The Northern Star spoke with Bill Foster, the recent winner of the 14th Congressional District’s special election, Friday to find out what he has been doing since elected and how he is approaching the upcoming general election.

Northern Star: After your win for the special election, what has been on your agenda?

Bill Foster: Well the first thing is to set up the offices in the district and in Washington D.C. I had a very busy first week. The special election was on a Saturday and I was sworn into office the Tuesday immediately following that and the three hours, maybe four hours after I was sworn in, I was able to cast the decisive vote in favor of house ethics reform which passed by a single vote and had been basically stuck in Congress for the last year or so.

This is the idea that house ethics oversight would be performed by an independent panel that is one that is not composed of cynic Congressmen because that has sort of been proven not to work very well for the last 20 years. So, I was very excited to have my vote count almost immediately and was congratulated by the people on both sides of the aisle that were supporting that legislation.

NS: Why do you feel that you are the best candidate for the 14th Congressional District for the upcoming election in November?

BF: Well I’ll be the most experienced in fact. I’d have established a very tiny amount of seniority. I will become to establish working relationships with members of Congress. I hope to have a modest set of accomplishments in the short time that I have been in Congress.

NS: What are the issues you feel most strongly about and how do you plan to approach them? And how will you face opposition?

BF: Well, there are a range of issues that do address on different time scales. Well, the things that I am hoping to immediately work on is that I am going to make a serious attempt to see if we can get some financial relief because of the funding cuts at the Fermilab and Argonne and I am going to make an effort, that’s all I can promise.

That’s going to be tough, that’s a very short term priority. I think there’s a reasonable chance that there will be another attempt to pass children’s health insurance this fall and if so I will be a good vote in favor of that. I have been put on the financial services committee, which is of course the committee that is in charge of both the mortgage industry in general and the financial services industry that’s involved with the credit crisis.

So, I expect to be very actively involved with that committee and trying to make sure that the credit system in this country keeps functioning and that going forward we don’t repeat the same kind of mistakes that got us into this mess in the first place.

NS: You have been said to be a politician of change, what changes do you hope to make if elected in November and what how have you already done?

BF: I’m working on them right now. I’m not so naive to think that you are going to walk in as a freshman in Congress and change everything. I’m certain that the election that we have had, when the voters spoke out in the special election, it was a message that was heard around the country.

You see it talked about over and over again in response to the questions about where the country is heading in the fall, what issues the voters really care about. I think that one of the strongest messages I think that came through is that people want solutions and less bickering. And that’s actually what I’m working at is just try to become a productive member of Congress and the best possible representative of the Illinois 14th District.

There was a lot of excitement generated by the election itself. I know that we carried DeKalb County by I believe more than 10 points which was just absolutely remarkable for quite Democrat. There was a lot of help from for example Kevin Chambliss who’s the leader of the NIU Dems and there was a reasonable turnout from the students even though the special election happened on I believe it was the first day of Spring Break that we still had a reasonable turnout. There’s a lot of coming excitement due to the fact that one of your students Ryan Gailey is now running for the State Senate and that generated a lot of excitement looking forward.

NS: Do you as a Democrat feel your win in a previously predominant Republican district shows

the change of the times?

BF: There’s no question. I think there’s probably two components of this is that simply the district is changing. Twenty-two years ago when [they] elected Denny Hastert, the district was largely rural and now the district is increasingly suburban and that has generated a big shift internal in just the demographics of the district.

Moreover, especially in the last six years, President Bush has caused a lot of people to look hard at what they really want in the future direction of this country and they don’t want to be taken further in the direction that President Bush has been taking them. And that’s especially true of independence, where they just don’t believe on a number of different fronts on healthcare and the economy, the War in Iraq; they just don’t want to continue going down that direction. And that’s been probably a big part of the change is just that demographic shift from new people moving in.

NS: How will your previous experience as a scientist and a businessman help you in Congress or hurt you in the job?

