Tammy Baldwin - interview with Rep from Wisconsin - Interview

Progressive, The, Jan, 1999 by Ruth Conniff

In November, Representative Tammy Baldwin (Democrat of Wisconsin from the Second Congressional District) became the first woman Wisconsin has elected to the U.S. Congress, and the first openly lesbian politician ever sent to Washington, D.C., to represent the voters in any state. Baldwin is accustomed to being a pioneer. After graduating from Smith College and the University of Wisconsin Law School, she was elected to the Wisconsin legislature six years ago at the age of thirty. She was the youngest woman and the first openly gay person among her colleagues.

A local reporter remarked, "She'll make history just by showing up for work." She did more than that. Baldwin won the respect of her colleagues and rose to become a committee chair in her first year. She racked up 100 percent lifetime voting records from labor and environmental groups. And she was hugely popular with her constituents--especially students, whose interests she once championed as a city council member from the university neighborhood.

Nonetheless, in her race for Congress, she faced a formidable challenge from her opponent, Jo Musser, a moderate Republican woman.

Baldwin ran on a platform considered too far left by many of her fellow Democrats. She championed single-payer, universal health-care coverage, public financing for day care, long-term care for the elderly, and tougher labor and environmental regulations.

Baldwin owes her historic victory to a massive grassroots organizing campaign. In the University of Wisconsin dormitories, floor captains rounded up student votes. Campaign workers throughout the district knocked on doors and got people to the polls. In a year when turnout was supposed to be abysmal, the Baldwin campaign got out so many voters in Madison (turnout was 62 percent) that the city was caught unprepared and the polls had to stay open until 10 P.M. while the clerks photocopied more ballots.

I caught up with Baldwin just after she arrived in Washington for her freshman orientation. We met in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel on Capitol Hill, which was bustling with new members of Congress. On the television set at the bar, CNN was covering the press conference, a few blocks away, where the Republicans were announcing a purge of their leadership. This changing of the guard was brought on by what the Republicans experienced as an electoral disaster--a wave of unexpected Democratic victories in Congressional races all over the country. Baldwin seems delighted to be part of that trend.

"I feel giddy," she says, fingering the NEW MEMBER name tag clipped to her jacket. With her navy blue suit, short blond hair, and button earrings, speaking in a soft, almost girlish voice, Baldwin doesn't stand out on Capitol Hill. But from the start it's clear that things are going to be different. When I spoke with her, she was puzzling over the questionnaire that asks new Representatives to list their spouses and other immediate family members, so they can get special passes to come onto the floor of the House. She didn't know whether to write in the name of her domestic partner. "They have this space for spouse and family," she says. "Does that mean legally?"

Q: What is it like to come to Washington?

Tammy Baldwin: Just arriving here is really humbling. It was the first time since election day that I finally convinced myself that this is real, landing in Washington, seeing the buildings. I've seen them several times as a tourist, but to walk into the Capitol for a meeting, and to go out onto the floor of the House for the first time--it was amazing.

Q: Political experts were surprised by your victory and by the results of the elections around the country. Why do you think you won?

Baldwin: Well, you know, throughout my political career I've always been dealing with the skeptics and the cynics, who say, "This isn't going to be our best candidate to win the primary." And, you know, "She's too progressive, she's too young, she's a woman, she's a lesbian." You hear that, and what was important for us to communicate was just that simple reminder: Hey, folks, this is a democracy, and in a democracy the cynics don't decide who's elected to office unless you let them--unless they're the only ones who vote. We decide. And that's a message that pervaded the entire campaign--stop listening to those people who say, "you can't, you shouldn't, it won't work," and start deciding that we can do it. It was great to watch that build.

The thing I love the most about this job is that moment you connect with someone and they figure out their vote matters, their voice matters, their participation matters. There have been so many times I've been talking to a fourth-grade class, or a college class, or a group of people who are about to be affected by a policy that may pass in a neighborhood in my district, and you see that lightbulb go on and it just makes everything worthwhile.

You know there were several polling places that ran out of ballots. Apparently at one point the city clerk had to go to Kinko's to copy off ballots, and they lined up police officers to dispatch them to the polling places that were without. I have this mental image of the city clerk at the copy machine and the squad cars lined up. I bet that will never happen again. We'll have more ballots.