WASHINGTON — The town-hall meetings are done. So are the constituent breakfasts, committee hearings and roll-call votes. No more drives across the state to Little Rock or Memphis in the early morning darkness to catch flights to Washington.

For the first time since 2001, Rep. Mike Ross, a Democrat from Prescott, won’t travel to Washington in January to serve in the U.S. House.

Ross, 51, announced in July 2011 that he would not seek re-election. Rep.-elect Tom Cotton, a Republican, will represent Arkansas’ 4th District during the next session of Congress, leaving Sen. Mark Pryor as the only Democrat representing Arkansas in Washington.

Ross, who called serving in the House his “highest professional honor,” said he looked forward to spending time with his wife, Holly, their two children and his parents.

“I never viewed it as a sacrifice because I signed up for it,” he said about political life. “But they certainly made sacrifices,” he said of his family.

Ross leaves behind no piece of significant legislation that he sponsored and was passed during his 12 years in office. But he and observers from both parties say his major contribution as a legislator was in tirelessly responding to the needs of his constituents and in leading the Blue Dog coalition, made up of Democrats who bill themselves as fiscally conservative.

Ross was twice the cochairman of the group, which numbered 54 before the 2010 elections. The Blue Dog pack has thinned, however, as members like Ross have retired or been defeated by Republican challengers. In the next Congress, there will be only 14 Blue Dogs.

Ross said his biggest accomplishment as a Blue Dog was in the summer of 2009, leading seven members in discussions on health care with President Barack Obama.

In addition to successfully squeezing costs out of healthcare legislation, Ross said, the group forced White House concessions that resulted in state-run insurance exchanges, rather than a centralized “single payer” system. And while a “public option” of federally run health insurance was ultimately left out of the legislation, Ross said, he and the Blue Dogs ensured that if there was a “public option” — a government-run health insurance that was a sticking point in the debate — fees would be negotiated, rather than set in accordance with existing Medicare schedules.

Ross said he and the Blue Dogs prevented a “back-door” attempt by liberals in the Democratic Party to install universal government-run insurance, while allowing the legislation to move forward in the House.

“If you ask the far left, they’re going to say I tried to kill it, and if you ask the far right, they’d say I was an enabler and it wouldn’t have survived without me,” Ross said. “The truth is somewhere in the middle in that I was trying to find something acceptable to everyone.”

Jay Dickey, the Republican who Ross succeeded after the 2000 election, said Ross’ work on health care “left a lot to be desired.”

He said Ross — a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — voted to pass the bill in that committee, allowing it to proceed.

“His vote was the determining vote,” Dickey said. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a Blue Dog. In the end, they always caved.”

While Ross was one of several Blue Dogs to vote for the bill in committee, he did not vote for the health-care overhaul when it went to the House floor. He made his decision to vote “no,” he said, after visiting every county in his district — which takes in the southern part of the state — during the August congressional recess in 2009. During those visits, he said, constituents made their views on the bill clear: It should be voted down.

Drew Goesl, a Texarkana native who was Ross’ chief of staff and is now a Washington political consultant, said Ross was constantly criss-crossing his district, the largest in the state, to get face time with voters. His travels helped him amass an intimate knowledge of the state and the attitudes of his constituents. Ross’ energy, Goesl said, impressed the other members of the state’s Washington contingent.

“It made other members of the delegation better,” Goesl said.

Pryor agreed and called Ross a “role model.”

“He combed the district constantly,” he said. “He knew every person who works at every filling station in his district.”

Sen. John Boozman, a Republican who traveled regularly with Ross on trips to Europe as members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — a group of legislators from the United States and Europe who meet to discuss policy — said he admired Ross’ dry wit and ability to memorize arcane political facts.

Boozman predicted that Ross has a long future in politics.

“He’s a young guy with lots of talent,” he said.

Former U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder, a Democrat from Arkansas, called Ross “the most disciplined, hardworking political leader I’ve seen.”

Snyder said the Democrats have been most successful at retaining power on Capitol Hill when they’ve been a “big tent” party, accommodating a wide range of views.

“Mike was a big part of making that tent big,” Snyder said. “That was a good thing for House Democrats, and everybody knew it.”

Ross is a political “survivor,” said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway. Barth was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., in September.

He said that as a state senator and then during his first congressional campaign, Ross positioned himself with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But his district, like many areas of the South, began to lean more heavily Republican over the past decade, and Ross began to take a more conservative stance, Barth said.

“He has been a very ambidextrous politician,” Barth said.

Had he decided to run this year, Barth said, Ross would have been tough for Cotton to beat.

“He’s probably the only person who could have won in that district as a Democrat,” Barth said.

According to one publication, Ross voted pretty near the center on most issues as a congressman. National Journal, a political trade magazine in Washington, ranks lawmakers on a number of policy issues. Ross’ combined score in 2011 put him at 54.2 on the liberal scale of 1-100, with 100 being the most liberal, and at 45.8 on a similar scale ranking conservatives.

For the past month, Ross has been in limbo. After the Nov. 6 election, he lost his office space in the Rayburn House Office Building. And in November he sold his Capitol Hill condominium to incoming Rep. Stephen Fincher, a Tennessee Republican, for $325,000 (Ross bought it in 2004 for $272,000).

With most of his staff gone and his office furniture moved out into the hallways of the Rayburn Building, Ross used Pryor’s “hideaway” — a small office in the basement of the Capitol to work out of between votes.

During a pre-Christmas interview, Ross kept tabs on the action on the House floor that was being shown on a TV and checked his phone every time a text message came in. An avid hunter and co-chairman of the House Sportsmen’s Caucus, his text alert sounds like a duck call.

During his tenure on Capitol Hill, Ross said Congress has done many important things — such as raise the minimum wage, reduce interest rates on student loans and increase funding for veterans’ health care. He said he is proud that the House instituted “pay-go” rules — a longtime Blue Dog priority that requires new spending and tax bills to have “offsets” so the effect on the federal budget is neutral.

Ross also singled out bailouts for the automobile industry and big banks that he said limited the duration of the recession and helped avoid a depression.

He defended his vote on sending troops to Iraq in 2002, but said he’d make a different decision in hindsight. He said members of Congress were falsely led to believe that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, making Saddam’s regime a direct threat to the United States.

“We were given bad intelligence,” Ross said. “The reality is there are evil dictators all over the world, and we can’t afford to police the world.”

Ross has taken a job as a political consultant with Southwest Power Pool, an organization regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that works to ensure the transmission of electric power.

Ross said he is open to returning to elected office, but as he sat in Pryor’s basement office in the Capitol, not knowing whether the discussions on the “fiscal cliff” would keep him in Washington for the holidays, he seemed frustrated at the lack of compromise in Congress.

“Any democracy is messy,” he said. “Ours is more messy than it needs to be.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/30/2012