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Jamin Raskin announces candidacy for District 20 senate seat

On January 25th, Jamie Raskin and his family hosted his first official campaign event at his Takoma Park home on Holly Avenue. The following is a copy of his speech.

Welcome to our home. First I want to apologize for these strange Republican weather systems we've been experiencing today. I am honored to be joined by so many wonderful friends and family and neighbors.

When Tabitha was in kindergarten up the street at Takoma Park Elementary School, her class was learning about multiculturalism and she came home and said: "Daddy, in my class, we have seven African-Americans, six white people, four Asian-Americans, three Hispanic Americans and two absent-Americans."

Absent-Americans. (I told Tabitha that I think I have some of those absent-Americans in my Constitutional Law class.)

I am here, my friends, to declare my candidacy for the Maryland State Senate from District 20 because I refuse to be an absent American.

When Hannah and Tommy and Tabitha grow up and they have children and those children become Democrats, as they will, they may ask me, "What did you do when the Republicans took over the Governorship and Lieutenant Governorship in Maryland, and captured the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, when they threatened to take a U.S. Senate seat with millions of dollars of special-interest cash, when they turned government into a vast money-making operation and a war machine, when they made torture an element of American public policy, when they spied on Marylanders in the peace movement and took us to war under false pretenses and spent $1.5 billion a week on it, when they raised college tuition rates by 40% and used a guy called "the Prince of Darkness" to fire long-time public servants in Annapolis because they weren't Republicans and turned state lands over to developers and polluters, what did you do?"

And I want to say. "I took a stand. I drew a line, right here in Montgomery County. I heard a calling to fight for the Maryland and the America that I believe in. I was willing to step out of my professional comfort zone to defend our deepest values and to organize Democrats in Maryland to take our state back."

This campaign is about education in the deepest sense, educating Democrats about long-term Republican strategy to take over our state; educating our neighbors and friends about the policy challenges we face and the importance of investing in our collective future; and, above all, educating our children to become the best people and most active citizens they can be.

If I am elected to the Senate, I will be the only representative from District 20 with kids in our public schools. Indeed, I am the only candidate for the legislature from District 20 with kids in the public schools.

So Sarah and I have already invested what's most precious to us in public things. I want to guarantee this investment by fighting to make sure that Montgomery County gets its fair share in the state, that all of our students are thriving, that our teachers get the resources they need, and that we address the serious educational challenges that confront us.

Half of all the kids in Maryland who speak English as a second language live in Montgomery County and a huge number of them live in our district. We need to make sure that we are investing in the proper language education, both for kids and for parents.

We have schools in Montgomery County that are not even making acceptable progress toward state standards and one-third of them are in our district. As an educator, a father, a citizen, I don't accept that. This is no time for complacency, lethargy or politics-as-usual. We can do much better and we dare not turn away from our problems.

The Ehrlich administration has demanded a lot from Maryland's college students and graduate students, that is, a lot of money from them and their parents. Tuition has skyrocketed by 40% since Ehrlich took over, and many middle-class families can't figure out how to put their kids through college.

Meantime, in our small state where the land is imperiled by runoff pollution and runaway corruption, where species that flourished in the Chesapeake Bay when I was a boy have vanished, this administration has been selling off public lands to their buddies, taking cash from Jack Abramoff and his cronies. Like President Bush, Governor Ehrlich has a staff infection. It's spreading and it's time to quarantine the values of this administration.

Government priorities today are upside-down. We should be asking more of our college and graduate students, but not more money—more commitment. I want to get them engaged in helping to educate high school, junior high and elementary students. In our universities, we have a surplus of idealism, energy and talent; in our public schools, we have a deficit of public investment, time and individualized personal attention. We can use the surplus of knowledge in the universities to wipe out the educational deficits and achievement gaps in the schools. Let's establish that the highest accomplishment you can reach before graduating college or finishing grad school is to teach a youngster how to read English or how to speak Spanish or how to do calculus or to know the six rights contained in the First Amendment or how to clean up a polluted creek in your community.

