As Republicans take over the Senate Tuesday, the new dynamic in Congress is best described as two clocks ticking at once.

President Barack Obama is a lame-duck president with just two years left in the White House. But the incoming Senate chairs are no spring chickens either and can’t escape thinking about their own legacy as legislators fast approaching or already past their 80th birthdays.


Many have wielded the gavel before: veteran chairmen who remember how the Senate used to function and determined now to leave their mark in the time afforded to them.

But this very real human ambition is up against what’s also a very real animus toward Obama among the GOP’s heavily white voter base back home.

Indeed, history can’t ignore the fact that the nation’s first black president will be matched against a Senate so dominated by Southern Republicans who rely so much on white votes to get to Washington.

Party loyalties, the South’s historic conservatism, the slow economic recovery are all factors in this divide — quite apart from race. But the concentration of power and hostility toward the president is real and complicates not just Obama’s life but that of the Republican committee chairs coming to power in the Senate.

Must these chairs wait for the president to leave and sacrifice accomplishments in this Congress? Or can they jump into these waters while they still have time in their own lives to get things done — even if it means getting his signature?

It’s a contest that will be central to what is — or is not — accomplished in the next two years.

To explore this dynamic more closely, POLITICO compared the new crop of chairs with those from another Republican takeover a generation ago in the 97th Congress — after Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1980 ended decades of Democratic power in the Senate.

The focus was on the top 14 chairmanships: Budget plus the Senate’s 13 most-coveted “A” committees, which are responsible for generating much of the legislation before the chamber.

Altogether, Southern Republicans held just three of these posts back in 1981. Republicans from the West and Great Plains, men often with roots in the Depression and a history of federal involvement with land and water issues, dominated with eight. The average age of all the new top chairs was just under 60.

Today, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) adds a fresh female face as the new chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But her native West has ceded immense ground to the South, which will command six major committees as well as the top two Republican leadership posts in the new Senate.

Just as striking, the average age for the top committee chairs has jumped to over 70, almost 12 years or two Senate terms older than in 1981. In fact, six of the incoming Republican chairmen are at least 80 years old already or will have their 80th birthday in the course of this 114th Congress.

None of this is to suggest they are all about to collapse. “Don’t forget I get up and run three miles four times a week,” says the 81-year-old Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). But their age is a human element that can’t be dismissed.

Consider the case of Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the incoming chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. A former governor and secretary of education at the federal level, he brings impressive credentials, and in November, won reelection ensuring him six more years in the Senate.

That said, life’s markers are also there. Just last July, Alexander delivered the eulogy for Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), who had been Alexander’s mentor coming up in politics. Already 74, the new chairman will be 80 before this Senate term runs out.

“Howard Baker knew how to make the Senate work. He understood that the Senate’s unique role is as a place for extended debate and amendment on important issues until there is a consensus,” Alexander said in his eulogy. Six months later, he’s rushing to seize his chance.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has opted to go back onto the HELP panel for this Congress, said she was surprised when Alexander called on her — even before she could go to see him.

“He is in my judgment a legislative powerhouse,” Collins said. “He’s determined to have accomplishments come under or as a result of his chairmanship. I had planned to go visit him, but before I could do so he had called and came over and visited with me to find out what my particular interests were and to offer me the ability to lead on bills that I’m particularly interested in … I very much expect the HELP committee will be enormously productive under his leadership.”

First on Alexander’s list is tackling the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — a battle which will require him to find compromises not just on school testing but civil rights issues important to Obama.

Top Row: Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), left, chaired the Agriculture Committee when he was 58, and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), right, will chair the same committee at age 78. Botton row: Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), left, oversaw the Finance Committee when he was 57 in the 97th Congress, but in the 114th Congress, the 80-year-old Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), right, will run the committee.

“This is not veto bait. This is a legitimate effort,” said one Democratic leadership aide of Alexander’s early efforts to reach across the aisle. And reforms in the Food and Drug Administration are expected to be a second part of Alexander’s committee agenda.

For other chairs, the same hunger for enacting legislation — signed by the president — is there. The trick is to find issues that are not so “about Obama” that supporters at home can accept compromise.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) led the HELP committee in 1981, when he was just 46 — a virtual youngster. This week, at 80, he takes over the powerful Senate Finance Committee where the pent-up agenda includes three potential areas of compromise: trade, business tax reform, and finding some revenues to end the shortfall in highway and transportation funding.

Grassley, who previously led Finance and is now the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of the 16 GOP freshmen whose election in 1980 allowed Republicans to take over then.

In the new Congress, he’s been handed a political hot potato right off: the nomination of Loretta Lynch, a federal prosecutor from New York, to succeed Attorney General Eric Holder. But Grassley is also looking for chances to advance a bipartisan agenda with issues like prison reform or long-delayed patent legislation.

Up until now, the Iowa Republican has not been a major player in the patent debate. But it crosses party lines, it is a top priority for many in the business community, and it gives Grassley a chance to use his skills to broker a compromise.

“Take it a day at a time,” Grassley said of his philosophy. “There are some things that are going to have some bipartisan support and it seems to me that we ought to work on those early and see what we can get done that we can do in a bipartisan way.”

The controversy around the Lynch nomination has less to do with her record and more with the partisan fallout from Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to authorize temporary work permits for millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living for years in the U.S. under the threat of deportation.

Republicans, including Grassley, argue that the president’s executive order runs counter to the Constitution. But what the new chairman wants most is a full vetting of the issue — not obstruction of Lynch.

