When Politics Is Personal

My daughter Clare, and it's spelled c-l-a-r-e, she's my fourth child of eight,'' Senator Pete V. Domenici began reluctantly, his voice soft and gravelly. ''Clare was a beautiful, beautiful girl. Now she's all grown up, and she's, well, she's struggling. Struggle is a good word for it.''

Domenici had been sitting beside me in an armchair in his Washington office, chatting about a re-election race that is causing him little anxiety. But when the conversation shifted to his family, and then specifically to his 40-year-old daughter, Clare, he rose abruptly and moved away, putting his solid senatorial desk between us. Sitting beneath a Navajo wall-hanging from his native New Mexico, he absorbed himself lining up pens on a yellow legal pad. A 70-year-old Republican, Domenici is not a soul-bearing, confessional type, and he has zealously guarded his family's privacy during his nearly three decades in the Senate. ''Personal stuff,'' as he calls it, makes him squeamish; he'd rather talk about taxes or nuclear energy or almost any piece of pending legislation.

With what looked like a nod to himself, however, he continued. ''Clare was a very marvelous gifted athlete,'' he said. ''In her best year in high school, she was district champion in tennis; she was a catcher on the baseball team; she was an absolutely outstanding guard on the basketball team.'' During her freshman year at Wake Forest in North Carolina, however, Clare started to lose her zest, growing ''fuzzy'' and inordinately indecisive. She would call home frequently for guidance on simple issues, ''like what kind of potato to have,'' Domenici said. ''She was all out of whack. Then my wife, Nancy, went down there to help her and ended up bringing Clare back home. That's when things got really out of hand. Her temperament totally changed. She became angry, mean. Throwing things at mirrors. Cussing, swearing. Crying, shrinking into a shell, taking to her bed. And that started two novice parents down the strange path of having to believe something we didn't want to believe. And to really believe it, to acknowledge that Clare was mentally ill, took a long time.''

As Domenici exhaled, his assistant tiptoed in to give him a note, and he asked her hopefully, ''Meredith, do I have to go to an appropriation meeting?'' The assistant shook her head, but Domenici had revealed all he wanted to about Clare for the moment. So he switched gears and talked, in his distinctively folksy and rambling way, about how the happenstance of Clare's illness had redirected his political agenda. If it were not for Clare's struggle with what was finally diagnosed as atypical schizophrenia, it is improbable that Pete Domenici, Mr. Fiscal, would have assumed the unlikely role of champion for the mentally ill. ''I don't believe the subject ever would have come up,'' he acknowledged.

Domenici had made a name for himself as the Republican Party's budget expert. He was a gray, pragmatic fiscal and social conservative who opposed abortion, gun control and same-sex marriage and supported school vouchers, tax cuts and mandatory three-strikes sentencing. He was no bleeding heart, no cause-pleader. But Clare's troubles led Pete and Nancy Domenici into what, 18 years ago, seemed almost like a secret world inhabited by all those whose lives had been touched and ineluctably changed by mental illness. ''And once I got into it, I wouldn't have gotten out of it even if somehow Clare would have come out of my mind,'' Domenici said. ''You get into the world of these dread diseases -- you hear stories -- they're terrible from the standpoint of what's happening to these people and what's happening to their families. Society was just ignoring them, denying them resources.''

It is strange to think that government works that way, that the fact that a senior senator has a mentally ill daughter can spur governmental action on mental illness. Yet on many issues, politics really is that personal and lawmaking that arbitrary. ''You'd be surprised how often legislation is directly informed by our lives,'' Lynn N. Rivers, a Democratic member of the House from Michigan, says. ''In the field of mental health, I think it's possible that nothing at all would have been done by Congress if it weren't for legislators like Domenici who were galvanized by personal experience.'' Rivers herself has had very direct personal experience; she is a manic-depressive. At a committee hearing this spring, after a couple of witnesses suggested that mental illnesses were not really illnesses, she snapped open her purse and extracted an amber vial -- the pills that keep her healthy -- and shook it like a maraca as if to wake them up.

