WASHINGTON — It’s the dawn of a new era in our nation’s capital. With a new president, a Congress with a strengthened Democratic majority combined with the rising tide of populism throughout America, Rep. Jo Bonner faces a lot different challenges than he did when he first arrived on the scene in January 2003.

Despite being a former press secretary for his predecessor Sonny Callahan, Bonner has flown under the national media radar and hasn’t actively sought attention. And although he has had his critics over the last six months, he still remains politically invulnerable to challengers while rising up through the ranks of the House GOP leadership.

Last week he sat down with Lagniappe to talk about his role in a different federal government, opting out of the 2010 governor’s race, the elusive KC-X tanker contract and progress made in Iraq and Afghanistan.

L: How has Washington changed since you first arrived in 2002?

Bonner: It was more fun being in the majority. It bears tremendous responsibility being in the majority and I think our friends on the other side of the aisle are realizing this. And it’s especially challenging when you have the president and the Congress of one party. And so, while President Obama is still on his honeymoon and is still enjoying personal high-popularity ratings — and understandably so, he’s a charismatic individual — the policies that are being promoted are not as popular.

And there was this stimulus package that was the biggest expansion of government. There are so many different analogies. The actual dollar amount represents the same amount of money that’s in the United States of America today. In one fell swoop, we appropriated with interest, $1.13 trillion, with very little input from representatives that represent almost half of the American people.

We have seen just in the first few weeks of the new administration and the new Congress a real full-frontal assault on free-market economy, on a belief going back to Reagan that big government is not the solution. Big government is back. Even though President Clinton pronounced it dead when he was in office, it’s back with a vengeance.

L: Despite the wishes of many of your constituents, you voted for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) — the banking bailout last fall. Can you talk about your thought process when you made the decision to do so?

Bonner: If it had strictly been a vote of conscience, or conviction, or a reflection of the phone calls and letters that were coming into my office, I would have voted no. That was a much easier vote and it was certainly made easier because Sen. [Jeff] Sessions and Sen. [Richard] Shelby both voted no, and they were very visible out there attacking it.

But, there are times usually that deal with a national emergency such as national security matters that an elected representative or an elected senator has the opportunity to be briefed on matters that may not be in the public domain.

The House voted for it the first time and it failed. The Senate resurrected it, passed it. And I believe if it failed in the House a second time, and I can never prove this — I was convinced that many of my conservative colleagues were convinced, and if you look at the people that voted for that ugly thing, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, John Campbell, Gresham Barrett — some of the most conservative members of Congress did as I did and held their nose to vote for it, not because we wanted the end result, but what we didn’t want to happen was the financial system of our country and subsequently the financial system of the world to collapse.

And when the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is the foremost expert on the Great Depression — has written books, has been quoted countless times about what led up to the Great Depression and what perhaps could have been done different at the time, looking backwards, to have kept us from going into a Great Depression — when the Treasury Secretary, the President of the United States, when your own nominee of the party — when all of that converges.

Again, the easier vote and the vote my heart would have had me to vote would have been to vote no. But I couldn’t go to sleep at night. I’ll take you back — we had the young man who was the chairman of the President’s Joint Council of Economic Advisers come to see us — there were 10 of us meeting with him — I’m not lying when I tell you he had tears in his eyes as he was begging us to vote for something that he said the president and he and others did not want to have to ask us to do.

But he said within 10 days, Washington Mutual is going to fail. Within a week, Wachovia will go down. And he said, even if you pass this, and this Paulson I (bailout), that ugly, ugly monster that was three pages that basically gave them a blank check, which we insisted wouldn’t pass muster, but he said, within three to four weeks, another 200-300 banks could fail, even if you pass it. And, we don’t live in a time where we can always have the benefit of hindsight, but that was on a Tuesday. By Friday, Washington Mutual had failed.

I don’t know anything about Washington Mutual. We don’t have a Washington Mutual in Mobile. Certainly don’t have one in Chatom. But, Wachovia was SouthTrust and within three days, not two weeks, Wachovia had gone down. I don’t own stock in Wachovia, but that bank when it was SouthTrust — a year before the stock was $45 a share. At the time it was going under, it was 75 cents a share.

