After more than a year on Capitol Hill, freshman GOP Representative Rick White '75 R-Wash. said he is still surprised by his leap into the national political arena.
With no prior political experience, the Seattle area lawyer ran for Congress in 1994 and, successfully taking advantage of a strong anti-incumbent mood among voters, was elected to the House of Representatives.
"I sometimes think I haven't paid my dues," White said in an interview with The Dartmouth yesterday morning, after speaking to Director of the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences Linda Fowler's Government 3 class on the American political system about his experiences.
A political start
It was at the College that White first got involved in politics, when he worked for the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern.
He said he was responsible for door-to-door campaigning in the nearby town of Enfield, N.H., and justified his involvement with a Democratic campaign by citing figures showing that one-third of the House GOP freshman class were former Democrats.
"Dartmouth had a huge impact on me ... the sort of education you get here, the process you go through... has been hugely significant," he said of his years as an undergraduate French major at the College.
In addition to acting in student plays and working on WDCR's broadcast team, he said he was "the worst member of the ski team for two years running."
While White said the College has changed since his departure, most notably in the increase in female students, he said he found the campus "reassuringly the same in some ways."
"I think the changes, by and far, were good changes," he said.
After graduating, White said he worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico for a year, then studied at the University of Paris and worked as a translator. He also spent time working as a dock foreman and on a factory assembly line.
After graduating Georgetown University Law School, he worked as an international lawyer in the capital, then developed an insolvency practice in Seattle.
White said his work as a bankruptcy lawyer was valuable preparation for politics.
"It was a wonderful background," he said. "If you have to identify a financially insolvent institution, you have to look at the government."
Adjusting to Congress
Representing Washington state's first congressional district, White's vision of government is an activist one.
"The main theme of my campaign is that if you don't like the way your government is run, change your government," he said.
White said he found it difficult to adjust to Congress's political climate."I had a hard time getting people to tell me the right thing to do," he said, explaining that his aides were more concerned with the political effects of taking a stand on issues.
"Nobody would ever get down to the substance," White said, which led him to impose "a rule on no politics" during bill discussions.
He said his office now concentrates on what effect legislation will have on the people. "If we were the king, what would we do?" he asked.
White said one of his more urgent priorities as a congressman is to reform the federal government's entitlement programs.
"Every Republican representative voted to reform three of the four major entitlement programs, [Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and welfare]," he said.
White also said there is a need for restrained government spending, and said that the notion of being "reelected on the basis of getting your people more than they deserve" is outdated.
White said his second priority is to keep abreast of legislation impacting his district, which is comprised of the northern suburbs ringing Seattle.
He said one of the more pressing issues affecting his district was regulation of the Internet, since the headquarters of the software giant Microsoft are located in his district.
White said his other major priority is to keep the values that led Washington state voters to elect him to office, while spending the majority of his time outside the district.
"In D.C. ... there's this insular attitude," White said. He said he is trying to combat this attitude by returning to his district as much as possible and holding town meetings with his constituents.
He also said that he has "four kids in the [Bainbridge Island, Wash.] public schools, which helps me keep a pulse on the public."
Facing reelection
As a member of the sizable freshman class of GOP representatives, White said he went through "basic training" with the members of his class and that he has "more interaction with them than anyone else."
While he said that the class's inexperience causes them to be "a little bit of bumbling idiots sometimes," he praised their efforts.
"This is a much different Congress than in the past ... It's not as much fun to serve in the Congress anymore ... and it's exactly the way it should be," he said.
"It's not the pay and the perks and the commuting," he said, but rather the chance to influence the national agenda that should call people to serve.
White faces reelection in November, and he said his district has been a "battleground" in previous years. Yet the congressman said that, if elected, he still expects to keep his promise not to serve more than five terms.
"We're going to have an opportunity to bust the budget ... Ten years is certainly enough."
And while he strongly opposes President Bill Clinton in the presidential race, saying that the incumbent executive "lacks an inner core of beliefs," he said he is not ready to voice support for a specific GOP candidate.
"I got some great advice from Slade Gorton '49," White said, referring to the senior Washington senator. "He told me to 'stay scrupulously neutral.'"