“We’re going to keep it going until everybody’s asked their last question,” he said. “We’re going to take whatever time it takes but we aren’t going to intentionally slow things up or anything.”

Asked if the Lynch nomination would become a partisan fight, Grassley said, “I think it has a chance of not being except for immigration. I think the president has made it very difficult for anybody he appoints in that area. There are going to be a lot of questions about that. I don’t think it is going to be a deciding factor on whether or not she is approved … but I think those are going to be the toughest questions for her.”

“Taking over the Senate this time is a little bit different from when Republicans took it over in the past,” Grassley added. But this change is less about any personal anger toward Obama, he insisted, and more about the four-year reign of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as majority leader, Grassley said.

“This is post-Sen. Reid,” he said. And from Grassley’s standpoint, Reid broke with Senate traditions set by not just Republicans like Baker but former Democratic leaders like Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, George Mitchell of Maine or Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

“He ran the Senate differently than Mitchell and Byrd and Daschle. It was a very much a deliberative body under them,” Grassley said. “So if there was anything that is going to be different starting January the 6th , it is the Senate is going to be a deliberative body. Extended debate, seldom-use of filling the amendment tree or filing cloture motions and both Republicans and Democrats offering amendments to do what the Senate is meant to do.”

But putting all the Senate’s troubles at Reid’s doorstep ignores the GOP’s own history.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the incoming majority leader, talks now of having to teach younger Republican senators how to vote for the annual spending bills needed to fund the government. But time and again in recent years, it was McConnell who pulled the rug out from under his old colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee. And his often hostile relationship with Obama plays to white voters at home in the South.

Can this change with the new Congress?

McConnell can’t seem to resist continued jabs at Obama. But he himself turns 73 next month and shares many of the same impulses as his aging chairs. And as leader, McConnell has vowed to revive the Senate as an institution and deliver the floor time needed for those like Alexander who have promised their committees a full and open debate.

Much depends too on Obama. He can be painfully distant from Congress and there’s always been an uncomfortable element of class as well as race at work here. Too often, critics say, Obama plays the Harvard-trained, Chicago sophisticate, treating Republican leaders as if they were the same backwater, southern Illinois pols Obama remembers from his days in Springfield and the state Legislature.

Real life is rarely as simple too as a black and white picture.

Given all the focus on Southern white votes, it was actually Democratic black voters who helped to save one chairman: Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who only narrowly won his GOP primary with this black support and will again lead the Appropriations Committee.

In November, Tim Scott (R-S.C.) also made history when he won his special election to become the first elected black senator from the South in more than a century

But a useful benchmark is survey data collected by The Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll about Obama’s job approval ratings and how he fares with white registered voters generally and then specifically from the 13 states of the South.

The poll is a well-respected, long-standing survey by a bipartisan team: Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies. And this allows some comparisons with Bill Clinton’s experience as a white Southern-born Democrat vs. Obama.

The numbers show that Obama has had to struggle to win white approval generally but his ratings consistently run at the low end of the spectrum among whites in the South. Clinton experienced some of the same drop-off in support among Southern whites, but the pattern is more pronounced with Obama. And even in the midst of impeachment in December 1998, Clinton had a job approval rating among Southern whites that was 20 points higher than Obama’s last month.

In Obama’s case, a WSJ-NBC survey in December showed the president with a job approval rating of 45 percent nationally. But when the numbers are broken down, this fell to 37 percent among all white voters in the survey and 32 percent among white voters in the South — a total drop of 13 points.

In December 2013, another WSJ-NBC poll showed Obama with a job approval rating of 43 percent nationally. That fell to 35 percent among whites in the survey and 27 percent among whites surveyed in the South — a total drop of 16 points.

Among four WSJ-NBC polls over the past year, Obama’s job rating among Southern white voters was 6 points below that of all whites and 14 points below all voters generally.

Clinton’s experience shows this is a larger Democratic problem in the South. But Clinton’s national approval numbers were far higher than Obama’s at this point in his second term, and the cost of losing Southern whites had less impact on his ability to govern.

In October 1998, for example, a WSJ-NBC poll gave Clinton a 68 percent approval rating nationally. That fell to 64 among all white voters in the survey and then 59 percent among white voters in the South — a drop of 9 points or a 14 percent discount, so to speak.

As House Republicans moved to impeach Clinton that same year, he was hurt among Southern whites, but on balance, he proved remarkably resilient and never fell close to the level now facing Obama.

For example, in December 1998, even as the House was voting on impeachment, Clinton had a 65 percent job approval rating in the WSJ-NBC poll. That fell to 60 percent among all whites in the survey and then down to 52 percent among whites in the South — a 13-point drop or 20 percent discount when measured against Clinton’s national numbers.

This poll data are useful too because this stage of Clinton’s presidency corresponded with Obama’s today.

Clinton was beginning his last two years with a 55-vote Senate Republican majority in January 1999 just as Obama faces an almost equivalent 54-vote GOP majority in the Senate which convenes Tuesday. In each case, tensions were real: Clinton faced an almost immediate impeachment trial in the Senate. Obama is being accused of violating the Constitution by his use of executive authority in the immigration debate.

But Clinton’s 52 percent approval rating among Southern whites at the end of 1998 surely helped him survive the storm. Moreover in the 106th Congress, just a third of the 55 Republicans hailed from the South.

For Obama, the numbers are tougher on both counts. It adds up to a big test for the president — and the new Senate chairs eager to move ahead. The clocks are ticking for both of them.