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June 2008 Stories

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Congressman Steve Pearce - A Sense for Business

Congresswoman Heather Wilson- A Sense of Place

Congressman Tom Udall - A Sense of History

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By Sabra Brown Steinsiek

Heather Wilson grew up in a small town in New Hampshire and went on to become a graduate of the Air Force Academy, earned a D.Phil. in international studies from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, served on the National Security Council (NSC) as director for the European Defense Policy and Arms Control, was appointed to cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families department, raised three children and has served 10 years as U.S. congresswoman. Some critics claim she has not made many friends with her republican constituency, especially women.

“I must have been out of my mind.” U.S. Representative Heather Wilson laughs as she recalls her first campaign. “Being a member of Congress was never part of my life plan. When Steve Schiff became ill in 1998, Senator Pete Domenici called me. I remember it was a Thursday night, and I was working in Santa Fe. _e senator said he was coming to New Mexico that weekend and wanted to talk to me about running for Congress, so we met and talked about the challenges facing the country. _en he called on Sunday afternoon and said that if I would run, he’d help me. _at was eight days before the filing deadline.

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into. At the time, there was a state senator [Phil Maloof] from a very prominent New Mexico family on the democratic side. When Steve Schiff died, we ended up in a special election. It was pretty brutal, and I’d have never been able to do this if it weren’t for Pete Domenici.

“Sometimes I look back now after gaining 10 years of campaign experience, politics, and seeing how things work and wonder why I thought I could win in a democratic district against a billionaire state senator named Maloof. Any rational person would have said ‘this is nuts,’ but we did it anyway.”And Wilson, only the second female member of Congress from New Mexico, has continued to win every two years in a district that consistently votes Democrat. But who is the woman behind the title?

Heather Wilson is a small-town girl from Keene, New Hampshire, daughter of a pilot and a nurse. Her love of flying comes from her grandfather and dad. “My grandfather lied about his age to join the Royal Air Force in World War I, then he flew during the Second World War as well. My father earned his pilot license at 16, went into the Air Force right after high school, and was in the service for a couple of years, then went back home and was in civil aviation.” In a bit of foreshadowing, Doug Wilson ended up as a crew chief at Walker Airfield in Roswell, New Mexico.

Despite her father’s death when Heather was only seven years old, she says, “I had a pretty normal life growing up. My grandfather and grandmother were strong influences in my life. I always knew that no one in my family had ever gone to college, but, for some reason, that was never a question in my mind. I was going to go to college.

“There was always a responsibility to the community and service to the country as part of our family. I can’t tell you what party my parents were registered as. We never talked about politics at home. That was never an issue of conversation at the dinner table, but I can tell you that if you didn’t get up off the sidewalk at the Memorial Day parade when the flag went by, you would get hauled up by the scruff of your neck. We were a patriotic family, committed to service to the country and the community. That’s what I wanted to do.

“At one time, I was kind of interested in working at a hospital, in medicine or something like my mother. One time I was thinking about being a lawyer. I didn’t have any idea about what kind of doors were out there. So I ended up being continually surprised as I grew up and got an education.

“When the Air Force Academy opened up to women, I was a junior in high school. And that looked kind of different and exciting because of my family’s history in aviation.” Wilson was nominated and accepted to the class of 1982, one of 153 women in the third class at the academy to admit women.

When asked about being one of the first women at the academy, she says, “Going to a service academy was hard enough. I didn’t really realize it so much at the time but, reflecting on it afterwards, a little older and a little wiser, I not only had to do everything every kid has to do in a service academy—keeping your grades up, the military things, the physical fitness things—but at the same, time women cadets had the additional responsibility to change the attitudes of the people we were serving with about whether we should be there in the first place. It was an additional responsibility the guys in my class didn’t have. They didn’t have to prove they were worthy of being there or change the attitudes of people towards women in the service. Most of the cadets I was with, my peer group, pretty much accepted we were there. They’d gone to coed high schools, and it wasn’t a big deal, but for some of the officers, it was quite a change.”

