Q: Almost all the candidates running for Marty Meehan’s seat have some experience as an elected official. Do you think you have the experience necessary to be an effective Congressman?
I do. I’m not sure that elective office is the only thing that should be measured when the voters look at all of us and our qualifications to be their next Congressman. I’ve got a pretty diverse background of experience in state government, in the federal government, in the private sector and working for nonprofits.
My first job out of college was working for State Senator Patricia McGovern, back when I graduated from Merrimack College in 1986. I have experience working in the federal government under President Clinton when he tapped me to be one of the first staffers to help start the Americorps program in 1993. I also worked at the U.S. Small Business Administration as the regional advocate for New England.
I have experience working not only for federal government and state government, but also with candidates for president. In the last four and a half presidential campaigns, I started with Mike Dukakis’s campaign, worked on the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore twice, and traveled in the 2000 campaign with the Gores occasionally but more often in the general election with Joe Lieberman as his trip director. The moment he was picked as a candidate, I was one of four staff people to fly out to Connecticut, pick him up and bring him to Nashville for the announcement and I was with him for the entirety of the campaign, including the protracted, painful recount.
Q: Of those experiences, what would you say is your most important achievement in your public life?
I would say working on national service, because it was Eli Segal, who just passed away last year, was our CEO and chairman and if you will, the founder of the modern-day Americorps movement. He was the man tasked with getting it up and running by President Clinton. The challenge of that organization and bringing that idea from poetry to prose, as Eli would often say, was really about getting the Americorps program up and running. It was a merger with the old action agency where Vista and older American volunteer programs which all started as a result of the war on poverty back in Lyndon Johnson’s day, merging that with a new brand of service which was President Clinton’s Americorps program. So it was a merger, a startup.
It was exciting to work there but it was not without its challenges. Working with bureaucracies was something that we had to learn to work through, but also at the end of the day prove results of a new program. It turns out that the motto of the Americorps program was getting things done. The debate about whether service would be about those who do the service and then come back and reflect on it, or about what service they do in the community, in part so they could justify spending federal dollars on it. In the end that’s what it became, it was about getting things done in the community. A byproduct was that people felt good about the service, the community felt good about people dedicating a year of their lives to either come in the community or come from within the community to make things better.
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Q: What do you think is the number one issue on the minds of voters in the 5th District?
Of the voters I’ve talked to, I’ve been to some Democratic Town Committees, I’ve been to some Democratic events, I’ve spoken to folks at a Lion’s Club in Tewksbury, and I think, while we all presume that the war in Iraq is top of mind and people do talk about it, but people are still concerned with issues that don.t seem to go away and don’t seem to get the attention they need. I don’t think they are unsolvable, but there’s only so much time in the day that our leaders in Washington can commit to working with the troublesome issues, and I think one of the problems is, the attentions on the domestic front have really suffered as a result of everyone’s time, attention, frankly budget focus on the war in Iraq.
We’re spending billions in Iraq. It’s a lot of money, and it’s money not being spent on something else, whether it’s foreign programs or foreign aid somewhere else or trying to rebuild another country, or rebuilding our country. I mean, we have issues that are challenging here, like affordable housing or heath care, K-12 education, higher education. It’s not always about dollars. Too often in Washington, it’s a sense of priority and we’re not investing in the things that are helping our own people get ahead. That’s what they expect us to do. They expect us to do the people’s business, and for the past four years Iraq has been something that in large part has been distracting our leaders from keeping their eye focused on solving the challenges here.
Read the rest of the full interview at .08 Acres.
