THE LISTENER.(J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives)(Interview)(Biography)

In July, at the Petunia Festival Parade in Dixon, Illinois, on a street near Ronald Reagan's boyhood home, which is now a lovingly groomed national historic site, a parade-goer named John S. Allen threw a water balloon at an antique fire engine that a big white-haired guy was driving. The balloon hit the truck, not the big white-haired guy, and it's a safe bet that Allen, who was carrying marijuana and may have been a little clouded in his judgment, was surprised to find himself swarmed both by Dixon police and by plainclothes security men with wires in their ears. The day after the parade, in Lee County Circuit Court, Allen was charged with one count of aggravated battery--a felony--for attacking J. Dennis Hastert on a public street. The presiding judge asked Allen if he was acquainted with the name J. Dennis Hastert. Allen said he wasn't. "J. Dennis Hastert is the Speaker of the House of Representatives," the judge said. "He is third in line to the Presidency of the United States. You won't forget it next time, will you?"

"I had no idea who he was," Allen said to the judge. "It was just a water balloon."

It's hard not to feel sorry for Allen. J. Dennis Hastert, whose official biography lists "carving and painting duck decoys" as one of his hobbies, and whose most memorable quote on record is "I'm not saying I'm a humble person; I wouldn't blow my own horn on humility," is still sometimes referred to as the Accidental Speaker. Nearly half of the American electorate has never heard of him. You're most likely to have seen his beefy, squinting face partially cropped out of a picture of somebody more famous--George Bush on the House dais, say, looking surprised by the words of his own State of the Union address. If you've ever found yourself watching Hastert on TV, you've probably reached for the channel flipper. He speaks in a sticky downstate-Illinois monotone heavily punctuated with the phrase "you know," which, half swallowed, comes out as "yeah-oh." When he's under stress, he narrows his eyes so tightly that his pupils are barely visible.

Hastert's public persona, to the extent that he has one, is the Coach. He was a star wrestler in high school and college, and from 1964 to 1980 he coached wrestling and football and taught government and economics at Yorkville High School, in Yorkville, Illinois. Even before Reagan made "government" a dirty word, politicians lucky enough to have nonpolitical pasts were at pains to talk about them. In his fund-raising speeches nowadays, Hastert likes to tell how he visited a high-school principal to see if he might want the job himself. Outside the principal's office were half a dozen chairs that were filled with problematic students in the morning and with problematic teachers during lunch hour; the job consisted of listening to complaints all day. "I couldn't see myself doing that," Hastert says. "So I decided to be a state legislator." Later in the speech, he describes the Speaker's office in the Capitol. "It has a great big chandelier in it," he says. "Yeah-oh, I was a high-school wrestling coach. I never thought I'd have an office with a chandelier. But things have a way of coming full circle. Because right outside my office now there are seven or eight chairs. And they're full every day." He pauses for laughter. "They call me the Speaker, but, yeah-oh, they really ought to call me the Listener."

Because Hastert cultivates a low profile, and because he very rarely gives the media an entertaining quote, and because most Democrats on the Hill like him personally and prefer to attack the House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, there's a widespread perception in Washington that DeLay is the real power in the House and that Hastert is, to put it charitably, his facilitator; uncharitably, his puppet. This view is disputed by the Illinois Democrats, who like the Speaker personally and depend on his support at home, and by most prominent Republicans, who like the Speaker personally and wouldn't want anyone to think that such a central player on their team isn't valuable.

"You're always better off to be underestimated," Nicholas Calio, President Bush's former congressional liaison, said of Hastert. "It's the same thing the Democrats do with Bush. They think he's dumb, dumb, dumb, and yet they keep getting beaten by him." Newt Gingrich, Hastert's predecessor, who described the Speaker as "an order of magnitude" more powerful than DeLay, offered this comparison: "I was the relentless, entrepreneurial, idea-oriented disrupter of the old order, and he is the organizer, codifier, and maintainer of the new order." When Gingrich assumed the Speakership, in 1995, the Republicans had a twenty-six-seat majority in the House; by the time he left, in 1998, the majority was down to twelve. Under Hastert, who was elected in part because he is so unlike Gingrich, the House Republicans have maintained their majority; their national approval rating, which had fallen to twenty-six per cent when Gingrich stepped down, has since climbed to past fifty per cent. "He's the reason we're still in the majority," Susan Hirschmann, DeLay's former chief of staff, said. "He is the glue."

Although Hastert is unfailingly courteous in his public remarks about Democrats, the House that he presides over is an increasingly angry and polarized place. Moderate Republicans are angry because the party leadership and agenda are so hard-line conservative; hard-line conservatives are angry because, to them, even small compromises feel like defeats; and House Democrats are angry because they feel excluded from the legislative process altogether. "Hastert has personal qualities and legislative skills that are good and healthy," Representative David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said, "but he's chosen to downgrade those. He's determined to win at whatever cost to the institution. In many ways, the greatest deliberative body in the world now more closely resembles the old Soviet congresses: stamp-of-approval and ratify, rather than use your own judgment."