The way I look at this now, I look at it as an opportunity-I"m hoping I can get into a field that I"m comfortable with. Some of the people who"ve left FERC while I"ve been here have been able to compete very well in private industry. And I think with my background, I can just about learn anything that I really put my mind to. I"m actually looking at some computer training or something like that, maybe get into network engineering or something of that nature. I"m looking at various things. I"ll eventually move on to something else. [Laughs] I just don"t want my tombstone to read, "Here lies a lifelong bureaucrat."
We still have a really good system of
government here.
TOWN MANAGER.
Jennifer Daily.
I"m the manager of the town of c.u.mberland, Indiana. We"ve got a population of five thousand eight hundred and I"m responsible for everything-budgets, parks, organizing meetings, privatizing the wastewater treatment plant. I deal with it all. The police force, everything.
The only difference between what I do as a town manager and what a mayor does is that mayors are elected. I"m appointed. The c.u.mberland town council hired me about a year ago. I"m actually the first manager they"ve had here. Before me, each council member ran a department of the town. No centralization, not much getting done. One council member would tell town workers to do one thing, then another council member would come along and say something different. A lot of politics getting in the way. The town needed a manager to take those politics out of its day-to-day town decisions. So here I am. It"s my job to figure out what needs to be done based on reason, need, and available resources-not how to get elected next fall.
I"ve been wanting a job like this since I was a kid. [Laughs] Sort of. I mean, I come from a family tradition of caring about local government. My father was the mayor of my hometown, Kokomo, Indiana. I did a lot of related extracurricular activities in high school-debate team, student government, newspaper-and I always liked social studies and government cla.s.ses best. They just seemed so much more relevant because they"ve got a real world application.
In college, I majored in political science and education and then I went through a bunch of jobs, from law firms to nonprofits. I ended up in a position where I was helping train munic.i.p.al officials for the state. I got to know a lot of these officials-saw what they actually did-and decided that I wanted to be a town manager. It"s an expanding line of work. Towns are moving away from the mayoral form of government to be a little more like companies. And it just seemed perfect for me. I liked the idea of it-the challenge, the responsibilities, and the chance to look at issues objectively.
I found out about the opening here through an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the Indiana a.s.sociation of Cities and Towns trade publication, Action Lines. I think I was chosen because I"d never been a town manager before and c.u.mberland had never had a manager before, so I think they felt more comfortable with someone who wouldn"t come in and change everything all at once. They were looking for a coordinator, not a dictator. I think I"ve done a good job of fulfilling that need, but it"s hard to say. At the very least, I try my best and I"m intense about it.
The thing is, this job could keep you busy forty-eight hours a day and you still wouldn"t be finished. I keep a "to do" list. It"s usually about a hundred items long and I always mark off a few items every day, but it hasn"t gotten any shorter in the year I"ve been here. Today, it has one hundred and thirty-four items on it.
I work sixty hours a week solid. And I"m never really off-duty. I"m always on call if one of the council members have a question or a complaint. At night, on weekends-I"m available to them. The citizens as well. A couple mornings ago at about six A.M., a resident called me to cuss at me about taxes. I was so asleep I don"t remember. People call me at all times for all reasons. This one guy called me because a construction truck kicked up a rock and hit his car.
It"s pretty stressful. Every morning, first thing, I set aside an hour to catch up on reading and organize. This hour is one of the few times I"ll close my door. Today, I read about finding new revenue sources for the town. Then it"s go, go, go. Mostly to meetings. This morning, I met with the town clerk about advertising rates for town notices, I saw the superintendent of parks and streets, I worked on a fiscal plan for annexing a row of houses near town. At lunch, I showed a prospective buyer the old town hall. In the afternoon, I met with the building commissioner to discuss re-zoning parts of the town. Then I wrote employee evaluations. Tonight, I"ll be at the town council meeting, available for questions from the council members and the citizens.
Throughout the day, I also get complaint calls from residents, like the driveway nut. We"re resurfacing a street here, and part of some driveways have to be torn up to lay the new road. We"ll be replacing whatever we tear up, but this week I"ve received several calls from one of the residents on this street who wants the town to pay for, not just the part we tore up, but to have his whole driveway redone. Ha! His last call, he tells me I should get my fat a.s.s from behind the desk and go down there. And he acts like this resurfacing is a huge surprise. But last Sunday, I went door-to-door telling people that the edge of their driveways would get torn up and then replaced. I did that on a Sunday. And I still get people yelling at me.
