness again.

Brad Ingelsby.

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

In the final episode, Tom finds himself taking care of a young and suddenly parentless boy, Sam. Sam reminds him of his own son, Ethan. Sam wants to live with Tom. And Tom desperately wants Sam to stay with him. But Tom also recognizes that Sam would be better served in the care of a young family capable of meeting his needs. Sam shouldn’t be stuck with an old man like him. Tom lets Sam go; he believes the boy will be taken care of. That is Tom’s act of faith.

When Ed and I met for dinner last month, we talked about how his idea of God has changed over the years. He no longer sees God as a bearded white man tallying our sins and waiting to judge us in heaven. He thought God was everywhere, all the time. The love that exists between people. He thought he could feel God right then, among us at the table as we laughed. We talked about Camp Mystic. The young girls swept away. Why, God? They were there to serve You. We didn’t have any answers. We never do. But the food and wine were good, and we talked about great-uncle Dan, about how he was so different from us but how much we loved him anyway, and how, when he drank Manhattans — plenty — he could turn harsh and opinionated, but it didn’t matter because he loved God. He loved Him with his whole heart, and we thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that and what an amazing gift it would be — to believe and never doubt.

Spencer Pratt is a showboat, a loudmouth, a troll and a self-proclaimed villain who seems willing to say anything in his quest to be the next mayor of Los Angeles.

Little wonder that his critics rolled their eyes when the former reality television star told CNN host Elex Michaelson a few weeks ago that his campaign role model is Jesus Christ, because “he was a politician.” How on earth did Pratt — a man who tosses insults with the ease of someone spitting loogies — come off boasting that his political hero was the Prince of Peace?

But anyone who ridicules the exchange as a blasphemous moment by a deluded wannabe isn’t paying attention — which is exactly the error that has allowed Pratt to storm L.A. politics. He isn’t running on an explicitly Christian message — that would be risky in a city with large Jewish, Catholic and secular constituencies. But the proud born-again evangelical is channeling the zeal of an old-fashioned tent revival, even if some of his rhetoric falls far outside the bounds of the Good Book.

In his recent memoir, Pratt recounted his conversion — actor Stephen Baldwin baptized him in a river during the 2009 season of the reality show “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.” Before that, his Christianity had consisted of wearing a black diamond cross necklace he described as “thirty grand of Jesus bling” bought from a Beverly Hills boutique. Pratt credits his faith with providing direction at a low moment in his life, as he embraced Jesus with such fervor that a pastor told him to stop joining altar calls so much during church services — once was enough.

“I needed the receipt stamped weekly,” Pratt wrote, “like a parking validation, just to make sure it stuck.”

Seventeen years later, he’s still seeking that affirmation.

The memoir comes off as a millennial version of “The Confessions of St. Augustine” — perhaps the most famous literary example of someone who saw their wreck of a life not as a series of mistakes to apologize for but as necessary failures on the road to grace. That’s why Pratt and his followers don’t see his sketchy past as a disqualifier, but rather his biggest strength. Only someone who says he was reborn in the inferno of the Palisades fire could possess the clarity and willpower needed to bring salvation to an accursed land, they argue.

In another era, Pratt would have been a welcome edition to the roster of bombastic Southern California preachers a la Aimee Semple McPherson, Chuck Smith and Gene Scott, as well as radio titans such as George Putnam and John Kobylt. His claims that only he can deliver us from damnation and that we need to repent of City Hall’s status quo at the ballot box are nothing less than a modern-day gospel to his followers. Pratt feels the pulse of L.A.’s civic malaise far better than Mayor Karen Bass or another of his opponents, City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Like any good pastor, he knows how to distill that discontent into soundbites and stories.

That’s why the self-designated “Pratt Daddy” has cast this moment in L.A. history as a modern-day Armageddon, urging voters to wage war against apostates and usher in a Second Coming, lest the city continue its supposed descent into hell. He admits in his memoir to holding “epiphanies and apocalyptic visions” in equal measure — no wonder he told a Canadian podcaster in March that life for him is a “spiritual battlefield” where “however I can be to stop evil at this point feels like a purpose.”

Spencer Pratt is shown on a television while journalists work during the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral debate at Skirball Cultural Center on May 6.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Far from me to criticize someone’s faith. But I urge Pratt to reacquaint himself with the words of the messiah in whose path he professes to follow. Humility, frugality, turning the other cheek — it’s what Jesus taught and what Pratt has long rejected.

Nowhere does Pratt need more of refresher on Jesus’ lessons than when it comes to homeless people.

Instead of offering compassion or viable initiatives, Pratt consistently calls the unhoused “zombies,” “vagrants,” “drug addicts” and “bums,” with a particular fixation on the naked ones. He vowed to ABC 7 recently that he would push people off L.A.’s streets and onto federal land — like herding stray wildlife. The mayoral hopeful added that “scam homeless nonprofits” exacerbate homelessness, which must have been news to Scripture-based organizations such as the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Union Rescue Mission and the Salvation Army, which have been trying to help homeless people since before Pratt was born.

Pratt also told ABC 7 reporter Josh Haskell that most of L.A.’s homeless are not locals.

“These people, when I unplug them … they’re all going to Seattle, where the mayor will welcome them,” Pratt proclaimed.

Jesus would not only roll out the welcome mat for homeless people — he would embrace them.

Spencer, what New Testament book says that your crude campaign against the most destitute among us is holy?

Christ never looked down on itinerants, famously saying, “The Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” In the Book of Mark, when Jesus sent his disciples out into the world, he told them to bring no food or money, because good people would take care of them.

“And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them,” Jesus said.

Christ did do some name calling, but his ire was directed at the powerful, the braggarts, the hypocrites — the Pratts of his time. The Nazarene saved his kindest words for the meek, the poor, the peacemakers — who are sorely lacking in Pratt’s caravan of disaffected liberals, Trumpers and the wealthy. Christ didn’t offer counsel to the comfortable but to outcasts — lepers, prostitutes, people possessed by demons or afflicted with disease — whose modern-day contemporaries live on our streets and whom Pratt World blames for all of L.A.’s ills.

Jesus especially embraced outsiders — the Canaanite woman he initially compared to a dog because she sought help for her daughter, the Samaritan lady at the well, the Roman centurion in the Book of Matthew of whom Jesus proclaimed, “I have not found so great faith” anywhere in Israel. Pratt would have rounded up all of them in donkey carts and dumped them in Babylon, if he had been around back then.

I understand how frustrating it is to see homeless encampments in neighborhoods and to deal with unhoused people who disrupt one’s day, as my wife does at her restaurant in Santa Ana. But whenever annoyance gets the better of me, I remember what Jesus told his followers: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me,” warning that he would keep this in mind on Judgment Day.

Those who didn’t take his advice? “Depart from me, ye cursed,” Christ thundered, “into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Christianity — and good society — calls for us to look to our better angels, not to demonize others, as Pratt regularly does. He knows this too.

“When the whole world hates you,” Pratt wrote, “it’s comforting to think at least the big guy upstairs has your back, so long as you repent.”

But repentance means admitting you’ve done wrong. Instead, Pratt is doubling down on his anti-homelessness nastiness as more and more people join his crusade.

Let’s see how many Angelenos embrace this false prophet on election day.