I know it can work because of the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project which sends 60 law students every semester into public high schools and junior high schools in Montgomery County and the District to teach a course in the Constitution. We built that program on nothing but the vision of that great Marylander Thurgood Marshall that the Constitution belongs to everyone. We should all teach it, we should all learn it.

Maryland can become the nation's leader in generating waves of learning at every level of schooling. As a State Senator I will make it happen. I will be a champion for educating citizens for active democracy. I will introduce a bill during my first week in office to promote 100% voter registration of all students in the state before they leave high school and they will register to vote in elections with a voter-verified paper ballot trail. Democracy suffers when it's just for some of us, on the inside; it must be for all of us, on the inside and the outside; and in the meantime my campaign is going to launch a voter registration drive to sign up hundreds of new voters from new communities in our district.

But we need to invest in education long before college and high school. We need to bring pre-K education to all 3 and 4-year old kids. Pre-k is critical for language development, emotional intelligence and social competence. Of course it will benefit the poorest kids who tend to arrive at kindergarten significantly behind others in reading, math, general knowledge and social skills. But we know that that kids from all income backgrounds gain in their skill development when they participate in high-quality pre-K programs.

We are not going to educate new generations of Americans simply by testing them to death. It may take a village to teach a child, but it takes someone of George W. Bush's and Robert Ehrlich's political philosophy to believe that all we need to do to teach them is test them more frequently. This is like saying the way to take off an extra 50 pounds is just to weigh yourself every day.

I've spent a lot of time in high schools and with high school students, and I can report to you that No Child Left Behind is a better description of this administration's military recruitment policy today than it is of its educational program. We need to go all the way with the Thornton Commission recommendations and build a universally accessible full-day pre-K system in our state.

The question of the environment is also a question of public education. If people understood the long-term public health consequences of federal and state policies undermining the quality of our air, water and land, we would turn away from the spoiled get-rich-quick recklessness of the Bush-Ehrlich Party. We need laws that will require clean cars and green buildings and create the right incentives for home insulation and energy efficiency. We must resist the pressure to pave over close-in farmland. We need political leaders to focus on future generations rather than future campaign contributions.

We are choking on traffic, wasting millions of hours of our time every year sitting in cars. (The only saving grace is that you get to see bumper stickers like the one I saw last week, which said, "My child is an honor student. My president is an idiot.")

But it's hard for me to see what our comprehensive transportation strategy is today. The ICC is not that. Whatever its other merits, it's not going to affect traffic on the Beltway positively and it's going to soak up a million dollars a week for the next five years from the general fund. But this is where we are.

We need a comprehensive public transportation strategy. We need to invest in major road improvements and construction, better bus service and expanded mass transit that will give us precious time back with our families. We need to break the logjam over the inner Purple Line light rail system by designing a political strategy to get it done. Imagine what our area would be like today had we not made a visionary investment back in the 1970's in the Metro system. Every day it moves more than a half-million people what if all those people were driving instead? We need to be equally visionary today about expanding mass transit and making it convenient, beautiful and conducive to positive growth.

Now, I'm advised not to talk about this because people don't really like lawyers, but I have used my legal education to fight for justice. We just won a big battle against an absentee landlord from Great Falls, Virginia who allowed an elevator to be out for more than five months in a building about ten minutes away from here and then wanted to evict all the tenants and go condo. My clients found no solace in the political system but I worked with the tenants association and the amazing Pat Powell to bring a successful action against the landlord for the defective tenancy and, with the help of some great friends at Arnold and Porter, we have been able to work out a deal with Montgomery Housing Partners to take over the building and save 28 units of housing that will remain affordable for low and middle-income families in our community. This is all pro bono work. Imagine what I could do if I had a little political power.

Governor Glendening appointed me to chair the State's Higher Education Labor Board and, in five years, we wrote a set of rules for union organizing, representation elections and collective bargaining on the state's university and college campuses. There are now more than 7,000 new people in Maryland who belong to unions and have participatory voice at work today. We had to educate the educators about the importance of hearing the people who clean the offices, type the letters, provide the security and keep the buildings in good, working shape. We had to get workers to feel invested in the success of our universities. But today Maryland is a leader in higher education, and one reason for that is we have taken the high road not the low road to success. In Annapolis, I will be a passionate voice not only for teachers and students but for the people who work behind-the-scenes on campus and in every other institution to make our economy thrive.

And this is why I have given help to the Campaign for America's Future in its impressive WalMart Campaign. There is no reason for full-time workers for billion-dollar corporations to depend on public assistance for health care. We need to fight for universal health coverage for everyone, but until we get there, the biggest businesses should not be able to skip out on the responsibilities so many small businesses live up to.

My buddy William Klein told me that many of his neighbors don't know who their state senator is or what the state senate does. My friends, when I am State Senator, you will know who your State Senator is. And you will know what I am doing. And I will know what is on your mind. I will hold regular town meetings all over the district and I will stay in close touch with you; we will be working together to change Maryland. As Paul Wellstone used to say, "We will take this journey together."

My friends, this is going to be a long and exciting race and we need to take our message of progressive change for the future to all of the Democrats in District 20 from Hillandale and Four Corners to White Oak and downtown Silver Spring to Takoma Park. I hope you will join me in building a huge grassroots movement here like the one created by our wonderful Congressman Chris Van Hollen, who I have always supported, and I am indeed honored to have the support of so many of the key people who made the Van Hollen phenomenon happen, like Dorothy Davidson and Esther Gelman and Peter Kovar and Paula Kowalczuk and the amazing Howard Kohn, who is the conscience and center of moral gravity in Takoma Park.

Now, elections are by nature competitive, and that's a good thing. As our great new state party chair Terry Lierman told me a few weeks ago right here you know, he's the only Democratic Party chairman in America who makes house calls—competition is good in business; it's good in sports; it's good in politics. When it's healthy and fair, it can bring out the best in all of us.

But, as I learned from my father, competition must always take place in the context of community. Politics is competitive but it does not have to be negative or personal or mean or destructive or petty. It shouldn't be any of these.

I have principled differences with the incumbent over issues and I'm sure the reverse is true as well. But we are both Democrats and we can discuss these policy differences in a respectful and constructive way. I hope that we can have not one or two but many community-sponsored forums and debates over the course of the next eight months to give our fellow Democrats a rich substantive sense of how we might differ as leaders of our community in the many years to come. We have nothing to fear from the dialogue and our dialogue must never be based on fear.

Public office is not a form of private property. It belongs not to any individual or party or machine, but to the people and we earn the right to occupy it only through our passion for service, our sense of responsibility for the future and our sense of proportion about the meaning of things. I will be a different kind of State Senator: I am a champion of campaign finance reform and I would have voted and I will vote-—to lower contribution limits from $4,000 to $2,000 in our state. It's $2,100 at the federal level and look how corrupt Washington is even under that system. Annapolis could theoretically be twice as bad. But the incumbent introduced the bill to double limits on contributions from wealthy donors, so a single donor could give $20,000 rather than $10,000 a year. How many people in Maryland can even give $10,000 a year to state legislative candidates, much less $20,000? This is a question of democracy: who are we going to serve in office?

I will vote to lower all these limits because most of the donors who really can and do give at that level are special interests trying to purchase special favors and special legislation. I support and I will fight for the common good, and that means universal pre-k, universal health coverage and universal voter registration. I will not take gambling money. I will not take money from corporations who lobby me.

I oppose casino gambling in Maryland, from Silver Spring to Ocean City. This is the economic low road. I believe strongly in judicial independence and the separation of powers in our state.

I oppose the death penalty, a morbid lottery infected with racial and geographic bias that lands not on the people who committed the worst crimes but on the people who have the worst lawyers. If the death penalty deterred crime, the safest states in America would be Florida and Texas. It makes life coarse and cheap, and I don't care what the polls say, I'm against it.

