I never let politics get personal. You can have the most intense, heated debate on issues, and so long as you keep it on issues, you can go out and have coffee afterwards and you're good friends.

During his tenure the group waged a nationwide campaign against President Jimmy Carter's proposed cession of the Panama Canal and against the proposed SALT II arms limitation treaty with the USSR. Despite being dramatically outspent (Phil Crane received almost no funding from the national level) Bean surprised both parties by garnering 43 percent of the vote in a district that supposedly had been redrawn after the 2000 Census to protect Crane (several previous opponents from both parties found their homes drawn out of the 8th and into the neighboring 10th District). C.

At the time of his defeat in the 2004 election Crane was the longest-serving Republican member of the House. He was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 2005 representing the 8th District of Illinois in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago.