#8
Mark Strama
Mark Strama was married in Playa del Carmen, a tourist town near Cancun. Despite being a state representative in Texas, he was one of the least famous people at his own wedding.
Strama’s fiancée (now wife) was an Austin-based television journalist named Crystal Cotti. Present at the wedding were high-profile Texas lawyers and politicos. The doctor who delivered NFL quarterback Vince Young was present. So was journalist Lisa Ling. The Austin American-Statesman was there to chronicle the whole thing.
The story was thorough, covering every part of the wedding—except Strama. The notoriously low-profile state representative was hardly more than background noise in his own region’s coverage.
“Mark is just different,” said Paul Stekler, a documentary filmmaker and professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “He’s someone who’s secure in who he is, who loves helping people, but could also live without the power of office.” Stekler also praised Strama’s “uncommon intelligence” and “the ability to put people around him at ease.”
When it comes to voters, Strama’s goal is to educate them early, engage them in the election, and push accessible and modern methods of registration.
Strama was the director of operations for Rock the Vote, and was key in registering over a million first-time voters. His Campaign Academy program focused on exposing high school and college students to the campaign process.
“Mark has been a tireless advocate for engaging people, especially young people, in the civic debate and the electoral process,” said Mark Shilling, director of Shilling Public Affairs, an advocacy and communications group. “His goals of improving education, civic participation, and access to technology are evident through not just his political work, but his community engagement as well.”
Strama founded the first company to register voters online, which was acquired by Election.com in 2000. According to Strama, the site helped to register some 700,000 voters that year.
He can see past the next election cycle, making public education, children’s health-care, and renewable energy priorities. Going green in an oil-rich state like Texas might be as popular as rooting for the Redskins, but that hasn’t stopped Strama from publicly expressing a desire for Texas to become this country’s leader in renewable energy technology.
He has recently proposed measures against school bullying, working closely with Equality Texas, a statewide LGBT advocacy organization, to push anti-bullying legislation adjusted for issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Forward-thinking positions like these could one day make Mark Strama an unforgettable name.
Man-to-Man with Mark Strama
Can one be both a good man and a good (i.e., effective) politician?
The short answer is yes, definitely. In fact, of the politicians I know personally, more of them are good men than good politicians—and many of them are both.
Admittedly, I play in what many would consider the minor leagues (the state legislature). Your question refers, I believe, to the ruthless ambition, self-serving machinations, and underlying narcissism that people believe are necessary for political success at the highest levels.
There is a poignant passage in Heilemann and Halperin’s Game Change in which Barack Obama’s advisors describe in detail the extraordinary sacrifices he and his family would have to make if he chose to run for president—sacrifices to which no one in their right mind would voluntarily submit—prompting Obama to reject “the notion that running for president was a task suited only to the borderline mentally ill.”
I do sometimes consider that the higher you want to go in politics, the crazier you have to be, though I find the current president to be a comforting exception to this rule.
In my much smaller world, I interact daily with effective politicians who, though I often disagree vehemently with them on matters of policy, are excellent fathers, grandfathers, husbands, civic group members, congregation members, and community leaders. Indeed, once you get to know some of them outside the political environment, it can be startling to see them practice—or even just passively tolerate—the sometimes vicious devolution of politics that Americans find so discouraging.
Explaining that phenomenon—how good people are co-opted into a system that so many Americans find so frustrating—would take a book, but it’s a book that needs to be written.
If you were making a list of politicians you respect for both their integrity and their dedication to the ideas they believe in, what man—from a party other than your own—would you be sure to put on the list? And why?
This is hard for me to answer because I respect the integrity of most politicians, regardless of their party. However, as the stage gets bigger, it gets harder to find political leaders who do not appear to have compromised their integrity at some level. I admired George H.W. Bush for his international diplomacy, and for supporting bipartisan budget reforms in the early ’90s that contributed to the prosperity and fiscal surpluses of the late ’90s (and that engendered the Pat Buchanan challenge from his own base that undid his presidency).
As an individual, he practiced a politics of cordiality and respect, he was devoted to his wife and family, and he truly believed in public service. On the other hand, his policy reversals on voodoo economics and on reproductive rights illustrate the extent to which big-league politics do seem to bring out the worst in a man.
Same with John McCain. I’ve always admired his advocacy for campaign finance reform, and his personal history of service to the country, but the John McCain who emerged from the gauntlet of Republican presidential primaries two years ago—not to mention the John McCain currently seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate today—strikes me as a politician who simply wants the job too badly. My favorite politicians are generally the ones who would rather be doing something else.
So my list is topped by the Republican Speaker of the Texas House, Joe Straus. He’s principled and smart, and has restored an inclusive and bipartisan atmosphere in the Texas House after unseating an incumbent speaker from his own party. Most people haven’t heard of him yet, but someday I hope they will. They probably won’t, though, because he strikes me as more principled than ambitious, and therefore he may soon be reaching his political limits.