I am opposed to the Iraq War. I marched against it before it started with my son Tommy. I would not have voted for a pro-Iraq War Resolution in the Maryland State Senate, much less sponsored one. This war is not only costing the lives and limbs of thousands of young Americans and Iraqis but robbing the people of America of hundreds of billions of dollars that we need to develop our communities. I support the city of Baltimore and the dozens of other municipalities who are calling for an end to these policies.

And I oppose discrimination in every form. This means, obviously, that I am categorically and unalterably opposed to marriage discrimination. My friend Heather Mizeur has the exact same right to marry her life partner Deb as I have to marry my beloved life partner Sarah. Their marriage in no way threatens the strength of our vows or the happiness of our family. We wish them and our other gay and lesbian friends nothing but happiness and equal rights. I am not one of those Democrats who will equivocate or duck or waver or dance around the subject. I will be an active and visible statewide leader for civil rights and equality for all Marylanders. I am proud to have many gay and lesbian friends working on my campaign and I hope to be invited to their weddings soon and I guarantee you I will be campaigning hard there.

And, as my former student and friend Ryan Butler told me, "If you don't like gay marriage, don't get one."

I will fight for all of the state money and projects that we need in our area with every last ounce of energy and vigor I have, but I will never ask the people of District 20 to choose between energetic constituent service and their core political values. We can have both. When I go to Annapolis, I will fight for solutions and I will never become part of the problem. District 20 is the most progressive legislative district in the state, and we deserve the most effective leadership for our priorities.

Now this is going to be a fascinating campaign. Already the Washington Post tells us that some incumbents are meeting behind closed doors to fend off the rising tide of reform insurgency and my opponent is prominently quoted as saying this insiders' meeting, which took place on Sunday, just three days before my announcement (although I'm sure that was a coincidence), was "long overdue."

Well, some of my friends have said, "Jamie, you can win cases for high school students and teachers, tenants and unions, you can create a movement for civic literacy, but you cannot take on the political machine."

But let me say this. I was born ten minutes from here. My family, thankfully, lives nearby, my nieces Emily and Maggie and Mariah and Phoebe and Lily and my nephews Zachary and Boman, my brother Noah, my brother-in-law Keith, and my sisters Erika and Eden, my brother and sister in-law, Kenneth and Abby, my in-laws, Herb and Arlene, and my children go to school at Sligo Creek Elementary and Pine Crest Elementary in Silver Spring and Takoma Middle in Takoma Park. My wife walks to the Metro every day. We shop here. We live here. We play soccer here. This is our community and this is where we will take our stand. We will not be scared off by machine politics.

Ghandi once said, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

For those machine insiders who believe that politics is all about money and power, I say, "Remember why we are Democrats. We believe that politics can be about something more than that. It must be about something more than that."

For those voters asking whether we can win, I say, "Join us, because we will."

For those politicians out there saying, "Forget it, you just can't beat the machine," I say, "Watch us do it."

We often talk to our kids about the famous passage from Rabbi Hillel, "If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am for myself only, who am I? And if not now, when?"

For me—for us—the time is now. This is no time to retreat to our private spaces to let politics-as-usual take us down the wrong path in our nation and our state.

I have to close with a story about the young Tip O'Neill, who spent an entire year campaigning for Congress and saw his neighbor Mrs. O'Brien on Election Day and she told him that she had thought about it and had decided to vote for him even though he hadn't asked her to. O'Neill was stunned that this was even a question and he said, "Mrs. O'Brien, I've known you for 18 years, I cut your grass in the summer, I shovel your walk in the winter, and it never occurred to me that I needed to ask for your vote." And Mrs. O'Brien said, "Tommy, let me tell you something, everyone likes to be asked." Well, I've already asked our wonderful next-door neighbors Nan and Martin and Lynn and John to vote for me and Frances and Hal across the street. And I want to formally ask you, too.

My friends, I need your ideas, your networks, your resources, your help, and, yes, I need your vote. Thank you for being here. On to the campaign.

This transcript was copied with permission from Friends Of Jamin Raskin.

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