I've been a minor Orrin Hatch fan ever since I was writing about Ronald Reagan and Reagan sent a telegram endorsing "Warren" Hatch in Utah's 1976 Republican U.S. Senate primary. I felt sorry for Orrin/Warren; you get the Gipper's endorsement but he gets your name wrong, raising questions about whether he has any idea who you are.
Now here were are, 42 years later. Reagan is no more, telegrams are no more and a year from now, Orrin Hatch will no more be in the U.S. Senate. For that matter, the Republican Party that Reagan and Hatch used to embody is no more, either.
Last Tuesday, Hatch's office spurned Western Union and used Twitter to link to a video in which Hatch announced that he wouldn't seek an eighth term in this year's election. At 83, he's lost a few feet off his fastball.
Hatch's seat is widely expected to be won by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a once and future Utah resident and the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. It says something about Hatch's charisma that everyone's excited about Mitt Romney replacing him.
Hatch has been kind of a barometer of the changes that have occurred within the Republican Party in the past four decades. I wish I could say that's why I paid attention to him, but really, it's the songs.
Hatch fancies himself as a songwriter, a lyricist mostly, and did pretty well at it, hawking his CDs on the Home Shopping Network and through the now-defunct website Hatchmusic.com. In 2006, after he'd been at it 10 years, The New York Times reported that he'd earned $39,000 in royalties the previous year. Lots of songwriters in Nashville don't do that well.
It seemed like such a normal hobby, though clearly as a U.S. senator he had entree to people in the music business that less exalted people don't. A devout Mormon, he leaned toward love songs and up-tempo spiritual and patriotic ballads, intended to be sung at maximum volume, a la the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Consider:
"America rocks!
From its busy bustling cities
To its quiet country walks,
America rocks!
It's totally cool, it's totally hot,
I mean it's like right there at the top,
America rocks!"
You can hear some of Hatch's music at Apple Music and Spotify, though I don't recommend it. Still, by his seventh term, Hatch had turned out to be a better songwriter than senator.
He caught the first wave of modern conservatism as Reagan turned the party to the right, but not so far right that he couldn't occasionally find common ground with a Boston liberal. Reagan had Tip O'Neill and Hatch had Ted Kennedy.
Hatch and Kennedy became a trope, the example people in Washington cited to say: see, bipartisanship still exists. They were the odd couple, the abstemious former Mormon bishop and the hard-drinking heir to everything that went along with being a Kennedy.
Together they passed federal AIDS funding, the Americans with Disability Act, advertising regulation for prescription medication and the now-endangered Children's Health Insurance Program for kids in working poor families.
A Utah Republican Convention in 1997 condemned the CHIP bill, but Hatch wouldn't fold. He had been raised in poverty, worked his way through law school and raised his family in a rehabbed chicken coop.
"I've gone hungry. I've gone without," he said. "When people can't help themselves but want to, government does have a role in helping them."
By the time he ran for re-election in 2012, the GOP had gone through its tea party phase and had committed itself to zero cooperation with President Barack Obama. Hatch caught that wave, too.
He turned on Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, whom he had once praised as a "consensus nominee," going along with the Republicans' successful effort to steal the seat.
In October, Hatch's Finance Committee finished work on a reauthorization of CHIP funding. By December, as Republicans prepared to pass a $1 trillion tax cut heavily weighted to wealthy taxpayers, Hatch's conversion to fundamentalist corporate conservatism was complete.
"Nobody believes more in the CHIP program than I," he said, adding, "The reason CHIP's having trouble is we don't have any money anymore."
This child of the Depression went on to say that he had a "rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of trillions of dollars to help people who won't help themselves, won't lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything."
Hatch knows that's not who federal safety net programs help, but he said it anyway. He should write a song about that.
"I've always fought for people who can't fight for themselves," he said in his announcement Tuesday. At one point that might have been true, but thanks to people like Hatch who sell out, America doesn't rock for everyone.
