The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?

WHEN HE WASN'T IN WASHINGTON, Van Hileary was traveling the length and breadth of Tennessee's Fourth District asking for votes, just as he had done two years earlier. But this time he wasn't the revolutionary outsider riding a wave of voter anger and anti-Clinton feeling. Now he was the congressman asking to be sent back to Washington. He was part of the system. And he could only hope that impatient voters wouldn't throw him out of office either for not changing enough or for going farther than they had wanted.

It was kind of hard to tell what people thought. They certainly weren't as angry as they had been in 1994. As he went around the district talking to voters, Hileary got the impression they were pretty satisfied with the job he had done representing them.

He was definitely too conservative for some people. But his pleasant, nonconfrontational, aw-shucks demeanor made him seem less dogmatic than he actually was. And after two years he figured he had permanently won over some conservative Democrats who voted for him in 1994 as a protest. This time around they would be voting for him because they knew him and liked him.

Even though he had won by more than 20,000 votes in 1994, the labor unions had targeted his district for ads, which had been running for months. Because he felt he had to counter the labor spending, Hileary was doing more fund-raising than he might otherwise have done.

Hileary's Democratic opponent was Mark Stewart, a 36-year-old lawyer from Winchester in Franklin County, one of the most Democratic counties in the Fourth District. The red-haired, freckle-faced Stewart had served as an assistant district attorney

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