Tell It Like It Is
For maverick Congressman Mike Thompson the key to success is learning
how
to think for yourself
By tom nugent
Drop by California Congressman Mike Thompson’s office on
Capitol Hill, and you’ll probably be surprised to find a big
blue sign planted in the middle of the hallway that flanks his front
door.
The sign reads: “Today the U.S. National Debt is: $7.8
trillion. Your share of the National Debt: $29,000.
“This message brought to you by the BLUE DOG COALITION.”
Push your way past the sign, and you’ll soon find yourself
face to face with a tall, broad-shouldered former U.S. Army paratrooper
who doesn’t mince words when talking about the fast-growing
“time bomb” that is the U.S. National Debt.
“Let’s face it—we can’t keep on borrowing
money in order to pay for things like the Iraq War,” says
Thompson (BA, Public Administration, ’82; MPA, Public Administration,
’96; Distinguished Alumnus, 2000), the fourth-term Democratic
congressman from California’s sprawling First District, which
includes the major wine-producing regions of Napa and Sonoma Counties.
“We can’t keep going the way we’ve been
going,” grumbles Thompson, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam
War, “because all that borrowing has put us on a slippery
slope to bankruptcy. We’ve already got an $8 trillion national
debt, and it’s now projected to hit $10 trillion in the next
couple of years. A lot of people don’t seem to realize it,
but the fact is that foreign countries are holding nearly half of
this [debt] paper, which makes us very vulnerable to them. And giving
them that kind of leverage is a real mistake, no question about
it.
“We can’t keep passing budgets that depend so heavily
on borrowing. Why? Because it’s dishonest budgeting!
All we’re really doing is passing those debts on to the next
generation, which will then have to pay back every single dollar
we so foolishly borrowed.”
Growing up the hard way, in Vietnam
Thompson’s a centrist Democrat—fiscally conservative
but moderate on most social issues—who’s described by
some Washington political pundits as one of the most interesting
and independent-minded members of congress on Capitol Hill. He’s
also a former high school dropout who worked for many years as a
heavy equipment maintenance supervisor in Napa Valley’s wine
industry while also earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees
at California State University, Chico.
Down to earth and plainspoken, Thompson owns a growing reputation
in Washington as a spokesman for the increasingly powerful “Blue
Dog Coalition,” a group of 35 conservative Democrats that
in recent years has become a highly visible presence in the Republican-controlled
House of Representatives.
Ask Thompson to describe his odyssey from agricultural machine operator
to fourth-term U.S. congressman, and he’ll tell you that the
journey probably began in a South Vietnamese jungle, on a brutally
painful morning back in 1970. That was where Thompson says he “began
to take life seriously” and to “ask some difficult questions”
about the society that had sent him to fight an unpopular war 13,000
miles from home.
On that morning in South Vietnam, U.S. Army Sergeant Mike Thompson
was leading a combat patrol as a member of the Army’s 173rd
Airborne Brigade of paratroopers—a highly decorated unit that
would suffer more than 1,700 casualties during the decade-long war
against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. An easygoing, fun-loving
young man who’d grown up in St. Helena, California, Thompson
had quit high school after his junior year and signed up with the
paratroopers in search of excitement and foreign travel. Instead,
he walked head-on into a disaster—after his platoon’s
“point man” stepped on a landmine and detonated an explosive
that killed him instantly.
Standing only 10 yards distant, Thompson was hammered to the earth
in a blizzard of shrapnel. During the next few months, as the doctors
worked to fix his legs, the kid from St. Helena would have plenty
of time to review his life and ask himself searching questions about
his uncertain future.
“I guess Vietnam was where I really started to grow up,”
says the thoughtful congressman. “That was 1970, and the morale
on the ground was very low. I don’t think anybody in our unit
really wanted to be there, by the time I arrived on the scene.
“We did our jobs, of course, and we did our best to live up
to our vows to protect the country. But I think that experience
taught many of us that we needed to begin learning about things
like foreign policy and military strategy and geopolitics.”
Home again
After being awarded the Purple Heart, Thompson would return to Napa
Valley—and to the same textbooks and classrooms he’d
spurned only a few years before. During the late 1970s and early
1980s, while working as a maintenance supervisor in Napa Valley’s
wine industry, Thompson would put himself through college at CSU,
Chico. His major, understandably enough, would turn out to be public
administration in the political science department.
Within a decade—and shortly before returning to Chico to earn
a master’s degree—Thompson would find himself representing
the North Coast as a state senator (1990–1998) in Sacramento,
where he would manage to nail down an important assignment as chair
of the state budget committee.
After eight years of learning how government works, Thompson would
take the advice of several political colleagues and enter the 1998
race for congress in the state’s First District, which sweeps
south from the Oregon border through several counties dominated
by the local wine industry.
Thompson won that race going away—and never looked back. After
resounding victories in three subsequent elections, he’s now
solidly positioned as a powerful incumbent who last January was
named to the most influential committee in the U.S. Congress, Ways
and Means, which controls the purse strings of the federal government.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, after naming Thompson to the
most sought-after committee position in the chamber, said, “Mike
obviously has the talent and experience to successfully build on
the impressive legacy already established by House Democrats who
have served on Ways and Means. He will be a vital voice on the committee—and
a voice that insists on both ‘pay as you go spending’
and fiscal responsibility.”