I"m twenty-eight. I"m the only female town manager in the state. And I don"t know exactly, but I"m probably one of the younger town managers in the country. It"s sometimes hard to get respect. But I let it be known that even though I"m young and a woman, I"m still the boss. I choose my battles. And by and large, I think I"m winning them.
The town council hired me unanimously, and they are all supportive of the job I do. They may complain sometimes-but that"s politics. It"s not a big deal and it doesn"t usually get in the way. For instance, I prepare the town"s budget for the council"s approval. Last year, they did not change a penny of the budget I proposed. And during the year, I am authorized to spend up to three thousand dollars on any single item without their approval. This takes care of ninetyfive percent of all purchases, which eliminates a lot of possibilities for conflict between me and them.
The one task that"s often difficult is administering large projects. Like last year we did a half-million-dollar road project. The council approves the overall budget, but then I have to watch and control costs within that approval. That means keeping a close eye on contractors and engineers who don"t think me-a woman-knows anything about construction. And they"re right-I don"t know about construction, but I have a sixth sense about when I am getting screwed and I don"t take it well. During that road project, we worked with an engineering company that whenever there was bad news, they would send this twenty-five-year-old guy who looked fifteen to give it to me. I don"t know why they did that-maybe they thought I"d be charmed by him. I wasn"t. I ripped him so many times that I felt guilty by the end of the project. I bought him and his fiancee a gift certificate for a nice restaurant. But I kept costs down.
So that was tough on me, but not on the council. Which is kind of the genius of this job. I can be the b.i.t.c.h, and the council still looks good. Politicians like that.
I am not political in the sense that I do not affiliate with a party, and I do not campaign or support any candidate. And I do not base decisions on running the town on political platforms. I have complete control of all town employee issues-hiring, firing, discipline. And, unlike a politician, I do not hire or fire based on political alliances. Instead, I"m more like a businessperson-I"ve created job descriptions, started a performance evaluation system, trained managers in supervisory skills, started an awards program, hosted employee meetings and parties, developed an employee newsletter, and many other things to make employees feel part of an important overall goal: the town. I want to promote a family feeling. I know that"s corny, but that"s what I want to accomplish. And it"s working.
People get the impression from the media that our government is all messed up or full of crooks. It"s not. We still have a really good system of government here. Especially local government. It isn"t this nebulous ent.i.ty that n.o.body has control over. Everyone can partic.i.p.ate and everyone should care. And most all the time, it works pretty d.a.m.n well.
For example, last June, a tornado hit c.u.mberland. A day-care center was leveled minutes after parents picked up their children. Dozens of houses were damaged, power lines downed. Town Hall became the emergency center, and we had all the systems in place to help people. I carried around a radio and coordinated everything. I set up the Red Cross and worked with other relief agencies. I did paperwork. I made sure that the workers were fed. I talked to the media. I took millions of phone calls. I gave out a lot of "atta boys" and kept people going when they had been awake for seventy-two hours straight. We received nothing but praise for the response. And it was so rewarding to know that we were able to help people.
That was government working, even despite jerks who complain about their d.a.m.ned driveways.
There"s no sprawl here.
CITY PLANNER.
Deborah Rouse.
For the past year, I"ve been the Deputy Director of City Planning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I came to this kind of circuitously. I"m forty-five and I started my career as an architect in Philadelphia with the Office of Housing and Community Development. I enjoyed that, but I found I was interested more in the front end of putting projects together-you know, in how construction actually happens-so I joined an architectural firm and I stayed there until 1990, when the development market collapsed and the firm I worked for went basically bust. At that point, I was confronted with starting over again at a new firm-at the bottom-and it was like, jeez, I don"t want to do this. It was the perfect moment to make a life change. So I went and got my law degree, and in doing that, it became clear to me that government is the place where my interests and skills kind of meet-the design issues and land use issues, the legal and the architectural-they come together. [Laughs] So, through a various number of machinations, I arrived where I am now.