BF: Well certainly I have sensed a lot of enthusiasm from members of Congress from having more scientific judgment. More than one committee chair has approached me enthusiastically, trying to get me on his committee because they recognize that there are very complex scientific issues that have to be dealt with.

Almost without regard to which committee you are talking about, essentially every issue that we look at has a technological edge to it and so that having a more scientific expertise in Congress is certainly something that Congress itself is excited about.

I also think that the people in this district also recognize the value of having better, fact-based policies. They recognize that the times that our country has gotten into trouble have been often the times in which we have ignored facts. The example of Iraq comes to mind immediately, but there are others and that we have actually to have a political debate where the starting part is the facts instead of ideologies and political partisanship. And that’s something I bring to Congress. I highlighted it in my opening speech to the members of Congress and it’s a message that has been really well received.

NS: As a scientist with the Fermilab in danger of being shut down, do you plan to help represent in Congress?

BF: Oh yeah, as a I said in my opening statement, that is one of my biggest short-term priorities is to see if there is a possibility of getting mid-year funding relief for the budget cuts. It is essentially certain that this will not be quick enough to avoid any layoffs that are scheduled at the Fermilab, but at a minimum, we can start putting the future program back on track.

One of the worst things about the funding cuts at the Fermilab was that the projects that were cut were the future program of the laboratory, which is essentially a statement from the U.S. Government that we don’t think that the Fermilab has a future and that was one of the most damaging aspects of it, besides the direct layoffs. So I am going to work as hard as I can to try to get some of that money restored. I cannot predict success but I can promise everyone that I am going to work hard at it.

NS: Well to kind of switch gears, to see what’s more to you besides just being a politician, what

do you like to do with your free time?

BF: Reading, going on long drives, I love taking ski vacations with my children, but I sort of knew that when I got into becoming a Congressmen that the amount of free time that I was going to have was going to go way down.

And so my idea of relaxation at this point is catching up on the mountain of reading I have to do. But the thing is that I really enjoy is going out and meeting constituents from all over the district. We’re doing this thing called Congress in Your Corner, which means you basically set up a card table in a Jewel or a store like that and just open up shop and meet all the constituents of the district and you get the whole cross-section of people coming in and talking with you. And I think you have to do a lot of that as a sitting Congressman so you just don’t slowly disconnect with the people that elected you and I find it really fun. One of the very pleasant surprises that I found from campaigning and serving is that it turns out I really like people; that really it’s only the scientists that drive me crazy.

NS: Do you have anything else you would like to add?

BF: I was actually out at NIU this morning and I was speaking with President Peters and he took me to the visit the Memorial Room that had been set up in Altgeld Hall and I was very moved, and we talked about how the students are reacting to it and settling down or not settling down and what’s easy and what’s hard. I had a very strong personal reaction there, because I have a daughter who is in college and the moment I heard about this, I had this completely irrational thought that, “Oh my God, I should call up my daughter to make sure she is alright,” even though she is half a continent away.

And I cannot imagine what the student body and the parents are going through and it was actually very good to hear that life is coming back to normal and that people are taking the right amount of time to adjust properly to these things. The feeling that I got is that things are going to be OK and things are in fact are going to be moving forward at NIU and it made me feel good to hear that.

NS: What are your views on the Cole [Hall] situation and do you have the opinion on that?

BF: We actually talked with President Peters about that. One of things that we both kind of concluded is that having it discussed is actually a sort of healthy debate. I understand that they’re actually sort of surveying the students to see what the range of opinions is.

On one hand, you get some people who just say put a new coat of paint on it and keep everything the same and pretend as though nothing ever happened. Then other people say that we should just flatten the building completely and then you have everything in between; refurbish the building for a different set of uses.

I don’t know what the right answer is and certainly the easy part of it is that when people decide what’s right that I think you can probably hope for help from both the state and federal government to do something to solve the easy part, which is the financial part. But I think it’s good – very good – to have the students, especially, deciding what’s right to do. It may take awhile for them to come to a consensus and it sounds like the school administration is doing exactly the right thing to kind of go a little bit slowly and ask the students what they think.