Added Republican Congressman George Radanovich of California’s
19th District (Mariposa), a key member of the 250-member House and
Senate Wine Caucus co-founded by Thompson a few years ago: “Mike
and I work on different sides of the aisle, but I can’t say
enough good things about him as a representative of California’s
First District.
“Mike is smart and thoughtful and down to earth—and
unlike some of the members of this institution, he doesn’t
take himself too seriously. I think he’s an outstanding lawmaker,
even if he is a Democrat, and we’ve worked very well together
on wine issues, ever since the day he arrived in congress.”
Taking a stand
Given his background as a Vietnam combat veteran, Thompson’s
decision to vote against the Oct. 11, 2002, resolution that authorized
the U.S. president to invade Iraq caused more than a little disquiet
in the White House and the Pentagon—even though the measure
eventually carried by a 296–133 margin.
Ask Thompson what it was like to risk his career by voting against
a powerful chief executive only 13 months after the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, and he will point out that he “fully supports
the troops on the ground in Iraq” but that the war “wasn’t
thought through, and it wasn’t carefully planned, and it hasn’t
been financed properly, from the very beginning.”
“I voted against the resolution because I wasn’t convinced
that our military intervention was the best solution to the problems
there,” says Thompson. “I’m also deeply concerned
about the way we seem to be financing this war, through ‘supplemental’
appropriations that we keep tacking onto previous budgets. Of course,
we have to provide our troops with the very best equipment and supplies
that we can find—that’s absolutely essential—but
we shouldn’t be doing it by resorting to this ‘backdoor’
fiscal approach.”
Like other members of the Blue Dog Coalition, Thompson has been
arguing for a long time that the country ought to take a “pay
as you go” approach to financing the war, rather than hiding
the true costs in “supplementals” and borrowing money
to pay them. “That kind of dishonest budgeting is totally
inappropriate in my view,” says Thompson, “and it’s
going to drive us into bankruptcy as a nation, if we don’t
find a way to put the brakes on it soon.”
Unpredictable and independent-minded from the day he arrived on
The Hill in 1999, Thompson has raised more than a few eyebrows on
other issues, as well. He’s an enthusiastic proponent, for
example, of allowing medical patients to use marijuana for pain
relief, provided they have a doctor’s prescription for the
controlled substance. Even though this controversial proposal has
almost no chance of being passed by the Republican-dominated House,
he shakes his head and says, “Every year since I’ve
been here, there’s been a bill introduced that would allow
people who are quite painfully ill to use marijuana under the supervision
of a doctor to relieve the pain of very serious diseases. But congress
has never expressed any interest in doing anything about that bill.
As a result, you now have a situation where the Department of Justice
can expend their valuable resources to bust 70-year-old grandmas—elderly
folks who are simply using the stuff to relieve the pain of their
cancer.”
Thompson is also a proponent of stem cell research, and recently
teamed up with several other House members, both Democratic and
Republican, to sponsor legislation that would increase funding for
hotly disputed research on human embryonic tissues.
Like the fabled Blue Dogs, for whom he now serves as both caucus
treasurer and a leading spokesman, Thompson insists on deciding
issues “one by one, and each one on its merits—rather
than on ideological principles or rigid instructions from the party
leadership. If there’s one thing that can be said of the Blue
Dogs, it would probably be that we think for ourselves!”
‘Education, education, education!’
Thompson describes his years as an eager college student at Chico
in the late 1970s as exciting. “An amazing experience, to
enroll in college after having been a high school dropout,”
he says with a delighted chuckle, as he recalls his busy days on
campus. Thompson and his wife, Janet, both went back to school at
that time (she got her nursing degree) while raising their two young
sons, Chris and Jon, “so we really had to scramble at times,”
he says.
“We hung out with the older students, and also some of the
professors, and it was really an exciting time for us, as re-entry
students with a real thirst for knowledge. You know, it’s
one thing to go to college right out of high school, and maybe take
it for granted a little bit. But we had been out in the world, and
we had seen enough to know how important education was.
“I can remember sitting in those political science classes,
and getting caught up in the excitement of the ideas we were discussing—and
then sitting down with the same professor later in the week, over
a potluck supper, and really digging at the material we had worked
on in the classroom. That was an ideal way to get an education,
it seemed to me, and it certainly served me well during my later
years in the [California] Senate and also in congress.”
A passionate angler and hunter who loves to slip off into the wilderness
areas of the North Coast whenever possible, Thompson says his experience
as a post-Vietnam War college student taught him that “there’s
nothing as important as learning about how your government works,
and about how it fits into the larger world of the 21st century.”
“If there’s one single idea that I could get out there
to the American people,” he says, “it would be the importance
of learning more about the issues that face us as a nation, right
now. We should care less about the ‘runaway bride’ from
Georgia—and more about the ‘runaway budgets’ that
this country keeps putting out!”
Thompson is passionate about the importance of education. “If
we’re going to compete successfully in a world that’s
changing every single day, and if we’re going to find a way
to get our own financial house in order and stop all this deficit
financing of our government, it has to start with education, education,
education.
“That’s what I learned at Chico State—and that’s
the gospel I preach every single day on Capitol Hill!”
About the author
Freelance writer Tom Nugent is a former Detroit Free Press
and People magazine reporter. He lives in Hastings, Michigan. |