I"m an appointed official. I serve at the pleasure of the mayor. My position is, essentially, I"m the design voice of the city for the planning commission, so I"m the person who the mayor turns to when we"re trying to figure out what"s the right way-architecturally-to do a development project.
There are days when it"s wonderful. I have a staff that is very bright, very talented, and who get along with one another, and we are, as a munic.i.p.ality, doing a billion-with a B- dollars of construction right now. It"s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the face of a city. And Pittsburgh is a very interesting city from a planning standpoint, because it"s strongly influenced by its geography. We are located not only at the confluence of three rivers, but also in this very mountainous area. The downtown is therefore very small. And it"s remarkably intact and very densely developed for a city this size. If you go to Kansas City or someplace like that where it"s flat and it sprawls, what you"d find is that in periods of decline, you"d end up with skysc.r.a.pers being torn down. So, you"ll have blocks and blocks of empty lots and then you have tall buildings for several blocks and then more empty lots.
So we"re lucky. There"s no sprawl here and we have a number of remarkable buildings that are a result of an era where you had very good architects designing truly memorable things. Pittsburgh was developed by the robber barons at the turn of the century, like Andrew Carnegie and his wife. There was a lot of money that went in here, so there"s a lot of really incredible, quality stuff. I think most people would be very surprised to come here and see how beautiful the downtown is.
But it"s been through the worst. We lost the mills early-the steel mills-and we"ve had to make the transition to a different tech economy. We"re not a growing area, we"ve lost a significant portion of the population. But we"re trying to learn how to grow small well. That"s what I view to be the challenge here-we have to grow, but we have to stay small. And it"s a great challenge. [Laughs] Believe me.
My job is to go to meetings. I live to meet. And it"s always strange because there"s so much going on. You"re sort of in the middle of these contrasts-discussions about these big sports stadiums, and then you find yourself in these in-the-trenches discussions about whether this school is a historic landmark. Then there"s some political thing that happens, where you get summoned to the city council"s office to talk about why the bus shelters are built the way they are. I end up going from garbage cans and bus shelters to football stadiums all in one day.
And I have to think on my feet. Because what typically will happen is that the developer of a project-be it something like the baseball and football stadiums or one of the new drugstores that are going up everywhere-will come in with drawings. The issue will be, what are the regulatory requirements in order to build the thing? But often, I"m seeing the drawings for the first time when I walk through the door to start the meeting, and they want my response to it immediately. So you"re getting real familiar with these very large construction projects fairly quickly. And basically, you try and antic.i.p.ate what the design issues are and also what the political issues are that are going to cause you, the community, the administration, or someone else who is in some way connected, to attack the thing.
There"s a lot of attacking. [Laughs] My days are made up of a lot of potentially confrontational gatherings. It"s funny, because when I was an architect, I once had a very aggressive boss. She was very talented and very tough, and she used to tell me I was a marshmallow when I dealt with my staff and with contractors when I critiqued work. She told me I was too easy, I was too nice. Here, I feel like Joseph Stalin. My friends even kid me about this now. One just sent me an e-mail, which started, "Dear Joe."
For this environment, where everybody needs to be politic, I am probably frequently much too forthright. I know it drives some people crazy that I am as abrupt as I can be when I do this, but I try not to spend a whole lot of time ruminating, because I find that when I do, I"m paralyzed with insecurity.
There"s one incident, actually, that was the defining moment for me in this job. While it was going on, it was certainly the most stressful thing I have ever gone through in my professional career. What happened was the mayor heard through some of his other advisors and people he"s known and trusted-people outside the government- that there were things about the baseball park design that were not as good as they might be. He was very, very upset. We ended up in a situation where the owner of the Pirates, the mayor, my director, and I ended up flying to Kansas City to be in the office of the architects that were designing the building to do this design critique.
A couple of things were wrong. The ballpark is, like most new ballparks, on the river. It"s right out there on the water"s edge, you can see it. When the TV cameras are there, when the Goodyear blimp is there, everybody in the country can see this thing. And the design of the riverfront side-the edge of the building that faced out toward the skyline of the city-was not as strong as it might have been. I think there was an image we were trying to project of a traditional urban ballpark that wasn"t getting across. Architecturally, at some places, it was very traditional and at others it was very contemporary. The transition between them was pretty jarring. There were these spiral ramps that had these metal roofs on them on this very traditional base. It almost looked like a s.p.a.ceship had landed on this little ballpark.
