While critics can attack his opinions or his votes, Rep. Rob Bishop has found a way to deflate accusations of being full of hot air: inflatable plastic furniture.

Maybe it's a symptom of having to run for re-election every two years, or the challenges of embracing a Washington, D.C., lifestyle on the salary of a Box Elder schoolteacher. Maybe Bishop, R-Utah, actually has a sense of style that has not infiltrated "Trading Spaces" or found a secret to sleeping more comfortably than on an Intellibed.

Whatever the reason, Utah's 1st District congressman in the House of Representatives has chosen to decorate his apartment — just down the hall from Attorney General John Ashcroft, within a few short blocks of the nerve center of American politics — with the squishy, squeaky, plastic furniture.

The blow-up furniture, Bishop said, is surprisingly comfortable, not to mention convenient. "If I ever leave, I can just deflate everything," he said.

With a substantial 31 percentage-point lead over Democratic challenger Steve Thompson in the most recent Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll conducted by Dan Jones & Associates, it doesn't appear that he will be deflating his household anytime soon.

If he wins a second term, Bishop, 53, said he plans to build on the successes of his first term, during which he felt like he did almost everything that could be expected of a freshman representative. Much of the credit for those accomplishments he gave to his staff, many of whom worked for his predecessor, Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, who retired after 22 years in 2002.

"I was amazed about what we were able to accomplish," Bishop said. "A lot of that was because of my staff, and I got a lot of things I didn't expect."

Among those were appointments to committees, such as Armed Services and Resources, which he considers vital to his district. He also helped expand the mission of Hill Air Force Base, which is always helpful with base closures pending in the next couple of years.

"We're not just sitting back and playing defense," he said. "We're trying to pick up even more missions for Hill."

Hot, not hotter

A veteran of politics who has served as House speaker in the Utah Legislature, Bishop still found himself embroiled in a surprisingly heated controversy less than a year into his first term. It happened when he tried to reclassify uranium waste from a federal facility in Ohio as commercial so that Tooele-based waste handler Envirocare could receive it.

After anti-nuclear waste activists rallied against the reclassification and Utah Democrats shouted about a conspiracy — Bishop had previously lobbied for Envirocare and received campaign donations from the company — Bishop backed away from the issue and left the decision about which waste to accept to the Legislature, which currently has prohibited any "hotter" classes of waste.