Commentary on Tom Harkin – The Upside and the Downside

Recently, Odyssey magazine, which is put out by the Clerc Center at Gallaudet University, featured an article explaining how Senator Tom Harkin met with students attending the 24th biennial Jr. National Association of the Deaf (NAD) conference. In the article Harkin is quoted as saying that his brother Frank once told him that he was tired of people telling him what to do because he was deaf. Harkin said that Frank once said: "I want to decide for myself."

While Tom Harkin has done a lot of good work over the years, and has even (laudably) been called a "radical" by some, the supposed quote from Frank strikes us as being apocryphal and created by Tom for pragmatic purposes. Granted, the general public often seems to give politicians some leeway in their use of rhetoric to make a point, but on this particular topic it should be pointed out that leeway cannot be given, because the point of the supposed quote would be contradicted by Harkin's intention. In fact, Harkin had a TV ad put together for his 1990 senate run, which he reused for his 1992 presidential run, that showed him conversing with Frank in sign. It was said to be the first-ever political campaign ad featuring a Deaf person signing. In the video, Frank makes a statement that tends to contradict Harkin's current claim.

Harkin has frequently touted the ADA as being his best accomplishment in Congress. Though the underlying premise is flawed as it pertains to social relations between Deaf and hearing people, it must be admitted that many of us have needed to resort to relying on it in lieu of more properly constructed civil rights protections, which have historically been lacking, and so it functions effectively now, in the present, as a stopgap measure. Before that, in 1983, Harkin pushed for more closed captioning on television when he was a member of the US House of Representatives.

We could go through a lengthy list of accomplishments which range over a wide variety of issues that merit praise. Surprisingly, Harkin was also able to accomplish much from 1991 onwards, despite the fact that his political point man on disability issues was (by our estimation, after careful study) a closet-conservative. Harkin even demonstrated a certain amount of heroism during a trip to Chile in 1976 as a participant in a delegation where he was forced out of a building once at gunpoint by Pinochet's soldiers who were trying to cover up illegal detentions and torturing that were occurring there.

Harkin has announced his retirement from the US Senate, and so his term will expire either at the end of this year, or in January. We wish Tom Harkin well, though we are keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that he will not go to the dark side to become a lobbyist for the cochlear implant industry. He hasn't tried hard to conceal the fact that he has been working to find money to fund an army of stenographers to provide CART services for mainstream students, as well as working to find the legal means to force local schools to provide such services. At the end of the day, though, the decision will be up to those students and their parents as to what kinds of schools they attend (mainstream or residential), if we are to believe the substance of the (most likely apocryphal) quote from Frank.