Senators Bill Frist and Patty Murray
Senator Bill Frist, Chair, National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee

Senator Patty Murray, Chair, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Live Webcast October 2, 2002, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT

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Patty Murray

Bill Frist

As the fall political campaigns race into their final month, control of the U.S. Senate remains up for grabs. Two people with more than a passing interest in the outcome are Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) -- the heads of their respective parties' Senatorial Campaign Committees.

Frist, a second-term senator, can trace his political lineage to the American frontier, as a direct descendant of one of the original settlers of Chattanooga. A Nashville native himself, Frist is also a Harvard educated heart surgeon who helped found the Vanderbilt Transplant Center. He's the first practicing physician elected to the Senate since 1928.

Frist, 50, serves on the Senate's Budget Committee, Foreign Relations Committee and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He and his wife Karyn have three sons.

Patty Murray is also working on her second term in the Senate after running a watershed 1992 campaign at the center of the "Year of the Woman" in U.S. politics. As Roll Call recently pointed out:

"Before the landmark 1992 elections, which occurred in the the shadow of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, there were a total of 30 women serving in the House and Senate. Today there are 72 women in Congress, 59 in the House and 13 in the Senate."

Murray's campaign drew national attention as she recounted being belittled in 1980 by a Washington state legislator as "just a mom in tennis shoes" when she went to Olympia seeking to restore cuts in state funding for parent-child education programs. A decade later, Murray was elected to the Senate, where she is chairman of the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee and serves on the Budget Committee. The daughter of a disabled veteran, she's also the first woman to serve on the Veteran's Affairs Committee.

Murray, 51, holds a bachelor's degree from Washington State University, is married to Rob Murray. They have two grown children.

Related Links:

• Bill Frist's Senate Web site.

• Patty Murray's Senate Web site.

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