You’ve worked hard to engage young people in the political process. Do you think most young people equate goodness with politicians? If the answer is no, can you blame them?
Every election cycle I run a program called Campaign Academy and spend the summer with 30 bright, committed, optimistic young people who believe in the power of politics to bring about positive change. So my perspective on this is skewed by that experience—these young volunteers obviously see politics as a noble calling, not a pejorative.
In 2008, we saw their generation embrace the political system, inspired by an Obama campaign that empowered grassroots organizers with cutting-edge technology, and by the urgency of the political climate at the time. A young former staffer of mine tells a great story about his experience working for John Edwards in the Iowa caucuses.
They had put all the eggs in the Iowa basket, and had IDed every person who had ever voted in an Iowa caucus before. Based on multiple conversations with each of those voters, they were absolutely certain they were going to win the caucus.
And their predictions were right on the money—among voters who had previously voted in an Iowa caucus, John Edwards was the winner that night. But Barack Obama is president today because he overwhelmingly won the votes of the tens of thousands of first-time voters that night. They were the margin of his victory in Iowa and throughout the remainder of the campaign.
Since then, an entire industry of political professionals has dedicated itself to making sure those young people who turned out in 2008 never vote again. That is what explains the entrenched, monolithic obstructionism being practiced by Republican operatives today in Washington, D.C.
All the polls show it’s clearly not helping their standing with the American public—but it’s taken the air out of the president’s balloon, and that’s exactly what it’s intended to do. The more unseemly, the more unattractive, the more frustrating they can make the political process, the less likely you will see the surge in youth turnout that occurred in 2008 sustained into the future.
And it appears to be working. Can I blame young people for falling victim to a cynical strategy to suppress their enthusiasm for politics? No. Can I do my best to illuminate that strategy for what it is, and hopefully reverse its effect? Yes.
We believe that a good man owns up to his mistakes. Tell us about a time when you fell short of “goodness,” however you define it.
During my first term in the legislature, following an interim hearing of the Juvenile Justice Committee, one of the advocates for the youth locked up in the Texas juvenile detention system approached me and urged me to look more deeply into allegations of misconduct by guards and prison administrators.
He said the system was profoundly corrupt, that kids were being abused on a widespread basis. This advocate was someone I did not know well, and while I have since come to respect both his credibility and his passion, at the time I thought he came on too strong, and that his passion on the issue overwhelmed his reason.
I had a hard time believing there were systemic abuses requiring conspiracies and cover-ups throughout the large bureaucracy that is the Texas Youth Commission.
I was wrong, and he was right. One year later, the whole sordid scandal was exposed by a Justice Department investigation and some high-quality investigative journalism. But I had been told of the problem a year earlier, and had failed to take action to protect those children.
We receive citizen complaints all the time that often can’t be substantiated, but now we make sure we perform adequate due diligence on each of them to make sure we’re not neglecting our responsibilities. I will always regret not having been able to uncover and document the systemic abuses at TYC soon after I was told of them.
The Top-10 Good Men Politicians
10) Mitch Daniels
8 ) Mark Strama
6) Jeff Flake
5) Al Franken
3) Cory Booker
2) Paul Ryan
1) Carl Levin
Maggie Thatcher is the only good politician I know of. The reason is that she is dead. Alive, she was a feminine version of Hitler only worse. Now she is were all politicians should be, in hell.
They promise us a better world yet when they are elected they turn their backs on us and sell out to the ruling people with power. It will never change unless we start to fight for what is rite instead of just letting it happen and hope it will be better tomorrow.
You left off the two Oregon Senators and the congressman from Seattle Jim McDermott.
Look up quotes of Boris Johnson. He is better than all of these.
Why the HELL is Ron Paul not on this list? You ppl r crazy!! He should be at the TOP!!
Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is a trumped-up plan to facilitate further corporate take-over. When all is said and done, we can vote who gets put in power in the government. We can’t vote on CEOs. I would rather pay my taxes to the government with all its flaws (and even corporate influences) than give more power to big money. And what is with Flake? I am so glad to see someone speaking up about the earmarks, but I think his politicizing of the funding of scientific research mars that. Now we need someone more vocal in defense of honest science than… Read more »
I actually got excited about his website, until I saw Paul Ryan on this list. This is a joke, isn’t it? Paul Ryan? this guy doesn’t have one ounce of integrity in his whole body. Paul Ryan is, excuse my language, the biggest corporate prostitute that has ever existed. He is a complete sold out. He gets his marching orders from the Koch brothers, and those orders are all about destroying the fabric of this great nation: the middle class. Guess what, no middle class = No Democracy. How can you put someone on this list who champions tyranny? You… Read more »
This list is baffling in its inconsistency.
Part of being a good man is showing self-awareness, and the fortitude to live according to one’s convictions – regardless of personal difficulty. Paul Ryan fails this test.
