Excerpt
Far from Home
Chapter 1Becoming a Reluctant SenatorOn my fortieth birthday, with a brand-new mountain bike in my living room, life was just about perfect. My husband, Verne, who had engineered the gift, was a great partner and dad. Our high-energy young sons, Nic and Matt, kept us going all the time, along with our two black Labradors. This new bike would help take us on more Alaskan adventures. I wanted nothing more. We lived in a modest house in Anchorage’s mixed-income neighborhood of Government Hill. Verne owned and operated Alaska Pasta, making ravioli and other fresh pasta for restaurants by himself and with one employee. I practiced law from a home office on my own part-time schedule. We had as much money as we needed and the time to enjoy our sons’ childhoods. Our family was constantly outdoors, fishing for salmon and playing soccer in the summer, hunting ducks in the fall, and skiing all winter. That new bike, which I still ride a quarter century later, excited me as if I were a little girl getting my first set of wheels, with the loving world opening ever wider for me.
At roughly midlife, I had not even the slightest inkling of ever becoming a U.S. senator. I didn’t desire any career in politics. Many of my Senate colleagues dreamed of power from a young age, as they relate in their memoirs. Those dreams never occurred to me as a kid, and by the time I was forty, such a dream would have seemed utterly extraneous to this comfortable life. Adding political office to my résumé would add nothing to my happiness, and could take away time with the family. Besides, there was no reason for me to put myself forward as a leader. I am not a special person. Many others could do those jobs.
But I did understand the rewards of public service. I had learned that as the president of the Government Hill Elementary School Parent-Teacher Association, a position that helped launch me as a leader.
Verne had first seen the promise of the Government Hill neighborhood when we were house hunting, before Nic was born. The dated house had been for sale for most of a year. Inside, it was a crazy maze of little rooms. The neighborhood, one of Anchorage’s oldest, squeezed between a railroad yard and an Air Force base, was among Alaska’s poorest, according to the census, with small middle-class homes and duplexes, and with the largest low-income complex in the city. My parents tried to talk us out of buying the house. So did our real estate agent. But the house was sunny, we could afford it, and Verne believed he could remodel it into something special. And he did.
When the time came, I had doubts about sending our boys to the nearby elementary school, in a cramped, old former military building. Government Hill Elementary received Title I funding under federal regulations supporting schools stressed by poverty. In addition to serving the neighborhood kids, the school offered a dual immersion program, where the student body was half native Spanish speakers and half English speakers, with morning instruction in English and the afternoon only in Spanish. Many of the children came from the low-income housing complex, often with parents who were recent immigrants, while others came from around the city for the Spanish. I worried that Nic and Matt would fall behind academically in this educational experiment, but I wanted to encourage the language skills the boys had acquired from their Colombian caregivers. Verne needed no persuasion, because he had grown up speaking Spanish in Latin America, where his father, an American businessman, had managed factories making Arrow shirts.
At Government Hill, the boys gave me an education in how people of different races, ethnicities, and backgrounds can learn together and be true friends. I had grown up differently, in Alaska towns where I knew only White or Alaska Native people, and I had perceptions I wasn’t aware of. Matt confided that he worried about his Hispanic friend Victor, who had trouble understanding the classwork in the morning, when the teacher spoke English. But then Matt recognized that he had the same trouble in the afternoon, when the lessons were in Spanish. So Matt could be “the smart one” in the morning and Victor could in the afternoon, as they helped each other learn. When Nic came home from first grade excited about his new girlfriend, Angela, I couldn’t picture who she was, although I knew all the kids in the class. Nic described her by her clothes, her pink backpack, and her pigtails. Finally, I realized he was talking about an African American girl, a detail he thought too insignificant to mention, and that I had never considered.
Academically, the school worked better than I ever could have hoped. Besides learning all the basics, the boys gained a fluency in Spanish that gave them the confidence of being experts, far beyond what I had learned in high school language classes, with their focus on conjugating verbs. At the dinner table, they babbled away in Spanish with their father, craftily supposing I couldn’t understand their boy jokes. I got the gist, but I couldn’t respond.
We were all equal at our school, but not in the world, and that mattered because Government Hill Elementary had major needs. I was a lawyer with a well-known name—my father, Frank Murkowski, was a U.S. senator—but my main qualification for the moms who recruited me to follow them as the leader of the PTA was that I showed up. In fact, no one else wanted the responsibility. Our worn-out school, crammed with 45 percent more students than it was designed to hold, needed a major expansion and remodel. I had no idea how to address that.
We organized a group of about eight parents to meet at a brewpub in downtown Anchorage, and we began to devise a plan to make our case, splitting up the tasks. We contributed as a team, gathering facts, trading contacts, calling elected officials, attending school board meetings. We all worked hard as parents trying to do something for kids, bringing attention to our funky, diverse little community school. It was extra effort for all of us, as working parents, but it felt good because we knew we were doing something positive for everyone. And we succeeded. After a vigorous campaign and lots of phone calls, we won. Our project was included in a bond package, received approval from voters, and the remodel took place. Some of the poorest kids in town got one of the nicest schools. And I benefited greatly, myself, as the effort had a foundational influence on me.
I believe that practical, solution-based politics are the true heart of our democracy. That’s why I think this simple story is important to tell. There was nothing exceptional about what we did. We were just fulfilling our duty as citizens to our families and our community. Our group included Democrats and Republicans, working parents and stay-at-home dads. It was not about politics or notoriety. We got together and accomplished something big for our kids that would improve many lives. And it felt great.
This kind of work is as old as America. As early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville described how Americans govern themselves with voluntary associations, from those he mentioned, which distributed books or started hospitals, to our Government Hill PTA and our group gathering at the brewpub. These are the volunteers, at many levels, who create a social consensus that gives the government real legitimacy. The system works best, as it did for most of our history, when citizens enter into it with goodwill, prepared to see everyone as a potential ally with a legitimate point of view. The dirty and ugly part of politics cannot be denied, but that is not what makes America work. Our country is built on communities.
As Alaska grew up from statehood, in 1959, it was a prodigy of this kind of participatory democracy. I was one year old at statehood, and my generation of Alaskans could sing our state song, “Alaska’s Flag”; we knew that fourteen-year-old Benny Benson had designed the flag and that educator Marie Drake had written the song. Most of us could tell the story of the Alaska Constitutional Convention drafting our model founding document. In its declaration of rights, our Alaska Constitution dedicates us to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the rewards of industry, and to equality and equal protection under the law. It also asserts, “All persons have corresponding obligations to the people and to the State.” Those words anchored the statehood generation, which wrote and adopted them, and they taught us well those values, especially the obligations of citizenship. I learned them as deeply as any catechism.
As Tocqueville noted, local associations not only solve local problems, they are also schools of democracy for leaders headed for higher levels of government. We build a certain kind of people in these settings. Ordinary citizens learn to grapple with issues collectively and to develop common cause. Today we call those skills social capital. They include both the ability to work with others collaboratively and the sense of community and belonging that gives us the hope to engage.