Now, the mayor is a man of vision-but he"s not an experienced builder. He was desperately trying to find a way of expressing what he didn"t like about this building. But it wasn"t coming out right and Kevin McClatchey, the owner of the Pirates, was not happy with being told that there were things the mayor didn"t like about his building.
By the afternoon, it had gotten so tense. And I was very new to the job at the time, I was just sitting there trying not to get myself into trouble-but it became pretty clear that there was no one else, because I"m the only architect on our staff, who could give what the mayor was saying words at this meeting. I ended up going very far out on a limb and saying, you know, this is what"s wrong here. In front of all these people, I spoke up. And in the middle of doing that, my director leaned over and said, "You need to be careful, because he may leave you out there to dry."
At that moment, I made a decision that if I backed down, I could never have credibility with these people ever again. So I kept on going. It made my position here. It established my presence and my credibility. And it was terrifying-though it ended up being phenomenal. When I look back on it, this is a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar building, I"m with the mayor of the city of Pittsburgh, and I"m telling the Pirates owner what they have to do to make him happy. And they did it. They changed the building. We ended up redesigning one street corner so there was more glazing and a very traditional gateway that looked more like an old-time ballpark. Then they brought down the height of the roofs and actually took the roof structure off of it so it"s just sort of an old-fashioned truss thing on there instead of the s.p.a.ceship look. It was-you know, it was just a lot of small details that make it generally a better building.
And now, it"s hard not be excited about this stadium. There are pictures of it everywhere, fireworks, groundbreaking ceremonies. In retrospect, you know, it"s pretty wild to have been involved in it.
At the same time, that story is a good ill.u.s.tration of just how tough this job is. There"s an awful lot of stress. I can joke about it now, but when we were doing the review of the ballpark, and having tense moments, I would lie awake at night with these images of turning the TV on and seeing the Pirates" owner saying, "We"re moving to San Jose, California, and it"s all Deborah Rouse"s fault." [Laughs] Seriously.
This obviously overstates the case vastly, but it happens. People will be talking about doing projects, and you"ll say, "Well this is what the law is." And they sort of say, "Well, if you don"t find a way around this, we"re going to move out of the city." That"s pretty scary.
We"ve been doing a project on a former steel mill site. It"s a multiresidential/commercial development. It"s right on the edge of a fairly sound, very neat neighborhood. One particular building-a fairly large one with about four floors-is located right on the corner where the main cross-street of this new community meets with the existing community, a very public location. And the architect and the owner came in with a building that violated the requirements for the development on any number of scores. For example, parking has to be screened, and what they ended up doing was putting a parking garage right on the corner there. They built the bottom floor so that the bottoms of the lowest windows were about eight feet above the sidewalk. It basically looked like a walled compound, and that"s exactly what you don"t want. You want it to be a part of the community, you want people to feel comfortable walking by it.
They showed me the project when they were about halfway through with it. I said, "You can"t do this." Well, they came back several months later with the same building, same problem. The neighborhood was in an uproar about it. I go into the meeting and say, again, "You have to change this." They say, "We"re gonna move to the suburbs if you make us do this."
In the meantime, the planning commissioners, for whom I work directly, are saying, "It"s important to have new development, we don"t want people going to the suburbs." Okay, that"s fine. I agree with that. But it"s important to have good development. So, you know, over a period of about six weeks, we ended up having a series of very tense, very acrimonious discussions back and forth.
We recommended that they could build the building, but only if they changed the sill heights, only if they changed the way the building met the corner. Basically, we threw the ball back in their court. All the while, they were calling the mayor saying, "We"re gonna move, we"re gonna move."
In the end, it"s a compromise. The parking garage is still on the ground floor, but now it"s sunk lower into the grade, the windows are right down on the sidewalk level, it"s relandscaped, the brick is the right color to match the neighborhood. Everybody is still very cranky about all of it, but they ended up building their building, and we have some of what the building ought to have been.
