It is time, sooner than they would have wished, to say hail and farewell to some of the larger figures in political life swept out by last week's GOP tsunami. House Speaker Tom Foley will no longer sit in the background as the president addresses Congress. Dan Rostenkowski won't be on hand to grandly orchestrate a tax bill. Neither Mario Cuomo nor Ann Richards is likely to ever again electrify a Democratic convention as they did with keynote speeches in the '80s. Taking new places are Republicans who made names outside politics. Oklahoma's delegation, 4 to 2 Democratic in 1992, will be 5 to 1 GOP, with enough football talent for a forward pass: Ex-Sooners quarterback J.C. Watts could lob one to Steve Largent, the NFL's most prolific receiver. Fred Thompson, one of Tennessee's two new Republican senators-elect, first faced the cameras as Howard Baker's counsel in the Watergate hearings. He's better known now as an actor in 17 movies, including a stint as an admiral in The Hunt for Red October. He switched roles in the campaign, wearing jeans and work shirts and crisscrossing the state in a red pickup truck, but he says he renewed the lease on his Lincoln Town Car.
And there's Sonny Bono, whose "I Got You Babe" catapulted him and his wife Cher to the top of the charts in 1965. After their divorce, Cher's career zoomed up and Sonny's down, but Bono got himself elected mayor of Palm Springs, Calif., and, after an inauspicious race for the Senate in 1992, was elected to the House. The improbability of it all struck even him: "The last thing in the world I thought I would be is a U.S. congressman, given all the bobcat vests and eskimo boots I used to wear." Only in America.
