It's early morning at Jimmy's restaurant, a cacophony of clinking plates and shouts for coffee. The talk turns to the nation's capital, and Calvert Lamke's mood turns sour.
"There's got to be some changes in Washington," grumbles the 69-year-old Foster Avenue resident, perched on a counter stool waiting for his ham and eggs. "What we got in there ain't so good."
Congress is out of touch. The economy's in a shambles. Average voters are forgotten, says Mr. Lamke and other diners, mostly working-class people angry and bewildered by America's decline.
The door swings open. In strolls a member of Congress, right here in Fells Point.
Mr. Lamke swivels around. "Hi, Barb," he says cheerily to the junior senator from Maryland, as Barbara A. Mikulski greets him and winds her way through the room, with an outstretched hand and a ready name. "Oh, Barb, she's a friend of mine," he confides, turning back.
And you'll vote for her? "Oh yeah," Mr. Lamke says without hesitation, a response echoed by others in this anti-incumbent crowd. "She does a lot of fighting for the elderly people, fighting for the veterans. I've known her since she was a kid. She's got a good reputation."
In this turbulent political year, replete with record-breaking congressional departures and a voter mood bordering on torch-bearing insurrection, Ms. Mikulski's re-election effort appears to be as calm as the misty harbor waters off Thames Street.
A Mason-Dixon poll of 815 registered voters taken in early June found that 61 percent would back her re-election, up from 53 percent in February.
Her GOP opponent, Alan L. Keyes, was the choice of 28 percent of those polled in June, down from 36 percent in February.
Del Ali, Mason Dixon's vice president, expects Ms. Mikulski to win easily in November, calling it "the safest Senate seat in the country."
Yet, behind her support is a glaring irony: While voters clamor for spending cuts, Ms. Mikulski is an old-fashioned, big spending liberal. She flatly says that the federal budget has been trimmed enough.
The senator is aided by the voters' own ambivalence toward the federal budget.
They decry federal spending -- but not the millions spent for their favored programs and projects.
"It's infrastructure improvement if it affects me," explained one Capitol Hill aide. "It's pork barrel if it affects you."
