A Tale of Two Deputies
By Sara Hatch
WASHINGTON, April 20- If you want to work in the nation’s capital you’ve got to love politics, have a passion for policy and be willing to work long hours. Two Connecticut natives who work for the state’s junior senator have brought all of these attributes to their jobs on Capitol Hill.
Siobhan Oat-Judge and Catherine McKenna Ribeiro are deputy press secretaries to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). Oat-Judge is on his staff at the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and McKenna Ribeiro is part of the press team in his personal Senate office.
McKenna Ribeiro, 27 had internships with both Congressman John Larson and former member of Congress Barbara Kennelly while still in college. After school she started with Lieberman in his Hartford office, working there for three years before coming to Washington last September.
Oat-Judge, 26, worked in 2003 for Lieberman’s 2004 presidential campaign bid and then moved to EMILY’s List as communications director. Following stints with the Democratic National Committee and a public relations firm she joined Lieberman’s committee staff three months ago. Oat-Judge also spent time with ABC News as an intern.
They both say they knew they loved politics from an early age.
For Oat-Judge, it started when she watched her mother work on school board elections and referendums in her hometown She remembers helping her mother by making phone calls while she was still in elementary school..
“I saw on a very local level how my mom and her friends could make a difference,” Oat-Judge says.
McKenna Ribeiro, like Oat-Judge, was drawn to politics through close relationships with people. “I’ve had a lot of great mentors,” she says.
“I love the idea of democracy,” she says. “I think it’s fantastic, and I’ve always thought it would be great to be a part of it,” adding that she loved politics in high school.
A typical day for a deputy press secretary begins with reading the news of the day and seeing where Sen. Lieberman has been featured as well as looking for stories that deal with issues on which the senator and his committee are working. They also field calls from the press and prepare press releases and statements. Some days they will work on publicizing an event Lieberman is holding or a committee hearing.
Both women are on call all the time depending on what’s happening in the news, but they say they understand that’s part of the job.
“It’s a 24-hour news cycle,” McKenna Ribeiro says, but she says she knew going into her job the pressure that was inherent in it.
“[Lieberman] never gets to shut off,” Oat-Judge says. She said it helps that she knows she’s part of a team.
The job of the press team is “to make sure that the trains run on time,” McKenna Ribeiro says.
Both women say they are rarely off-duty and even in their free-time politics is not far from their minds.
“We read The Economist,” Catherine McKenna Ribeiro says, describing what she does after a long day, adding, after a pause, “We’re not kidding.”
“No it’s true, it’s in my bag. I’m reading it on the Metro home tonight,” Siobhan Oat-Judge adds, laughing along with McKenna Ribeiro.
McKenna Ribeiro and Oat-Judge are remarkably similar. They grew up in towns 15 miles apart-McKenna Ribeiro in Wethersfield and Oat-Judge in Farmington.
Oat-Judge went to Farmington High School, and received a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s from Cambridge. McKenna Ribeiro attended Wethersfield High School and Pennsylvania State University and got her graduate degree at the London School of Economics.
Oat-Judge said when she was abroad her foreign friends would ask her about American politics which made her want to come back and “contribute” to the political system.
After graduate school in England, both women wound up working for Lieberman and eventually coming to Washington.
Like most people on Capitol Hill, they always have at least one eye on their ever present BlackBerry devices ready to respond to an urgent press request or staff issue. They also can finish each other’s sentences. When McKenna Ribeiro gets pulled out of an interview to handle an “emergency,” Oat-Judge picks up for her in mid-answer.
Both have said that one of the things that brought them back to politics is going to England and living there.
When asked what they miss about England, McKenna Ribeiro replies “good chocolate.”
“We were just talking about Cadbury’s eggs yesterday,” she says, laughing along with Oat-Judge.
They may joke about their love of all things chocolate, but McKenna Ribeiro and Oat-Judge are quite serious about politics.
Because they are working for a high-profile senator, Oat-Judge and McKenna Ribeiro get to experience things on a national scale.
In the months following Hurricane Katrina, Lieberman, who is the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, initiated a series of committee hearings on what went wrong during the response to Katrina.
In an e-mail message, Oat-Judge said the work of the committee following the hurricane has had a big impact on her.
“Watching those gut-wrenching images [of Hurricane Katrina] last August was heart-wrenching for me, as it was for most Americans,” Oat-Judge said.
“Sen. Lieberman has personally been very dedicated to this investigation, and it’s been an honor to be part of a team that is working so hard to help protect Americans from future disasters,” she said.
Leslie Phillips, who is the Democratic press secretary for Lieberman’s committee, said Oat-Judge has been extremely helpful in the past few months.
“She’s been a pillar of support,” Phillips said in an interview. “I could always rely on her to do what needed to be done.”
Oat-Judge is the fifth assistant who has worked for Phillips on the committee. Phillips said that Oat-Judge is “overqualified” for the job and she feels “lucky to have her.”
Right now, neither woman has plans for the future, and each seems content right where she is.
McKenna Ribeiro says she “would never want to say to no” to being a communications director or a press secretary but isn’t sure what her future will hold.
“I want to work as hard as I possibly can work and make sure I take every opportunity,” she says. “You know, all the doors that open I want to be able walk through them.”
If she did move up to press secretary, she would be following the path of Rob Sawicki, Lieberman’s press secretary, who previously had been deputy press secretary.
Both of their families still live in Connecticut. McKenna Ribeiro is the daughter or James and Gloria McKenna of Wethersfield and is married to Mick Ribeiro. She has two older sisters, Beth Renach and Sue Merino. Oat-Judge is the daughter of Jim Judge and Patty Oat-Judge of Farmington. She has three sisters and one brother.
###