I had heard from too many people who were expressing concern the ship might actually sink, so the vast majority of the calls were against it, but I called the lion’s share of the bank presidents in my district. I talked with 35-50 business leaders in my district and the more people I talked with said the credit market was frozen and what I feared was I thought we were almost living in a cocoon of disbelief. I would fly home and I would drive by Wintzell’s and it was full. People were eating, people were out shopping.

But, they were doing it because at the time, they could still put their plastic into ATM machines and still get money out. And I feared that if the financial system of this country collapsed and subsequently those of Europe and Asia and we had a run on the banks like we had in the 1930s, that you would have total panic, total chaos a few weeks before an election and I feared the worst.

As things have passed now – I voted against TARP II, I voted against the stimulus, against the omnibus. I’m going to be voting against a lot more expansions of big government and attacks on the free-market system.

L: Now as thing have progressed since October, do you regret the vote?

Bonner: The worst fears of TARP have come true. I think [then-Treasury Secretary Hank] Paulson in hindsight – I though at the time he was a terrible communicator, but in hindsight I think Paulson did the country a disservice. I don’t think he intentionally misrepresented the facts, I just think when that when we voted on TARP, it was to go to help troubled assets. They scrapped that a few days into it and went full guns blaring into a totally different path.

So sure, if you had it to do over again, and I knew what I know today, absolutely.

I will also say the worst did not happen. I can never prove that the fact we passed it helped keep the worst from happening as of today, it hasn’t.

L: Talk about your thoughts on the new president and a new united congressional Republican Party.

Bonner: I don’t think there’s anything that could have occurred that could have done more to unite the Republican Party and conservatives in general than having a very liberal, big government president and Congress put in power.

You know again, we were dealing with – we meaning House Republicans – the lingering effects of the culture of corruption, the campaign of 2006 that was so successful run by Rahm Emanuel to remind people why they were disenfranchised, disenchanted. They were frustrated, they were mad, they were angry at Republicans and we had given them a lot of reasons.

Throw in an unpopular president, who the media was just hounding everyday. And then throw in the financial meltdown that occurred and in many respects, the bloodbath that we took on Nov. 4 could have been a lot worse.

Having said that, I had the opportunity to sit on the front row of the presidential inaugural stand by virtue of the fact that I’m the ranking member now of the Ethics Committee and when you look out and you see literally a sea of people stretched from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial as far as the eye could see and you felt the electricity and you felt the euphoria.

I understand and I think [U.K.] Prime Minister [Gordon] Brown mentioned this in his remarks [before Congress on March 4], America sent a message to the world on Nov. 4 that few countries other than America could send – that you could take a young man, younger than I am, by his own admission, with a funny name – he said that, I didn’t, from a mixed family – who had been in federal service for fewer than four years. And then a community organizer, then a state legislator in Illinois – where else, I mean name me another country where someone who had so many challenges – didn’t have a father in his life growing up – so many challenges he could overcome, that in the span of 45 years he could put his hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and take the oath of office to be president? It sent a powerful message.

So, there’s a part of me that’s extremely proud that America once again can say to the rest of the world, if you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you have pride and dedication and say never quit, you can be a winner. The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards. I mean Barack Obama is certainly proof of that.

But, take away the personal attributes and the policies that are coming down the pike, from socialized health care to an all-out attack on the belief that we have in south Alabama that if you do all those things I just mentioned that you can be successful and you can climb the ladder of success in any area of life in America. We basically have a real convergence of the New Deal and the Great Society all wrapped in one and it’s going to be a full and sometimes bloody war trying to keep someone of those policies from being enacted, especially when our numbers are so low.

We’ve got 179 House members; the Minnesota senate race is still up in the air. You know they [the Senate] are so very close and you throw in an Arlen Specter, Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe, you know they can shut off debate and we’ll have a hard time winning the battles on the floors of Congress. Where we can win the battles is by getting the American people to open their eyes and realize the change they thought they were getting is not the change they are getting.

And a lot of the promises made by candidate Obama – it’s not our responsibility to remind him of those promises. He made a lot of promises on the campaign trail and it is up to us to respectfully – because he is the president of the United States – remind him of the promises that he made and to do it in a way to get the American people more engaged.

