Getting to Know Tom Campbell

Before Tom Campbell became an internet celebrity demonic sheep, he completed an amazing academic career and spent a decade in the House.

Before Tom Campbell became an internet celebrity demonic sheep, he was a newly elected member of Congress from Palo Alto. Shortly after he won his seat in 1988, he stopped by the offices of the Wall Street Journal in New York.

Campbell was hosted by Tim Ferguson, then the editorial page editor. Tim was (and remains) a man not susceptible to enthusiasms. So at first I thought he was engaging in characteristic ironic humor when he asked me, “Do you want to meet the smartest guy in Congress?”

Campbell had completed an amazing academic career: Harvard law degree, Supreme Court clerkship under Byron White, a PhD in economics from Chicago under Milton Friedman’s supervision. He served in Ronald Reagan’s Federal Trade Commission, where he put free market ideas into action. He joined the Stanford law faculty and then took up the good fight to swing Silicon Valley to the GOP.

Campbell would spend a decade in the House, compiling a distinctive voting record: fiscally frugal, socially liberal, and skeptical of military force. (He would stake out the unpopular position that President Clinton’s Kosovo war violated the War Powers Act.)

Campbell unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Senate in 1994. After leaving the House he served as Dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, then as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget director. It’s that last experience that inspired Carly Fiorina’s “demon sheep” ad.

That ad seems remarkably unfair, given that Campbell was one of the principal architects and advocates for Proposition 76, the 2005 proposition that was probably California’s last clear chance to avoid its present budget crisis.

I had a chance to talk to Campbell by telephone last week, the second in a series of interviews with the candidates for the GOP line against Barbara Boxer. (The first interview, with Chuck DeVore, can be viewed here.) FrumForum is promised an interview with Carly Fiorina later in February.

An account of the Campbell interview will post shortly in the box above.