A Pair of Giant Killers

When America woke up last Wednesday morning, it was to strangers they had briefly met, and hardly got to know, but who would now be running Congress. These strangers rode to victory on a shoeshine and a smile and a sample case full of miracle cures. They gave few specifics, but never mind. Voters were convinced that their generic bromides looked better than what the Democrats . had been peddling. Of those who uprooted hardy Democratic perennials, few were more unlikely than Texas Congressman-elect Steve Stockman and Tennessee Senator-elect Bill Frist.

Stockman was a pro-gun, pro-school prayer sometime house painter and occasional accountant. The most effective element of his platform was simply not being 21-term Congressman Jack Brooks, who, if he had been re-elected, would have been the most senior member of the House. Being a Congressman will be Stockman's first steady job. Bill Frist, a heart-and-lung surgeon from Nashville, Tennessee, knocked off 18-year Senate veteran Jim Sasser by campaigning against the things Sasser was for: gun control, abortion rights and Washington pols telling people not to smoke in Old Smoky country. The main requirements for success among the neophytes were work in a field unrelated to government, a life lived outside the Beltway except for the odd trip to see the monuments, and a Democratic incumbent as hoary as one of the marble buildings on the Gray Line tour.

Stockman, 37, didn't earn a college degree until 1990 and worked sporadically while raising money in the conservative churches of east Texas for a campaign that would spend little more than $100,000. But his limitations were a virtue because his target was so big -- and so maculate. Jack Brooks, an ex-Marine who chomped on a cigar in his seat as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee long after the ashtrays were removed, could be a poster child for term limits. More liberal than his east Texas constituents on issues like civil rights, he had hung tenaciously to office, power, perks and pork by fiercely protecting his constituents' love of guns, rice subsidies and the death penalty. He was also good at delivering federal building projects and disaster relief, as needed.

But Brooks' last grab for a slab of bacon proved too much for his sated constituency. After he managed to get $10 million for the Jack Brooks Criminal Justice Center at Brooks' alma mater Lamar College slipped into the crime bill, voters saw pork for the bad financial bargain it is -- two dollars in federal taxes for every one that might come back to the district in the form of pork. Stockman, who had been trounced by Brooks in 1992, saw his chance and tried again. Some Republicans in Texas ignored him as a wild man. (Stockman unfurled posters that said FIGHT CRIME. SHOOT BACK.) But he found ardent support among the pro-lifers, term-limit advocates, and gun owners, angry at Brooks' vote for the crime bill. And the giant fell: Brooks won only 46% of the vote.

The new Congressman says one of his heroes is Representative Dick Armey of Texas, who used to live in his office, sleeping on his couch and showering in the House gym -- practices Stockman plans to emulate. He knows he will have to work hard for the folks back home. "This is a tough district," he told TIME. "I know I got a lot of votes, not because they love Steve, but because they are mad at Brooks."