She speaks highly of her time in the academy. “There were good days and not very good days. It’s always better in hindsight than it was at the time. But I thought it was a challenge. I was determined to do well and succeed there, get an education, and I did.” She earned her BS from the academy, and, as a Rhodes scholar, went on to Oxford where she earned both her masters and doctorate in philosophy.

After Oxford, she moved on to become the director for European Defense Policy and Arms Control on the NSC staff from 1989-1991. It was during this time that she accepted a theater invitation from an Albuquerque attorney who had taught a law class at the Air Force Academy. They’d stayed in touch over the intervening nine years.

She and Jay Hone were married. “I started a small business (Keystone International, Inc.) and became a parent three times…once by adoption (now adult son, Scott) and twice by birth, Joshua (14) and Caitlin (11).” The family tradition of service continued, with Jay serving in the National Guard for 30 years while Heather took on an active role in the community, running for superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools before being appointed by Gov. Gary Johnson as cabinet secretary of the New Mexico, Children, Youth and Families Department from 1995-1998.

How does she balance a demanding job with family responsibilities? “Large amounts of caffeine,” she says with a laugh. “My scheduler here is wonderful. She signed up to kind of air traffic control everyone’s schedules. And the kids’ schedules are nuts now, too. Both of them are active in sports, and Joshua is active in Boy Scouts. With a teenager and a fifthgrader, we’re trying to make it all mesh.

“On (a recent) Saturday, Caitlin had a soccer tournament. I was there for the first game, then had three events before I came back and picked her up. I had to fly to Roswell so we arranged for her to come with me. We just had a blast. We put her up in the co-pilots seat where the pilot kept remind-ing her, ‘Don’t smile! This is work! Her grandfather, my dad, had been stationed at Walker Field, and we flew in there, and the event was in one of the big-old hangers.

“You’re much more likely to find me at a family barbeque than at a cocktail party. We’re a very, very close family. We love to read and play games. We like to dig in the dirt, and we just put in an herb garden. A church friend of ours gave us the best advice—as your kids grow older, make sure the ‘attractive nuisance’ is at your house. We put in a swimming pool, and it’s working so far, although with all the extra kids, our buying habits at Costco have changed!

“We try to balance things, but there are down sides to this job for my family, so we try to find things that are our version of upside like a front row seat in civics and what it means to serve. And not just with my job. My husband retired in February 2008 from the Air National Guard. One weekend a month, he’d put on his uniform, and he was called up for Katrina and called to go overseas. Caitlin was only 18 months old when I was first elected to the House, so she doesn’t remember a time I was not in Congress. They’ve seen that. They’ve seen our family serves.”

The decision to run for the Senate was reason to call a family meeting. “Probably the best discussion we had about whether to do this or not was with the kids,” Wilson remembers. “We talked about it over a pint of ice cream late into the night.

“A reporter back in Washington had incorrectly reported that I had decided I was going to run when I’d told everyone I was coming back to Albuquerque to talk it over with my family. So it was more rushed than it should have been.

“It was a good conversation. They’re very perceptive. The deciding factor for my son, who’s in the eighth grade, was that he’d figured out that if I did this, I wouldn’t have another campaign until he was out of high school.” She laughed as she noted, “ He’s a very practical guy.”

In running for the Senate, Wilson has given up 10 years of seniority to go back to freshman status. “I think it should be a concern for New Mexico,” she says. “No one’s ever going to replace Domenici. We have to find someone to take his place and I obviously think I’m well suited to that, having served 10 years in the House. I have a fairly broad background with the executive and legislative branches. I think I have the kind of common sense leadership New Mexico has come to expect. There’s a tipping point at which it would be foolish to give up that position of influence. I’m not at that point.

“The Senate is a much smaller group with much greater influence. In some ways, you’re painting on a larger canvas where you can shape issues over a longer period of time. I’d like to be able to spend more time working on constituent issues and major policy issues. I can do that in the Senate.”