And that"s what the job is really about-compromise. You definitely learn that there are limits to what you can control. When we meet with developers, there are things that I a.s.sume are truisms. Things that are good. Things I a.s.sume everybody in the world agrees to as being good, but the developers frequently don"t see as good. I mean, if you"re building a parking lot, you want to try and consider how people circulate down the street and make it so that cars are not crossing the pedestrian path, right? Well, that doesn"t always happen. And I can"t stop them from doing it unless the zoning code tells me I can. To have a conversation with them about this being right and just is absurd. They don"t agree. You only win incrementally. On both smaller and larger projects. It"s very frustrating, but you have to accept the fact that what you can influence is a fraction of what you"d like to influence.
So some days, I feel very marginalized. I go home and say, "I must have lost my mind when I agreed to do this." But at the same time, there"s a definite possibility that I could stay here for the rest of my career-or at least as long as it"s politically possible for me to stay here. Because, after this, how else could I do anything like this? That"s so, you know, heady? I don"t know.
It"s a lot of politics, sure. But it"s important stuff. I mean, I think Pittsburgh was a beautiful city. A very, very beautiful city. And in many ways, it still is. We have many instances of people adaptively reusing historic buildings that are just wonderful.
And I compromise a lot, but by and large, we"re pretty careful. We do win a lot of the time. I mean, look at the skyline-it"s just phenomenally beautiful.
Some people you can intimidate. Some
people you can jolly along.
U.S. CONGRESSMAN.
Barney Frank.
I am what is technically called a Representative in Congress, which usually gets kind of amalgamated into "congressman." We get elected to two-year terms. I"m now in the first year of my tenth term, so this is my nineteenth year.
I remember being interested in politics as early as thirteen or fourteen years old. I remember in particular the McCarthy hearings. I was very involved in those. The unfairness-it angered me. And I also remember being outraged to learn in 1954 that a kid my age had been murdered in Mississippi-he was a black kid from Chicago who whistled at a white woman-and so he was murdered. They knew who had murdered him, but didn"t do anything about it. So, I mean, early on at that point I was interested in politics as maybe a way to change some things.
But I never thought I"d be able to run for anything myself-one, because I"m Jewish, and two, because I"m gay. I realized that I was gay when I was thirteen, but I figured I could just keep it a secret. Whereas I had already come out as Jewish [laughs] at my bar mitzvah, so it was too late to stay in the Jewish closet. At first, interestingly, I thought being Jewish was more of an obstacle to an electoral career than being gay. At the time, there were Jews active in helping other people get elected, but not getting elected themselves. Since then, I"ve seen that totally broken down, but I could not have antic.i.p.ated it when I was young.
Plus I talk too fast, and my diction isn"t great. And I grew up- and your horizons are somewhat shaped by where you grew up-in Hudson County, New Jersey. Which, in the forties and fifties, was a very corrupt, machine-ridden place, with mob rule and the most corrupt union movements-Teamsters and longsh.o.r.emen-along with a very hard-line Democratic machine controlling things. Even if you could get into that you wouldn"t have wanted to, it was such a sewer.
But then I went away to college and began to get involved in politics here in Ma.s.sachusetts. And I saw that, well, while Ma.s.sachusetts was obviously not nirvana, it was more open than Jersey. And I began to think, this is something to get involved in. So I volunteered and I helped out.
And then in 1968, I went to work for Kevin White, who was the mayor of Boston. After that, I worked for a congressman as an administrative a.s.sistant and chief of staff. I kept my residence in Boston, but moved to Washington, and-it turned out-even though I still didn"t know if I could ever get elected to anything, I found I was very suited to politics. As I said, I"d always had very strong feelings about fairness in the world. Prejudice about race or gender or s.e.xual orientation, the notion of kids being poor in a very rich society, restriction of free speech-those were my major concerns, and it seemed that in order to address them, obviously, the government is a good place to do that. And then, also, it was fun for me. I think most of us like the things that we"re good at. And I"m better at politics than I am at a lot of other things. I"m fast on my feet. I don"t have the powers of concentration I would like to have. [Laughs] I don"t have a great attention span. But in politics, you deal on any given day with at least eight different things. While that"s a distraction for some people, it suits me better.
So, after a year or so in Washington, a couple of friends suggested I run for state representative from downtown Boston-the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the very cosmopolitan part of Boston. And I said, yeah, I think I will. So I moved back up here and ran. I had gotten some publicity because I worked for the mayor and people knew me. And I won.