Over a decade ago, when Domenici embraced the issue, mental illness was not on the national agenda. Americans didn't like to think about it. Even now, although the subject has come out of the shadows and Prozac is in many an American medicine cabinet, Americans remain skeptical and judgmental. Domenici knew that he was growing impassioned about an issue that many of his colleagues would consider marginal, even distasteful, and that he needed colleagues who had been shaken personally, too. He ended up joining forces with a quite liberal Democratic senator, Paul Wellstone, whose older brother had grappled with severe mental illness for many years. Together the ''odd couple,'' in Wellstone's words, nurtured bipartisan alliances with former Senator Alan Simpson, whose niece committed suicide, and Senator Harry Reid, whose father killed himself, and Tipper Gore, who has suffered depression, and Representative Marge Roukema, whose husband is a psychiatrist, and Representative Patrick Kennedy, who has also battled depression, and Senator Edward Kennedy, Patrick's influential father, and Rivers. ''There has been a personal, crystallizing experience in each of our lives,'' Wellstone says. ''You almost wish it didn't have to work that way, that all of us would care deeply anyway about people who were vulnerable and not getting the care they need. But this kind of thing happens a lot in politics for fully human reasons.''

y daughter Clare, and it's spelled c-l-a-r-e, she's my fourth child of eight,'' Senator Pete V. Domenici began reluctantly, his voice soft and gravelly. ''Clare was a beautiful, beautiful girl. Now she's all grown up, and she's, well, she's struggling. Struggle is a good word for it.''

For 10 long years, Domenici and Wellstone have focused their energies on a law that would force health insurers to treat mental and physical illnesses with full parity. They consider it civil rights legislation, but insurers and employers -- potent lobby groups who view it as a costly and unnecessary new mandate -- have largely succeeded in blocking it. Suddenly this year, however, the two senators feel tantalizingly close to achieving what once seemed a nearly impossible goal. It is odd timing, given the political preoccupation with terrorism, corporate misconduct and Iraq. But perhaps, after ''A Beautiful Mind'' won its Academy Awards, this was destined to be the year when the mentally ill received their due. Or perhaps it is simply because Pete Domenici has a friend in the White House, and his friend owed him one, and that's the way the chit system known as government works.

When we talked in his office, I asked Domenici if he kept a picture of Clare in the extensive gallery of family photos behind his desk. ''Sure,'' he said. Then he peered over the top of his glasses and rooted around. ''Hmmm,'' he said. ''Well. Hmmm. Well. I guess I don't have her here, and I'll have to fix that.'' He handed me a faded family portrait that looked to be from the 1970's. ''That's her right there,'' he said, pointing to a wan girl with a faraway gaze. ''I guess she has a little sad look in that one, doesn't she?'' He then ambled over to a display wall adorned with professional artwork from New Mexico. In one corner hung two childlike watercolors -- a vase of flowers and a cluster of sea gulls signed ''To Dad, From: Clare.'' A flicker of a smile crossed Domenici's face. ''She's not half bad,'' the senator said.

The Domenicis live in Washington, down the street from the Ashcrofts and a few blocks from the Senate in a house identifiable by the red chili peppers -- New Mexico's state vegetable -- dangling beside their front door. Clare lives by herself in an apartment in Albuquerque, with two siblings, four aunts, a boyfriend, a case manager, a job coach, a counselor and a doctor on hand to help her cope. Clare does not have hallucinations or delusions, which is why her schizophrenia is labeled atypical. Atypical schizophrenics suffer from losses -- of will and drive, of the ability to experience joy and pleasure, of cognitive functioning. Their affect tends to be flat and their thinking irrational at times.