Wilson identified three of the major issues that are on the table at this time—national security and the war on terrorism, economic growth and energy policy.

“I think sometimes that the greatest accomplishment of the last few years is what has not happened. We have not had another terrorist attack on American soil since the morning of 9/11, and the more time goes by that we’re successful at preventing another terrorist attack, the more people tend to relax their guard. It has to be people in our government—the Congress and executive branch—who are committed to preventing another terrorist attack by taking the action to keep this country safe. New Mexico makes a disproportionate contribution to national security with three Air Force bases, White Sands Missile Range and two national labs. We need a strong and effective leader for that contribution.

“Second, I think we need to focus in on an economic slow-down. As things wax and wane, we want to make sure we continue policies that encourage strong economic growth. The most important thing is making the 2001 and 2002 tax relief permanent, so we don’t go back to the death tax and the marriage tax and cut the child tax credit in half. We need low taxes, fair regulations and strong economic growth.

“Generally, in respect to business, I’m a big believer in the power of free enterprise and that that’s one of the greatest strengths of America. Government cannot create wealth, but it can create conditions for small businesses and entrepreneurs to create jobs. That means low taxes, fair regulations, good infra-structure and a business climate that is transparent, so people know the risks that they’re taking.

“Third is energy policy. Everybody gets hit in the wallet when they fill up at the pump. We need a balanced alternative energy policy in this country. There are some things you can do in the short term like stockpiling the strategic petroleum reserve but the thing that will have the most impact on pricing at the pump today and tomorrow short-term is consumer behavior. If we all go to get the groceries after dropping the kids at school instead of taking two different trips, the consumer base can have an impact on price. From a policy view, we need a balanced long-term energy plan that makes us less reliant on foreign sources of energy.

“That’s the area where there’s a strong contrast between the three of us who are running. Tom Udall has taken actions that discourage domestic production of oil—he won’t open up Alaska, won’t open up the outer-continental shelf, voted for taxes on oil and gas domestically. So he has been opposed to domestic production but supporting conservation. Every time we decrease production, that’s another dollar we’re sending to OPEC. The greatest accomplishment of the last 10 years in terms of reducing demand for foreign oil is the December 2007 Domenici energy bill that calls for increasing fuel economy by 40 percent by 2020 for cars and light trucks. All the auto manufacturers endorsed it, said they can achieve it. It passed in the Senate, and the President signed, it but Steve Pearce voted against it. He’s not been strong when it comes to conservation. We’re not going to be able to drill our way out of this, we’re not going to be able to conserve our way out of this, we have to do both and have a balanced long-term energy policy, as well as researching energy technology. So you have on the far left, Tom Udall who doesn’t want domestic oil production, on the far right, Pearce doesn’t want conservation, and I want a combination of both.

“There’s a third piece—research into game-changing technology that can get us beyond gasoline consumption. Some folks attribute the increase in corn prices to ethanol here in the U.S. There’s some disagreement on how much that’s had an effect. I’d like to see us get away from ethanol based on foodstuffs to cellulose-based ethanol from the nonfood part of crops, the corn stalk instead of the ear. We need to be moving that way.”

Is there anything she would change if she could? “I’m generally more of a forward-looking than backwards-looking person. Some decisions are 80/20 decisions, and you just feel confident about them. There are other things that are 51/49, and you’re not exactly sure about what’s the right thing to do, so you do the best you can and then move on.”

On her Web site (http://wilson.house.gov), Wilson sums it up best in her own words, “Sometimes, I walk around our beautiful capitol at night and I wonder at the tremendous vibrance and resilience of this great nation. I know my grand-parents would be proud of their only granddaughter serving in Congress. But, in a way, I don’t think they would be surprised. They believed in this country and gave up everything to be a part of it. They taught me to love America, to serve the community and to be a craftsman at my work.”