My Coffee With Keith

Keith Rothfus likes to meet his constituents at coffee shops and other restaurants rather than a formal town hall like many representatives do.  He usually has these during the week day, and based on the pictures from his Facebook and Twitter pages, they are attended mostly by seniors.  I always wanted to see what one was like, so I found my chance when he scheduled an early morning one before work.  I attended his recent “Coffee with Keith” at the Coffee Buddha on Perrysville Avenue in Ross Township. 

The coffee shop is very small, but the coffee was very good.  I would certainly stop there again if I was in the area, but it is a little out of the way for me.  It has a front sitting area with a few chairs, and a couple chairs to the right of the counter.   That is about it.

I was expecting a sign or something announcing that Congressman Rothfus was having an event there.  Instead, he was sitting in the corner to the right of the counter with a couple people and two staffers.  I would not have known he was there if I wasn’t looking for him.  It seemed like a typical morning for the coffee shop.  I am guessing other patrons didn’t realize he was there.  From their point of view, it looked like a couple people sitting around kibitzing and drinking coffee.

This is the extreme opposite of a formal town hall I attended with Jason Altmire.  His was held at in a library meeting room which was packed.  The front row was Tea Party members all with video cameras on tripods to record his every word.  Jason seemed to know them all by name from attending other events.  His relationship with them seemed to be a strange combination of friendly and hostile if that makes any sense.  It was a loud and emotional event with people firing questions at him from all sides of the political spectrum.

The first thing I thought was that the coffee shop seems to work for Keith Rothfus.  I have met him a couple times in the past before he became a Congressman, and he has the same low key personality.  I don’t think he could command a big room like I have seen Jason Altmire or Erin McClelland do.  He doesn’t have the imposing physical presence or the personality for that.  I am not sure how he would handle an audience like a town hall that wasn’t completely friendly, but I don’t think it would go well.  I would love to see him have one in the evening to prove me wrong.

The coffee shop also forces the discussions to be less emotional.  The discussions were in hushed tones, because you were in a coffee shop and didn’t want to disrupt business during the morning rush.  A bunch of pissed off voters would have disrupted the business, and they are the ones that would have looked bad and be blamed.

I found the location affected the tone of the questions I asked, and his answers were not as ideological as you see in his speeches, and in his Facebook and Twitter accounts.  It was more conversational than question and answer.  For example, I asked him what he was doing to cross the isle and foster bipartisanship, and he talked about building relationships and focusing on getting to know his fellow freshman congressman.  He told a great story about going to Arlington with a group of freshman congressmen.  I suggested that maybe he should be in Washington rather than being off from early August until after the election except for one week, and he sheepishly agreed.  

Conversely, I came across a video of a debate he had with Mark Critz, and when asked about polarization in Washington, he blamed the Senate and the President and sounded like he would be part of the problem and not part of the solution.  This is consistent with what he posts in social media, and what his supporters expect to hear.  I would have liked to include a link to the video, but it was “unlisted,” so I did not think it was appropriate to include here.

I could have gotten into more controversial topics with him like his voting against Hurricane Sandy relief and the violence against women act, his blaming everything that is wrong with our healthcare system on the Affordable Healthcare Act or his denial of climate change, but a coffee shop with two other people just didn’t seem like the right place.  These are issues that he should discuss with his constituents, but in a more appropriate venue like a town hall.

The debates with Erin McClelland will not just be a clash of ideologies, but a clash of personalities as well.  Erin McCelland is very high energy, aggressive and can take over a room.  It will be interesting seeing how Keith Rothfus confronts that.  Two confirmed debates are the Beaver County Chamber of Commerce Debate on October 15^th at Penn State, Beaver Campus, and October 28^th at Laurel View in Davidsville, PA.

What does "done" mean?

I am a software engineer, and last week we had a discussion about what it meant to be “done”.  Some thought it meant when you get your work completed, and it went to the quality assurance group.  My boss thought it was when it got the quality assurance group’s blessing.  I tend to take it a step further and think “done” is when the customer is using it and it meets their needs.  Anyway, it got me to thinking about what Congress thinks “done” is.

Our former Congressman Jason Altmire’s definition of “done” was easy to find.  The one thing he was most proud of was the 29 bills he introduced that were passed by both the House and Senate and signed into law by the President.  For him, “done” meant at the very least that the bill became law.

Erin McClelland is running for the House of Representatives in my district (PA-12).  Her definition of “done” takes it a step further than that.  She talks passionately about solving problems and that passing bills are simply steps along the way to solving the problem.  It seems that for any problem, she has a solution, a plan to implement it and facts to back it up.  For her, “done” is when the problem is solved.

Now let’s get to the House of Representative’s definition of “done”.  ­Speaker­­ John Boehner has often said “The House has done its job.  It’s time for the Senate and the President to do theirs” just before leaving town for one of their many vacations.   

Their definition of “done” is when they pass a bill and throw it over the wall to the Senate.  It is more than just talk, because you can see it in the quality of their work.  When your definition of “done” is simply completing a task with no concern for where it goes from there, then the quality is secondary.  You are just checking off an item and saying you did it.  I see that when a software engineer thinks “done” is when he or she can check off that something was completed.  If often comes right back with a bunch of issues.

The border security bill they passed in August was a good example.  After saying they couldn’t pass anything and that the President should deal with the child immigration problem himself, they passed the bill on August 1^st just before leaving on a month-long vacation.  They had no concern whether it would pass the Senate or be signed by the President.  The President said he would veto it before it was even voted on.  Their one and only goal was to pass something, so they can say they did it.  As far as they were concerned, they were ‘done”, and Speaker Boehner said as much.

The other problem with their definition of “done” is that they are more likely to pass bills to make a statement like voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act at least 50 times, or to sue the President for doing something they wanted to have happen anyway.  One can go on and on about times Congress claimed they were “done” knowing that it will never become law.

If I just threw something over the wall with no concern for whether it can make it through to the next step in the process, I would be fired.  I would never let my son get away with that either.  However, that seems to be how the House works.

My own Congressman, Keith Rothfus, has been remarkably short on solutions compared to his predecessor, Jason Altmire or his possible successor, Erin McClelland.  His definition of “done” seems to be limited to pointing fingers and “holding people accountable”.  He has shown little interest in coming up with solutions and solving problems.  Most of his speeches focus on identifying problems and assigning blame rather than solving them.

Erin McClelland’s definition of “done” means that quality matters. Bills are written with the intent that they can pass the Senate and will be signed by the President, because they are intended to solve a problem and not just make a statement.  It means getting people together with different interests to agree on a solution that can make it to the President’s desk, because you or your party can’t just do it yourselves.

It is very easy fulfilling the House’s definition of “done” or Keith Rothfus’s definition as well.   It is hard work fulfilling Erin McClelland’s definition of “done”, but she has a history of getting things “done” in the healthcare field both in her own business, and using her expertise in fixing medical errors.

Our government needs more people that believe that “done” means that the problem is solved no matter how difficult the solution might be.  Replacing Keith Rothfus with Erin McClelland would be a very good start to changing the definition of "done".