Fibbing senators claim undue credit

WASHINGTON -- After weeks of arduous negotiations, on April 6, 2006, a bipartisan group of senators burst out of the "President's Room," just off the Senate chamber, with a deal on new immigration policy.

As the half-dozen senators -- including John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. -- headed to announce their plan, they met Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who made a request common when Capitol Hill news conferences are in the offing: "Hey, guys, can I come along?" And when Obama went before the microphones, he was generous with his list of senators to congratulate -- a list that included himself.

"I want to cite Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback, Mel Martinez, Ken Salazar, myself, Dick Durbin, Joe Lieberman ... who've actually had to wake up early to try to hammer this stuff out," he said.

To Senate staff members, who had been arriving for 7 a.m. negotiating sessions for weeks, it was a galling moment. Those morning sessions had attracted just three to four senators a side, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., recalled, each deeply involved in the issue. Obama was not one of them. But in a presidential contest involving three sitting senators, embellishment of legislative records may be an inevitability, Specter said with a shrug.

Unlike governors, business leaders or vice presidents, senators are not executives. They cannot be held to account for the state of their states, their companies or their administrations. What they do have is the mark they leave on the nation's laws -- and in Obama's brief three-year tenure, as well as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's seven-year hitch, those marks are far from indelible.

"It's not an unusual matter for senators to take a little extra credit," Specter said.

Both Obama and Clinton have tried to make the most of it, and Clinton has attempted to bolster her Senate resume with her less-than-transparent track record as first lady. The release Wednesday of more than 11,000 pages of documents from Clinton's years in the White House sent reporters and political opponents scrambling for evidence that might contradict her lofty assessment of her performance in those years.

With colleagues in Congress quick to claim credit where it is due, word moves quickly when undue credit is claimed.

"If it happens once or twice, you let it go," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., an Obama supporter. "If it becomes the mantra, then you go, 'Wait a minute.' "

Last week, as the financial markets were roiling in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse, Obama made another claim that was greeted with disbelief in some corners of Capitol Hill. On March 13, Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, disclosed legislative proposals to allow the Federal Housing Administration to guarantee new loans from banks willing to help homeowners in or approaching foreclosure. Neither Obama nor Clinton appeared at the housing news conference.

Yet Obama on Monday appeared to seek top billing on Dodd's proposal.

"We should pass the legislation I put forward with my colleague Chris Dodd to create meaningful incentives for lenders to buy or refinance existing mortgages so that Americans facing foreclosure can keep their homes," Obama said.

Dodd did say that Obama supported the bill, as does Clinton. But he could not offer pride of authorship to the candidate he wants to see in the White House next year.

Clinton also has her share of colleagues willing to scrutinize her claims. Her campaign Web site describes her "successful effort to create" the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program during her husband's tenure in the White House, and she has placed herself in the middle of major international events, including the Northern Ireland peace process and the Balkan conflict.

But prominent Democratic senators are challenging some of her assertions.

During months of SCHIP negotiations in 1997, her name rarely surfaced in news accounts. Clinton never testified before Congress or held a news conference on the bill. When Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the lead GOP negotiator of the children's health bill, heard reports that Clinton was depicting herself as SCHIP's main advocate, "I had to blink a few times," he said. "If she was involved, I didn't know about it."