We can’t win a single battle legislatively. We’re not in the legislative business anymore in terms of getting bills passed. But where we can be successful is if the American people, just as they in record number went to the polls and voted, it’s now up to them to hold all of us – Republicans, Democrats, executive branch, legislative branch – accountable for the promises we make as a candidate.

L: Who is the leader of the Republican Party now, and what are the GOP’s prospects for 2010?

Bonner: I think they are golden. I think this [Limbaugh/Steele leader debate] has been an intentional diversion by [Obama Chief of Staff] Mr. [Rahm] Emanuel and his minions at the White House to divert attention so people aren’t focused on what’s going on up here and down at the White House.

And, they have found a clever way to do it by getting people to focus on whether Rush [Limbaugh] is the chairman of the Republicans or Michael Steele is the head of the Republican Party. I actually think that the Republican Party is being taken back by the people who made the party what it is. I think you’re seeing more interest, more active conversation about getting back to what we believe in and the foundation.

L: What about your decision not to run for governor in 2010? How did that decision come for you?

Bonner: Well I actually was initially was flattered by all the interest. Most of it was coming from outside of my district. It was from Huntsville, Birmingham and Dothan and I initially dismissed it until I started to think about the fact that five of the last six governors have been Republican.

In my opinion, Gov. [Bob] Riley has proven to be the New South governor that many of us wished for and worked for – for years. It took us a little bit longer to get one. Tennessee got Lamar Alexander and Caroll Campbell was South Carolina’s long before we got a Bob Riley, but boy we got the best when we got him.

I think it will be very difficult to see Alabama continue to grow and prosper and do well unless we can make sure and that we find someone who’s able to build on the Riley legacy, and so I began to I guess listen to all the calls that came in. I guess I had about 150 calls from people I probably should have been calling, asking for their encouragement or support and they were calling me unsolicited saying we want you to run.

I had people calling me saying they would take a leave of absence from their companies to help me raise the money. What I ended up doing, I spent basically the month of December going through – I put together a book of facts on what the budgets were for the state of Alabama with Fob’s second term, Siegelman’s term, the two Riley terms, the number of state employees, what it was like when we were in proration – how we dealt with that, what it was like when we were having a strong economy, and tried to better understand the general fund and the education trust fund to basically try to determine – here’s the job, here’s the job description. Do I have what it takes to be governor?

I even got down to the point to finding out how many people the governor had commuted their sentence or allowed go to their death who were on death row because that’s a decision a congressman doesn’t have to make and the governor does.

So I convinced myself going into Christmas that I probably could be a credible candidate and it was something I was seriously looking at. What talked me out of it – the short story is on Dec. 29, I took Robins Bonner, age 10 hunting. And he killed a deer. It made me realize that this job is a full-time job and I’m up here 40 of the 52 weeks Monday through Friday. And to get home on a Friday night or a Thursday night and to get in a car or an airplane and fly to Ft. Payne or Ft. Rucker or wherever else in the 67 counties, introduce myself to a million voters, try to chase $15 million, would mean that I got a full-time job as a congressman, I got a full-time job in a time when the economy is truly stressed and I got a lot of communities I represent that are going through difficult times.

I’ve got a pretty full-time job being a father and a husband to a very busy wife and the thought of trying to be a full-time candidate for governor and most importantly, going back to take Robins hunting, I couldn’t in good conscience take even more time away from the children to be a candidate.

I wasn’t going to run for governor to finish second. And I think if I had run, I would have had a decent chance at winning. But, at the end of the day, being a father is more important to me than being a candidate for public office. And I couldn’t imagine all the fishing trips, all the hunting trips, all the soccer games and track meets, and all the other things over the next year and a half that I would have to miss, or two years just for the chance to run.

And there are other good people running and so it was an easy decision. I haven’t thought about it twice since then.

L: What’s the latest on the tanker contract? Is splitting the contract between Northrop Grumman/EADS and Boeing no longer a possibility?

Bonner: Well, splitting the contract is going to be a challenge, but we’ve got a mighty strong advocate and that’s [Rep.] John Murtha. Chairman Murtha came down to Mobile and he told the people in Mobile that was basically the only way he could see us getting off stop and on the go.