In Clare's case, this produces debilitating anxiety. Clare's younger sister Paula Domenici, who is a psychologist, described Clare's daily life as racked by ''anguish and hell.'' Nonetheless, like many atypical schizophrenics who respond well to the new low-dose antipsychotic drugs, Clare has found a treatment regime that allows her to be quite functional when she sticks to it. She works; she drives; she sings in her church choir; she plays tennis at an Albuquerque tennis club -- and wins,'' Paula says. But Clare's condition fluctuates. Recently, she took a leave from her job sorting mail because the stresses of the mail room were getting to her. ''Any little thing can rock the boat,'' Paula says. ''She gets very hurt very easily.''

The Domenicis have grappled for years with how to balance their daughter's right to, and need for, privacy against the potential public good of talking openly about a senator's daughter's mental illness. ''We would ask ourselves, 'Will it do her harm or not?''' Domenici said. And until now, they have always erred on the side of playing it safe, since they are not people who like to talk about themselves anyway. In our first conversation, Domenici squirmed, his eye on his watch. Subsequently, though, he made the decision to surmount his discomfort because he thought it might serve his political ends. Besides, it was his wife who was the really private one.

When I first called Nancy Domenici, who is considered a lay expert on mental health by many in the field, she said: ''Gosh, why me? I'm not the most hep person on the subject of mental illness.'' Eventually, her husband persuaded her to talk. ''I didn't want to end up divorced,'' she joked. Still, because she is either protective or overprotective, she body-blocked the idea of my talking directly to Clare. She said that Clare was simply too ''wobbly'' right now.

We chatted at her kitchen counter, sipping tea from mugs with rose handles beneath a clock that chirps a different birdsong on every hour. At one point, after the finch cried noon, the phone rang, and Nancy Domenici let the answering machine pick up. ''Hi, Mom, this is Clare.'' Clare was calling in to report to her mother that she would be going to the doctor at 2 p.m. and to her ''weigh-in'' at 4. (One side effect of her medication has been a weight gain that makes Clare look matronly, and it bothers her, her parents said.) Clare's voice sounded thick around the edges, and it lingered afterward in the air between us.

In a senate coffee shop, with a cup of Starbucks by his side, Domenici doodled on his daily press clippings. ''Me/Bush,'' he wrote. He told me he had always hoped that the stars would line up as they now have, with a president in office whom Pete Domenici had helped elect. ''Here's how it worked,'' Domenici said. ''He's kind of my friend. He gets elected. I know there's one thing I really want to do above most other things. I wait a few months after he gets in, and then I request a meeting.''

In 1996, Domenici and Wellstone enjoyed their first success after four years of trying to overcome Congress's reluctance to address the problem of inequitable and inadequate insurance coverage for mentally ill Americans. Making a lot of compromises, they won approval for what Domenici now calls ''mental illness coverage lite,'' a first step. The Clinton White House helped, and especially Tipper Gore, who a few years later would disclose her own experience with depression. Newt Gingrich, then the Republican speaker of the House, didn't actively assist but, after a visit from Domenici, he didn't block the legislation either -- which mental-health advocates attribute partly to the fact that Gingrich's mother suffers from bipolar disorder... CLICK

that the fact that a senior senator has a mentally ill daughter can spur governmental action on mental illness.

Why does every broken bone, every headache, every individual ill require a "governmental action" ??? Everytime a drop of rain falls we don't need to make a law about it. I've had plenty of sad things happen to my family, but I sure as heck don't go out and make it national issue.

Lynn N. Rivers, a Democratic member of the House from Michigan, says. ''In the field of mental health, I think it's possible that nothing at all would have been done by Congress if it weren't for legislators like Domenici who were galvanized by personal experience.'' Rivers herself has had very direct personal experience; she is a manic-depressive. At a committee hearing this spring, after a couple of witnesses suggested that mental illnesses were not really illnesses, she snapped open her purse and extracted an amber vial -- the pills that keep her healthy -- and shook it like a maraca as if to wake them up.

How many other Democrat politicians are mental patients on drugs????

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