At the time, it was clear to me that I would have to keep my s.e.xuality in the closet. The anti-gay prejudice was beginning to crumble significantly, but like any historical change, it was difficult to see as it was happening. And emotionally-I wouldn"t have been anywhere near emotionally ready for it. And so I decided that while I could not publicly acknowledge being gay, I would make up for that on my own moral balance sheet by being an active advocate for gay rights. In fact, in 1972, after I got elected, I was the first person in Ma.s.sachusetts to introduce a gay rights bill. And I was the first serious candidate for office in Ma.s.sachusetts to ride in the Gay Pride parade. So I became pretty well identified as the major supporter of gay rights in Ma.s.sachusetts. But I was totally closeted. I had no life as a gay man. Which I later realized was a mistake.
It turned out I was good at legislating. But after seven years of it, I began to be depressed. I was about to turn forty. I"d sacrificed my personal life. I"d lived in the closet as a very repressed guy, and not had the kind of healthy emotional life or s.e.x life that I should have had-all for a political career which was probably going to end with eight years in the state legislature. Which I enjoyed. Which I was proud of. Where I thought I had done some good stuff. But there was nowhere to go, no higher office realistically available. What do I do?
And then as close to divine intervention as I will ever see happened to me. His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, who had ascended to the papacy a year or so before, decided that he did not want Father Robert Drinan to stay in Congress. Father Drinan was-and is-a Jesuit priest, and he was also a big liberal. And the Pope decreed that he could not run again. And when it was announced, I decided to run. I didn"t have time to think about it. I heard the news on Sunday, and if I wanted to run, I needed two thousand signatures on the nomination pet.i.tion by next Tuesday at five o"clock. So I had about fiftyone hours, and there wasn"t time to think. [Laughs] I had just been on the verge of saying, "Well, that"s the end of my political career," and then I was running for Congress.
It was a close race. In the state legislature, I had represented a downtown district which was pretty loose in its social approaches. I had introduced legislation to legalize marijuana, legalize prost.i.tution on a limited, zoned basis. I had opposed restrictions on p.o.r.nography. And, of course, I"d been a strong supporter of gay rights. And all these things were used against me when I ran.
It was awful. Campaigning was terrible. I was always concerned about the perception that I may be gay. And I"m a nervous eater, so as it went along, I just kept getting fatter and fatter. So it was a-I mean, it was the worst year of my life. And, you know, there"s this terrible thing about campaigning. In almost anything else you do, you may win a little, you may lose a little, but you keep going. Politics is very different. On election day you"ve either won or you lost. And if you lose, you no longer have a job! I found it very stressful.
But I won. I won with fifty-two per cent of the vote. On the night of the election, I was exhausted, but very, very happy. The feeling didn"t last long, however [laughs] because almost immediately it became clear that Ma.s.sachusetts was going to lose a congressional seat the next term. The census-we had lost population, or not gained it as quickly as the rest of the country, and it meant they had to redraw the boundaries of the districts, which is a very politicized process. And I hadn"t made a lot of friends with the legislature or the governor, who thought I was a wise-a.s.s liberal maverick, so it was clear that I was going to be targeted. And in fact, they took my district and pulverized it. The result was that it threw me against Congresswoman Margaret Heckler, who had been there for sixteen years, and who was very able. So 1980 was just round one of a very tough two-rounder. There were some very happy moments, but that first term was dominated by the fear of what was going to happen.
No one, including me, thought I had a chance to beat Congresswoman Heckler. What happened was she turned out to be a worse campaigner than we thought. Most importantly, we had the recession of 1982, and Mrs. Heckler had voted for all this Reagan stuff. She was a liberal Republican and she had had good relationships with the AFLCIO and poverty groups and union groups. But then Reagan came along and made her vote against their interests. So a lot of them came over to me. And I won again. And that"s when I felt that kind of elation, in 1982, because it was the first time after fifteen years of living hand to mouth where I knew what I"d be doing for the next three or four years. I mean, I didn"t buy a car until 1982. I didn"t really buy furniture.
After that victory, I said, all right, now I can be a congressman indefinitely-if I don"t screw up. [Laughs] And I"ve been doing it ever since. And I"ve enjoyed it a lot.
