Common Cause President Brings Maine with her to Washington
WASHINGTON, March 21-The staff at Common Cause used to get tired of all the Down East stories the organization’s president, Chellie Pingree would tell. That is, until last summer, when Pingree took them to her North Haven home for a retreat. They had a lobster bake on the beach, did some work and escaped Washington’s oppressive summer heat for a breezy time on Penobscot Bay.
The office now mixes chatter about Allen’s Coffee Brandy and hog’s head cheese with talk of Washington corruption and bringing the Maine Clean Elections system to the national level.
Pingree, who served as the majority leader of the Maine Senate from 1996 to 2000, came to Common Cause after her failed attempt to unseat U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in 2002. After losing, Pingree was contacted by a firm of headhunters looking to fill the recently vacated position of Common Cause president.
Pingree was dubious at first about coming to Washington. “I’d lived in Maine for so long, and I still consider it my home,” she said. But she quickly realized that she would have been here had she won against Collins, and she would be able to go back to Maine often.
Moreover, Common Cause, as one of the oldest people-power lobbying groups, fit well with Pingree’s progressive politics.
“It’s great to be one of the good guys when the bad guys are so bad,” Pingree said in an interview in her office a few blocks from the lobbying den along K Street.
“From a lot of people’s perspective this is one of the worst times in politics in Washington, particularly for the issues we work on,” she said. “Most of our work is around the influence of money in politics, how elections are conducted, whether the votes get counted, things like the ethics of elected officials, and this year has been obviously incredibly busy for us.”
Common Cause was founded by John Gardner, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, in 1970. In a press release that hangs on Pingree’s wall, Gardner spoke of his desire for “public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move they make.”
Gardner wanted his organization to represent everyone, saying that “our agenda must be an agenda for all Americans – for the poor, the comfortable and those in between, for old and young, for black and white, for city dwellers and farmers, for men and women.”
Pingree took over the organization at a time of transition. Just before she arrived, Common Cause had seen its efforts of the previous few years pay off in the form of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, according to Mary Boyle, the organization’s press secretary.
According to Boyle and Chief Operating Officer Sarah Dufendach, Pingree took the group out of its “tunnel vision” and made it focus on issues such as media reform and wider campaign finance reform. Pingree also focused much of the group’s work on the states, recently helping to pass a clean elections system in Connecticut.
Pingree is very hands-on with these issues, according to many on her staff. Barbara Burt, the vice president and director of election reform, who is from Newcastle, said Pingree wants to be treated as a “member of the team.” and She is very engaged at staff meetings, wanting to know what everyone is working on.
Pingree, who is now 50, came to Maine right after she graduated from high school. She grew up in Minnesota on a farm and is a third-generation Scandinavian-American. Pingree met her husband, Charlie Pingree, on an Outward Bound course in Minnesota and soon followed him home to Maine. Mr. Pingree is a member of the Maine landowning family but has no connection with the land-owning company itself..
The Pingrees have since divorced, but not before having three children. Hannah serves North Haven and the surrounding area in the state legislature. Cecily is a filmmaker who is working with her mother on opening up the old Nebo Lodge on North Haven for business this summer. Her son, Asa, is an actor.
When Pingree first came to Maine with her husband in 1971, she recalled, the couple lived in North Haven in a wood cabin with no electricity and no running water. The two had a much-read copy of Helen and Scott Nearing’s book, “Living the Good Life,” and led what Republican gubernatorial candidate Peter Mills called “a hippy-dippy existence.” Charlie got a job on a dump truck and Chellie kept busy making candles and raising vegetables. She also attempted to volunteer at the local high school.
The principal seemed excited, but when the issue came before the school board it took a vote and decided it did not want this aggressive young woman from another state-from “away,” as Mainers sometimes refer to outsiders-to be near their children. This stunned Pingree, she said, and spurred her to go to college so that she could become a science teacher and get her foot in the door of the school.
Pingree has since come to understand what kept her out of the school at first.
“There’s sort of a funny thing,” she said. “I think people in a lot of small towns and in New England, they kinda kick you around a little bit, and if you stick with it and show them that you’re really gonna be there for the long haul, then they accept you and say ‘OK.’ ”
Pingree, after the school board affair, left the island and went to Portland, where she attended night school at the University of Southern Maine and worked the lunch shift at the old Deering’s Ice Cream by the South Portland Bridge. She left southern Maine after one semester and transferred to the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. There she got a degree in farming.
She and her husband returned to the island after school. Chellie started a farm and delivered eggs to her neighbors, Charlie started building boats and the two of them started their family.
Pingree had cows, sheep, chicken and vegetables. She started using the wool from her sheep to make sweaters for her business, North Island Designs. Eventually she sold her products through 1,200 stores and mail-order catalogues like Lands’ End. About 35 women on the island knit sweaters for her.
In 1992, Pingree ran for the Maine Senate. She had been busy working on the school board and running a business. But she was, as her daughter Hannah described her, a “political junkie” and she needed that fix. She won as a liberal Democrat in Knox County, where 40 percent of the people were Republicans, 40 percent independents and only 20 percent Democrats.
She went on to become the majority leader in her last two terms. Mills said that she often made efforts to reach across the aisle, even if she never altered her policies.
After leaving the state Senate, she ran against Collins in what Mills called impossibly difficult circumstances. But to her supporters, she was still able to inspire people. Dale McCormick, who had served with Pingree in the state senate and originally asked her to run for that legislative seat, said she heard a brilliant bit on the radio.
“I can remember one time I was driving along in Augusta and I heard Chellie on the radio,” McCormick said. “And she in 20 seconds so clearly articulated how I was feeling, the problem with the current situation and a very clear solution. I was applauding at the end of it.”
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