My political awakening came during the 1972 presidential campaign. I was a teenager supporting George McGovern against Richard Nixon. I couldn’t have explained it very well at the time, but Nixon struck me as everything that was wrong with American politics.

Looking back, I suppose I became the Donald Segretti of the McGovern for President campaign in my home town of Needham, Massachusetts. My contribution to political dirty tricks consisted of a bottle of paste and a movie poster. The Godfather had just been released, and a giant poster hung in the movie theater in the center of town. If memory serves, it featured the famous image of the Godfather manipulating puppet strings. Some friends and I pasted a photograph of Richard Nixon over Marlon Brando’s face.

We thought it was hilarious.

Back then, I wasn’t thinking in terms of political philosophy or party platforms. Like most teenagers, I absorbed my politics from the people around me so my politics were borrowed long before they became my own. My parents were committed Democrats, and my sister was active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It simply felt natural that I would become one too. Over the next fifty years, I came to understand much more deeply the ideals that first drew me to the party. They are values I still hold today. I am simply no longer certain the party itself does.

Although I was too young to appreciate John F. Kennedy’s presidency, I grew up surrounded by its ideals. Like millions of young Americans, I took seriously his challenge to ask not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. Those words were more than a memorable speech. They described a way of thinking about citizenship. Government existed not simply to provide benefits or solve problems, but to create opportunities for ordinary people to build meaningful lives while asking each of us to contribute something in return.

Those ideas stayed with me.

After graduating from college and a few journalism gigs, I applied to the Peace Corps and was accepted to teach English in French West Africa. For me, the Peace Corps was one answer to Kennedy’s call. I wanted to be part of something larger than myself. I wanted, in whatever small way I could, to leave the world a little better than I found it. I’ve tried to live by that rule ever since.

Instead, I chose another path, accepting a position working for John Olver, a Massachusetts state senator who was widely regarded as one of the smartest liberals in the State House. A few years later, after returning to graduate school to earn my MBA, I even explored running for the Massachusetts legislature myself. With Barney Frank’s encouragement, I gathered enough signatures at Roche Brothers and, yes, even at the town dump, to qualify for the Democratic primary........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)