The job has, well, two very different aspects. When you"re in your district, you"re mostly meeting people and listening to their problems. You"re taking in information, going to events. You travel a lot. I have four offices. Yesterday I was in Fall River and New Bedford. I was on the fishing docks. I was at an elderly housing project.
In Ma.s.sachusetts, I"m constantly moving, listening to people. And that can be difficult. Because people tend-they don"t come to us when they"re happy. They come in and say, oh, "My mother"s got this problem," or, you know, "I"m going to be deported." "I can"t get enough money-my lungs." Or, you know, "My kid"s in the army and hates it." In some cases, we can intervene with the bureaucracy and help them out. You can"t help them all. And that part of it isn"t that fun-having to deal with the individual problems of that many individual people.
But the second part of the job is in Washington. And that"s the most important thing I do-I interact with my colleagues to shape the laws. I spend a lot of time just talking to other members of Congress, trying to get them to do things. Trading off. And I mean, it"s-the legislative process is fascinating for this reason. It"s the most interesting part of the job. Because, in most places where you work, somebody is the boss. And she gives orders, or he gives orders. It"s a hierarchy. There"s the head of General Motors down to the guys on the shop floor. And somebody gives somebody orders, and somebody can fire somebody else.
Legislators are the only people I can think of in our society who are exempt from that. I mean, the House of Representatives does have very formal rules-it"s described in the Const.i.tution of the United States-but we come to Washington, and of the four hundred and thirty-five representatives, n.o.body is anybody else"s boss. Not one of those four hundred and thirty-five can give anybody else an order. The Speaker of the House-I used to say, "Well, the Speaker of the House is more powerful than some freshman Congressmen." Except this Speaker of the House is not much more powerful than your desk. [Laughs] We have a very weak speaker right now-Dennis Hastert. And there are some people who are more powerful than others-they have more influence than others. But they"re-we"re legally equal. Literally none of the other representatives can order me to do anything. And none of them can fire me.
And not only that, there"s no division of labor. All four hundred and thirty-five of us are equally responsible for everything. There are committee chairmen who can recommend, but when it comes to it, we all have the same vote.
So what happens is, instead of being governed by a normal hierarchy, we are bound by our word. In a social situation, if you call me up and say, "You want to go to the movies tomorrow?" If I say yes, I can call you back and say I decided not to go. Okay? But if I"m a congressman and you come up and say, "Will you vote for my bill?" and I say yes, and then I don"t vote for your bill, I"ve broken my word. And I can"t do that. I will be damaged unless you give me permission to back out. Keeping your word-it"s a fetish. You need to know that when someone tells you they will do something that they will actually do it, so you can move on to the next thing, and the next thing. You have to be able to have that a.s.surance in order to get anything done.
So there"s this constant process of giving your word or not giving it-of bargaining, negotiating, trading off, wheeling and dealing, ingratiating yourself with people. You know, some people you can intimidate. Some people you can jolly along. Some people you can appeal to through the morality of an issue. And I find that fascinating. It"s what I"m good at. Thinking of strategies, especially when it"s on behalf of things that are important-it doesn"t matter if you don"t like someone or they don"t like you. You"ll have an ally on one issue with whom you might disagree ninety-eight percent of the rest of the time. If another representative is actively bigoted, if they"re actively h.o.m.ophobic, I find it very difficult to warm up to that person. I don"t try. But even so, I may ally myself with them over something that was being done on behalf of the values I care about, or issues affecting my region. That"s how it works.
It"s a kind of multidimensional chess. I like it a lot. It"s something I think I have a feel for. But if you want me to give a self-a.s.sessment as to the impact I"ve had, I won"t. [Laughs] You start talking about what you did and you get into this sort of mock humility. Or else you sound arrogant. It gets in the way of accomplishments. Because, I mean, I run for office, and I need my colleagues to think about me. How would a self-a.s.sessment enhance either my electoral success or my legislative success? And really, that"s always been the point of doing this-simply to get something accomplished. So I don"t selfa.s.sess.
