WASHINGTON — Rick Nolan fondly recalls his first days in Congress. He played basketball with teammates Al Gore and Dan Quayle, joined scrimmages against the Russian embassy staff, and signed up for a baseball team called the “Knee-Jerk Liberals.’’

Back then, in the 1970s, Nolan brought his wife and four young children from Minnesota to live with him in Washington. He and his family even spent weekends with congressional colleagues camping, hiking, and attending bipartisan barbecues. After three terms, Nolan left Congress in 1981, retiring and going back to farming.

Flash ahead three decades: Nolan, who party leaders saw as having the best shot at unseating a Tea Party-backed Republican incumbent, soon found himself back in Congress. He now holds the record of the longest gap between two terms in congressional history. The Democratic representative jokes that it is as if he took a 32-year nap. His staff calls him “Rick van Winkle.”

And just as in the tale, he no longer recognizes the world he has found himself in.

Almost immediately after new members got into office, Nolan says, the DCCC began coaching them on fund-raising. A schedule from that session showed that they should spend four hours each day asking for money – more time than any other activity and more than twice the amount of time they should be spending debating issues on the House floor or hammering out legislation in committees.

Nolan says he understood the impulse — the candidate with the most amount of money typically wins — but he was taken aback. He says he’s been reprimanded by Democratic leadership for not raising enough money. He says he has not set foot in a call center that the DCCC set up near Congress, where cubicles are lined up so that congressmen can come in and dial their donors without using congressional resources.

“It helps dictate the ultimate decisions around here. We have a saying out in the country, ‘Who pays the fiddler gets to pick the tune,’?” Nolan says. “Not only does it take away time from governance, but it has an equally adverse tendency to corrupt and pervert the public policy process.”

Nolan says he holds around one fund-raiser each week, but still has no plans to use the DCCC’s call center.

“I find it distasteful,” he says.