Nearly every Sunday I bicycle to the church building. Yesterday, that enabled me to have a remarkable encounter.
I was pedaling on Jamestown Road, up the hill from Lake Matoaka, so I wasn’t going very fast. Coming down the sidewalk towards me was a man, jogging. From a distance, he looked familiar somehow. He got up to me and was about to jog past when I said, “Senator Carper?” The man said, “Yes?”
What fun! I introduced myself as a Delaware native and said that, before moving to Williamsburg I had lived in the 1900 block of North Van Buren Street in the ’90s. That’s within a mile of where the Senator lives. (Senator Carper said, “Get out!”)
The First State is allocated exactly one United States Representative. That was Carper’s first statewide office. Then he served two terms as Governor. He’s serving his second term as Senator. I voted for him each time he ran, because he’s one of the few moderates, trying to hold the center in an increasingly polarized political environment. (In the Senate he compares to those “Blue Dog Democrats” in the House, who are insisting on fiscal responsibility in health care reform.)
When we were concluding our conversation, I said, “Hold on to that center!” He said, “That’s what I try to do every day.”
He didn't look this good, in jogging clothes, with sweat dripping off his nose!
Politics is so different in little Delaware, where everybody knows everybody, so a politician can’t suddenly invent himself into an artificial persona. And, since everybody knows everybody, and everybody has to get along, statewide and national office holders tend to be somewhere in the middle, just right or left of center. In Delaware, it’s much more likely that the politicians of both parties work together to actually accomplish things.
So — if Senator Carper is just left of center, Delaware’s US Representative, Republican Mike Castle (pictured below), is just right of center.
I voted for Castle everytime he ran, as well — for governor and then for Representative.
