The Long Goodbye to Byrd

When Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd announced last week that he would step down next January from the post he assumed a decade ago, relief among many Democrats was palpable. Senators appreciate Byrd for his obsessive attention to their personal needs, but little else. Increasingly, he has seemed unable to control his flock. None of the Government's 13 appropriations bills came to a vote last year, forcing the adoption of an omnibus spending bill whose full content was not known to a single Senator; in February, Byrd's own campaign- finance bill could not make it through the Senate. Moreover, with his silver- ^ blue pompadour and dour expression, Byrd, 70, has proved no match as an adversary to Ronald Reagan's polished role as the Great Communicator. As a Democratic spokesman following Reagan's State of the Union addresses, Byrd, with his stilted manner, came across on television like a clerk calling roll.

Byrd's graceful exit gives the Democrats a chance to choose a new majority leader, one who may have to counter another four years of a Republican White House by setting a more vigorous style of leadership in Congress. Anticipating that Byrd would resign or be pushed aside, Senators Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, George Mitchell of Maine and J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana have been jockeying behind the scenes since last year.

None of them has a commanding lead, although Inouye, 63, the no-nonsense insider who came to national prominence during the Watergate hearings, was once the favorite. But his fortunes fell last summer when his plodding, imperious handling of the Iran-contra hearings turned what should have been a Democratic triumph on national television into a showcase for Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. Inouye's standing slipped further in January, when he was found to have sponsored an unnoticed proposal to give $8 million to build schools for North African Jews in France. Even without these setbacks, Inouye may be too Byrd-like for younger members. "Inouye is the direction you go in if you really want to play it safe, not rock the boat," says Norman Ornstein, resident Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute.

Mitchell's stock has risen over the past year. During the Iran-contra hearings, he appeared judicious and intellectually rigorous. Under the glare of television lights, his wooden speaking style vastly improved. A Senator since 1980, Mitchell, 54, has been around long enough to have developed respect for tradition but not so long that he is inured to Senate logjams. "Tradition," he says, "ought not to be a justification for unreasonable delay and unconscionable deadlock," a sentiment that resonates loudly with the bloc of eleven freshmen Senators pushing a "quality of life" package to reform arcane Senate rules. As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- he defeated Johnston for the post in 1985 -- Mitchell has a leg up with the members he helped elect in 1986. Says one Senator: "A lot of those guys are going to think, We're gonna dance with the fella who brung us."