- 2005 January 4 Sacramento Bee Dan Walters
Local News P: B3
Matsui was loyal soldier for party

When Robert Matsui was elected to Congress in 1978, representing the urban core of Sacramento, a reporter who had covered his political career dubbed him "congressman for life." That moniker became an epitaph late Saturday night when Matsui, who had been elected to his 14th congressional term just two months earlier, died of complications from a rare blood disorder. He was 63.

Matsui occasionally flirted with running for statewide office -- and clearly enjoyed being mentioned in the media as a potential candidate for U.S. Senate, attorney general or lieutenant governor -- but never took the plunge, unwilling to give up certain re-election to Congress and his steady, if unspectacular, climb up the Democratic leadership ladder.

He and his politically active wife, Doris (who once held a White House post) became one of Washington's insider couples, and Matsui became known for trying to build consensus rather than pick fights.

Matsui's characteristic aversion to risk means that despite serving in Congress for 26 years, he leaves behind no landmark legislative or political achievements. He was a diligent party soldier who became a dependable party lieutenant -- most recently as Democratic point man on Social Security and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Com- mittee -- who could represent the party on Sunday morning talk shows. But he did not aspire to more important, if riskier, political office, nor to identify himself with a particular issue.

Matsui's self-effacing political career stands in sharp contrast with those of his predecessor as urban Sacramento's congressman, Democrat John Moss, and his chief Republican counterpart -- and sometimes antagonist -- in the Sacramento area, John Doolittle. Moss made a national name for himself as a dogged congressional investigator of governmental wrongdoing, while Doolittle created a powerful regional political machine and became a major player in the Republican-controlled House.

When Matsui won his first congressional term in 1978, he became part of a phalanx of Democratic officeholders that dominated Sacramento-area politics, but Doolittle's election to the state Senate two years later heralded a sharp change of partisan course. By the time of Matsui's death, major Democratic officeholders largely were confined to Sacramento's urban core, surrounded by suburban and rural Republicans, many of them Doolittle acolytes.

What happened in Sacramento paralleled what was happening nationally. Democrats dominated Congress in the 1970s, especially during the post-Watergate period, but Republicans took control in 1994 and solidified that hegemony last year despite Matsui's efforts at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Matsui's personal story was more compelling than his political biography. Born just three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he spent his infancy in one of the "relocation camps" to which California's Japanese Americans were consigned after the outbreak of World War II. His most lasting congressional achievement was legislation that officially apologized for the internment program and provided compensation to its victims.