And then a few weeks later in Seattle, he told the folks at Boeing the same thing. So, [Defense] Secretary Gates is opposed to it. There are many people in Washington who are opposed to it. Boeing is not excited about it. But at the end of the day, if we don’t do something to get a tanker up and going, then we’re going to have a tragedy. And when we have a tragedy and we have to ground that entire tanker fleet – 25 percent of the tankers today are not flying and they have to rob parts from them to keep them up in the air.

And, one thing we don’t talk about and the president hasn’t mentioned it very much, and he didn’t talk about it in his joint session – we are still a nation with a big target on our back. We are fighting two wars, and if you don’t have tankers, you don’t have the capability to project a strong national defense.

In my view, the dual contract, as opposed to a split – because there is a difference – I think the dual contract should be considered a viable option. I want us to build airplanes in Mobile. We know we have the plane the Air Force wants. We know we provide it at a price that was better than the competition. But if we go down another path and we win again and Boeing protests again, then it’s not inconceivable that we could be flying planes that are 80 or 90 years old by the time we retire the last tanker fleet.

L: Tell us about your trip to the White House on March 4.

Bonner: It was very generous. The president invited the chairmen and ranking members of all the major committees to the White House last night. I didn’t know at the time he’s undertaken the task of having Wednesday night socials. I learned about that afterwards.

It was nevertheless very special – probably 200 people there all total. We had dinner in the state dining room. He and the First Lady were very gracious, very down-to-earth and warm. There was not a receiving line. It was not really formal. They worked the rooms. You would have thought you were at a perhaps at an old-fashioned politically rally because he was out there shaking hands and posing for pictures.

But, it was lovely and when you consider we’re [Alabama] a small delegation, nine members, counting the two senators, it was pretty neat to see my friend [Rep.] Spence Bachus, Sen. [Richard] Shelby, so three of our nine members were there, which I don’t know many delegations that would have been so well-represented.

L: You recently made a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. What were your impressions coming away from the trip?

Bonner: This was my third trip to Iraq and you know, we are within eyesight of victory in Iraq and I truly believe if the politicians in Washington don’t mess it up, we will be able to leave there with our heads held high and a real opportunity for lasting peace and hopefully a kind of freedom.

It will be a democracy unlike ours, a country that can govern itself, that can protect itself and can become a strong ally and friend to us in a very crucial part of the world. So that was very encouraging, not to say Iraq is safe as Disney World. It certainly isn’t, but just from my previous visits I could see measured progress on some of the street we traveled down. You could actually see commerce taking place – markets with fruits, vegetables. I saw some of the biggest cauliflower I’ve ever seen. It was the size of a pumpkin.

But, we had a chance to meet with the president, President [Jalal] Talabani. We had a chance to meet with, obviously all of the American military and diplomatic leadership, Gen. [Ray] Odierno, Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker. It was [Crocker’s] last weekend on post. So I left Iraq feeling extremely upbeat about our chances of success.

It has been very important to all of us as we have seen the Iraqi war drag on longer than anyone had hoped it would. But I think it is safe to say that we have all been very concerned that we did give success the best chance.

Now Afghanistan, it was my first trip so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. But, it’s a very big challenge. And I hope that people don’t think that since the surge worked in Iraq, and it did even though there were politicians that were opposed to it, that we’re going to be able to just put – I think the president is going to put another 17,000 troops, but there’s talk the president is going to eventually put in 50,000 – I don’t think anyone should be lulled into believing just putting troops on the ground that that’s going to lead to the same positive response we got out of Iraq.

Afghanistan is the fourth poorest country in the world. Its illiteracy rate is 84-85 percent. The mean life expectancy is 45. There are tribes in Afghanistan that can’t communicate with each other. There’s one paved highway in the whole country, and it’s a country the size of Texas. So our soldiers are going to have a very challenging time in the birthplace of the Taliban.

While it was very special to get to go there and get to spend time with them – we spent the night in Kabul. I talked with people who had been at the embassy two years and never set foot off the embassy grounds. I’m not going say again Iraq is as safe strolling down the Main Street of Disney World, but Iraq by comparison to Afghanistan is a model of progress.

We must hope and pray the [president’s] decision is wise and that the success comes, but it is going to be a very challenging situation.