One of those old style politicians - Fred Rooney, the son of an Irish immigrant who worked in a Pennsylvania coal mine, spent his congressional years living in our DC neighborhood. He has just passed away at age 94.
I learned about Rooney's political skills when I decided to run in the first contest for Washington's new advisory neighborhood commissions, several hundred folks who lacked real power but at least had some visibility. Fred got a kick out of the fact I was running and became even more involved after I won, as I wrote at the time:
It began the morning after the election. Congressman Fred Rooney, who lived in my district and had taken a paternal interest in my electoral efforts, was on the phone: "This is Rooney up on Highland Alley. Why hasn't my damn trash been picked up?" A professional politician was taking me seriously. A good start, I thought. I spent much of the day trying to find out why the congressman's trash hadn't been collected but the number downtown was always busy or unanswered. The next morning I checked my constituent's driveway. The cans were gone.
"Well," I said when I reached him at his Capitol Hill office, "I see we got your trash problem cleared up." He never asked me who "we" were. I had followed one of the first rules of politics: exploit serendipity.
Fred still calls me Commissioner or Commish. Another rule of politics: make people feel good. Years later, he also told me that he had once received a call from a woman in a small town in his district wanting to know why her trash hadn't been picked up. "Have you called the sanitation superintendent?" Rooney asked. "No," the lady replied. "I didn't want to bother him, so I just thought I'd call my congressman."That's the way politics used to be.
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