When Incumbency Fails: The Senate Career of Mark Andrews.

• Author: Baker, Ross K.

When Incumbency Fails: The Senate Career of Mark Andrews. Richard E Fenno Jr. Congressional Quarterly, $29.95 hardback, $19.95 paper. The great political scientist Harold Laswell once observed that "political science without biography is a form of taxidermy." When Incumbency Fails, then, is political science without stuffed animals. The fact that one of the country's leading academic political sciemists has produced such a work gives hope that the discipline is not simply a museum of dusty correlation coefficients tended by a staff of credentialed curators.

Fenno has always been something of a wonder in political science circles. He wins praise from other political scientists for his scrupulous methods and attention to theoretically important questions but his books also receive accolades from practitioners for their descriptions of politics and politicians as more than abstractions or numerical aggregates. Few people can produce political analyses that both sparkle with the brilliance of first-class scholarly investigation and resonate with the solid thunk of the real world the way Fenno can.

When Incumbency Fails is an engrossing political biography of North Dakota Republican Mark Andrews, an eight-term House member who won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1980 and lost it to Democrat Kent Conrad in 1986. (That seat, by the way, is now open due to Conrad's decision to keep his promise to voters to retire after one term if the deficit was still raging out of control.) But Conrad gets little of Fermo's attention, because what really concerns him is how Andrews adjusted--or, more accurately, failed to adjust--to the job of U.S. senator.

Roughly one third of the Senate at any given time consists of former members of the House. Movement from the House to the Senate has been the normal progression for the ambitious legislator in recent decades. Some pols desire the enormous political opportunity the Senate offers--the chance to occupy one of 100 bully pulpits from which to stake out positions on issues of national concern. Like House alumni AI Gore and Phil Gramm, they understand immediately the potential for agendasetting and policy leadership the Senate offers. Others--according to Fenno, Mark Andrews was one of them--look upon the job of senator as a slightly sublimated version of House member.

For the half dozen or so House members who successfully make the leap to the Senate each election year, When Incumbency Fails is required reading. It...