Paul Simon

Decent Democrat who ran for President in 1988

Paul Simon, politician and educator: born Eugene, Oregon 29 November 1928; US Congressman for Illinois 1975-85; US Senator 1985-97; married 1960 Jeanne Hurley (died 2000; one son, one daughter), 2001 Patricia Derge; died Springfield, Illinois 9 December 2003.

A catalogue of American oddities would record Paul Simon as the country's youngest-ever newspaper proprietor - a tender 19-year-old when he dropped out of college in 1948 and borrowed the princely sum of $3,600 to buy a weekly paper in Troy, just across the Mississippi from St Louis.

But he will be best remembered for his 22 years in Washington as a Democratic legislator representing his adopted state of Illinois, 10 of them as a congressman and a dozen as senator, with a quixotic run for the presidency in 1988 thrown in for good measure. He was by common consent one of the most decent, honest, and nicest men on Capitol Hill.

With his trademark bow tie and slightly rumpled college professor's air, Simon occasionally came across as a mite pompous. In reality nothing was further from the truth. He treated office interns and mighty committee chairmen in the same way. For him, the ordinary person - the voter - came first.

As a senator, he blended social liberalism with fiscal conservatism. It was the formula now embraced by the outsider-turned-frontrunner Howard Dean, whose quest for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was endorsed by Simon shortly before his death.

Simon believed in an activist role for government - but one paid for out of taxes, not by borrowing against the future. "To be a liberal doesn't mean you're a wastrel," he liked to remark. For years, as massive federal deficits swirled around him, he was one of Capitol Hill's most impassioned champions of a balanced-budget amendment.

With his crusade against corruption that began in his newspaper-publishing days, and his partially successful campaign to reduce violence on television, some were tempted to see him as a pious do-gooder. If so, then Simon was proud of the label. Since his days as an Illinois state legislator in the 1950s, he had been disclosing his personal finances. So straitlaced was his image that in Springfield, the state's capital, that he earned the nickname "Reverend".

But, as Simon learnt in 1988, these qualities did not translate into a presidential campaign. He performed respectably in the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, but made no impression in the South. His lone primary success came in his home state, when it was too late to matter.

If that was his greatest setback, his greatest political victory came in 1984 when, in the year of Ronald Reagan's presidential landslide, Simon defied national trends to topple the blue-blooded Republican incumbent Charles Percy, a three-term Senate veteran and chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee.

Casting his opponent as a personal beneficiary of the Reagan tax cuts, and as "the candidate of country clubs and boardrooms", he fashioned an upset 50-48 victory. Simon retired from Congress after two terms, typically declaring that it was his duty "to leave the Senate while I am still eager to serve, not tired of serving".

Simon was born in Oregon, the son of a Lutheran missionary who had returned from work in China. In 1946 the family moved to Illinois, where his publishing career began. The Troy paper was the first of a local chain of weeklies that had grown to 16 before Simon sold them in 1966.

Two years later he was elected Illinois's Lieutenant-Governor, but failed in a bid for Governor in 1972. Briefly, Simon devoted himself to his second life in academe, lecturing at Illinois universities. After his Washington career, he returned to that existence, writing books, and starting a public-policy institute at Southern Illinois University.

Rupert Cornwell