Ryan rose to his current position thanks to the welfare state; specifically Social Security, upon which he attended college.
He advocates for the others an Ayn Rand-inspired level of self-sufficiency, the dismantling of this social safety net.
IOTW: “I got mine – f*ck you”.
This list is now painfully dated, with the revelation about Ryan’s taste in wine and drinking buddies.
How you missed Ron Paul, the most consistent, principled and honest politician of his era, or arguably of any era is beyond me.
Think what you will of his politics, but his candor, his respectful dialogue and his refusal to bend to the powers that be in the name of liberty are second to none.
Interesting that the two single politicians who prohibit the initiation of force and fraud in their politics are absent from the list. From the time of Confucius, all societies have followed this “golden rule”, (outside of government), until their governments based on force and fraud have destroyed the society, usually by murdering millions of innocent civilians in conquest or democide. Jeff Flake, one of the better people on your list, supported protectionist legislation that put non-cartel dairy farmers out of business. All the other politicians are even worse than he is. Russ Feingold, for instance, pushed through “McCain-Feingold”, legislation that… Read more »
Ryan is about where he belongs though #1 would be a better ranking. I see a bunch of tantrum tossing towards Ryan for his stance on gay marriage. And most of it is phony outrage because the same people give Carl Levin a pass regarding his wishy washy stance on repealing DADT. more selective outrage from the professional leftists.
Folks, turn that anger to solving the problem. Too many of our politicians should go home.
How can we limit their terms of service to 2, but not more than 3 terms in office? This needs to be done for the good of this country.
We support their behavior by letting them stay in office. They are not entitled to a government seat for life.
3 times this screen has changed and lost my words——I agree w/Willl 100% read The Powell Memo
Carl Paladino is a “Good Man”
senator bernie sanders is without question the best person in our government today. i wouldn’t feel that i’m overestimating at all in saying that 99% of those in congress are corporate controlled stooges, and bernie is most certainly not. i am also surprised to not see senator russ feingold, the only senator to not vote for the patriot act – in doing so being alone in standing up for our civil liberties – in 2002.
I think the list would make much more sense if you explained why you included these people on the list – each individually, not as a whole – then one cold see the reasoning in it. I would like to read your response, Senator Sanders. Thank-you.
Why not Dennis Kucinich? I am suprised, also.
kucinich sold out true progressives by compromising and going back on his word by signing that atrocity of a health care “reform”.
I love what you’re doing, and needless to say, as a Vermonter I like the Bernie choice. For future consideration, take a look at our current governor, Jim Douglas, who despite being a Republican – is a good man. But my main point……….. you are totally out of your tiny liberal mind to not include our president on your list. I won’t even bother to enumerate, you must have a brain somewhere in there.
No Dennis Kucinich? One of the few who is unbiased…and does not need a speechwriter because he speaks from the heart!
With some of your pollsters, I am surprised Bush/Cheney et al are not on te list!
Where is Dennis Kucinich?
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????!!!!! I can’t imagine what your criteria could be but as a citizen in Jeff Flake’s district I can tell you that he DOES NOT meet my definition of a good man. This man could not care less about his district! In the time I’ve lived in AZ I’ve never heard from him, despite my repeatedly contacting his office. When I complained to his office that he never acknowledges my comments I got a form letter. He has done nothing, and I mean NOTHING for this district. He serves only his corporate overlords. He is in every… Read more »
I was about to leave the same post almost word for word! I live in his district and he only serves one thing… his agenda and his religious beliefs…
I’m shocked – in fact I laughed out loud when I saw his name on this list!!
Dennis Kucinich – Good Guy
Goodmen Project:
put me on local fox about the growing problem of gender bias in the courts, children are being hurt an destroyed because the system wont listen to good men and women are over protected ….
How can Paul Ryan possibly be considered a Good Man when he actively encourages prejudice against gay men and women? He cares not for anyone who is not an extreme right wing evangelical Christian and the right of corporations over the good of his fellowman. By no definition, is this man a Good Man.
nonsense
I’m glad someone thinks as highly of Carl Levin as I do. I am proud of my Michigan senators. They have consistently shown themselves to be team players, not trying to screw over others for their own benefit.
Carl Levin fights for what he believes is right and practicable, and that’s what I want in a representative. He also gives a very well reasoned speech. It’s nice (and a very odd feeling) to have someone Michigan can be proud of.
Including Al Franken on this list pretty much invalidates the rest of the list as Al fails miserably at most of the criteria. Far from being respectful and trying to work with his political opposites, he belittles them every time he is left in charge of the house. Being from Michigan, I concur with putting Carl Levin on top of the list for being a good man. However, he has a completely undistinguished legislative record and basically has taken up space for several decades. Additionally, Michigan has been on of the top 2 tax donor states during Carl’s entire tenure… Read more »