Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
David Ross Obey
Wausau-raised Democrat; U.S. House 7th District 1969–2011; House Appropriations chairman; memoir Raising Hell for Justice
$214,503
David Ross Obey was the Wausau Democrat who held Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District for forty-two years and ran House Appropriations when the chamber's money bills still defined a career. Born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, on October 3, 1938, he moved back to Wausau with his family in 1941, graduated from Wausau East, saved money at the UW Marathon County campus, worked as a busboy at Rennebohm's on State Street, laid tile for a landlord, and earned a political-science degree and a Soviet-politics master's at Madison. As a kid he delivered Joe McCarthy literature, then watched McCarthy people brand one of his teachers a communist and walked; La Follette progressivism made more sense. Identified as a Republican into his teens, he joined the Young Democrats on a professor's advice and won a hometown Assembly race that cost $1,100 by about 1,100 votes. When Melvin Laird left Congress for Nixon's Pentagon, Obey won the 1969 special election at age thirty, the youngest member of the House and the first Democrat in that seat in the century. He stayed until 2011: ethics-code chair, Labor appropriations workhorse, and House Appropriations chairman briefly in 1994–95 and again from 2007 to 2011. He swung the same gavel that had passed Medicare in 1965 to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010. His closest later scare came in 1972, when redistricting paired him with fifteen-term Republican Alvin O'Konski; Obey kept about sixty percent of his old territory. He could be cranky on the floor and fiercely protective of the northwoods district that includes Wausau. He retired rather than become a mascot, lobbied for a time afterward, and the health-sciences building at Northcentral Technical College wears his name. Sean Duffy succeeded him in the seat. He married Joan in 1962; she died in 2023; they had two children. His 2008 memoir is Raising Hell for Justice. The childhood is Wausau, and the accent never left.