I do go out and talk to the media about issues. Actually, the most disappointing part of my job is that some of the smartest people I come into contact with-who are the media people, reporters-do their job the worst. Because of the negativism that has overtaken them. It"s just awful. They are out there to prove bad things happened. Actually, one journalist who had a great line about the cynicism said, "I wish we could get young journalists to be as skeptical of bad news as they are of good news." They just-they think their job is to be adversarial, to be critical. Rather than to present what"s happening in both cases. They"re always looking for the nasty side. And I think that disserves the American public. I mean, I think the major reason young people today are cynical about politics is the misreporting of American politics. If something good happens, n.o.body cares. People don"t read about success. They only read about failure. They only read about negativism. You know? The budget deficit is much more news than the absence of a budget deficit.
As a country, we are a lot better off than we were thirty or forty years ago. Now the problem is, there"s an inequality in the better off. A lot of Americans are very much better off. Some aren"t. We have become very good at creating the conditions in which capitalism can flourish. And that"s a good thing. Because when capitalism flourishes, more wealth is created that benefits potentially everybody. But we haven"t done as good a job as we should"ve helping the people who don"t automatically benefit when capitalism flourishes-people who have bad luck, who live in the wrong places. We"re not unable to help these people. We"re unwilling to help them.
I think the job is to do the next version of what Franklin Roosevelt did. Which was Franklin Roosevelt preserved capitalism as a wealth-generating mechanism, while mitigating its negative side effects. We have to now do that on the international level. Preserve the wealth-generating aspects of the free market while dealing with the anti-environmental, anti-worker rights aspects and simply, you know, showing that we can share the prosperity better. For me, that"s the major issue politically today.
Now, what about my personal life? Well, when I was first elected to Congress, I decided I wouldn"t come out publicly. Because still-it was 1980 and I thought that would still cost me a great deal. I feared I"d lose my seat. But I didn"t want to repeat the mistake I"d made in the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature of being completely closeted. So I decided what I"d do is be publicly neutral and privately gay. And I began to tell my friends and family, while remaining secretive in public.
But I underestimated the difficulties of trying to live that dual track life. How do you meet people? Well, if you"re gay, you meet people by going to public places where there are other gay men. But if I went somewhere like that, it was sort of an announcement that I was gay, and I wasn"t ready to do that. I mean, plenty of people have co-workers who don"t know they"re gay, and they go to dances and socialize and parties and elsewhere. But I couldn"t do that because I"d be in the paper. And, you know, I had physical needs. I was terribly frustrated. And it led me to do some stupid things-I, from time to time, relied on hustlers. What would happen would be on a couple of occasions I would hook up with a guy, and because I was not really getting any kind of emotional contact elsewhere, it would become more than physical. We would become friendly.
There was one incident in particular where I got involved in "85 with a guy whom I paid for s.e.x. And this guy was basically straight, which I learned after we had s.e.x a couple of times. So then it just sort of became a nons.e.xual relationship. We became friends. I hired him to help me out in the office. And later, in 1989, he decided to try and make himself kind of a career not just by announcing to the world that I had paid him for s.e.x-which I was prepared to acknowledge- but to make other claims, most of which were false. A couple of which were true. Ultimately, the House Ethics Committee reported that most of what he said was false. But it got kinda nasty.
And that was actually two years after I had already come out. I mean, I came out in June of "87, because I realized that getting involved with someone like him-being half in and half out-I was still not able to have the kind of satisfying emotional life I wanted. And so I said, well, it"s time to start thinking about coming out. And then there was a precipitating cause. A congressman named Stewart McKinney-a very smart, very decent Republican from Fairfield County, Connecticut-was apparently bis.e.xual. And when he died of AIDS in 1987 there was all this speculation about how he had gotten AIDS. And did he have a gay side or didn"t he? And it was just awful to see this really wonderful man have his life end in this kind of unseemly gossip thing.
I said, I"m not letting this happen to me. And there had been some journalists who had been asking me for a long time to-you know, to volunteer that I was gay. I said no, I"m not going to volunteer it. Because I want to be able to say it"s not a big deal. How could I volunteer something and say it"s not a big deal? You"ve got to ask me. But they didn"t want to ask me, because they wanted it to look like they didn"t care. So finally we cut through all the bulls.h.i.t-finally the Boston Globe asked me. I think they were afraid it would break somewhere else. So they asked me, and I said, yes.