Interview with Peter Agre

by: Joe Bodell

Wed May 30, 2007 at 08:57:46 AM CDT

Joe Bodell:  What was the initial impetus for you to start thinking about a run for office?

P. Agre:  Public service has always been at the back of my mind.  I was the VP of my student body in high school, ran an underground newspaper, and I've worked pretty extensively on human rights issues around the world as the chair of the National Academy of Science's committee on human rights.  So I've always felt comfortable with public service issues.

JB:  If you decide that yes, running for the Senate is something you want to do, where do you see yourself entering the field?  A long shot?  Middle of the pack?

P. Agre:  I think I'd definitely enter as a long shot; I don't have a campaign presence or a campaign manager yet, I'm not independently wealthy.  But I think there are a lot of people waiting to commit to one candidate or another, and I'm considering the possibility that I'm that person.  I'll have a different kind of platform, I don't have any extreme views...although I do have pretty set views on the environment.  Of course some people are going to say "oh, he's not a Minnesotan" but I've always felt an unmistakable connection to Minnesota as my home.  My family and I come back multiple times a year, we vacation up on the boundary waters, this state has always been my home. 

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P. Agre:  I'm a Democrat.  Some people have said to me that if I wanted to make a statement, running as an independent might be a way to do that, but I truly believe that if Norm Coleman is re-elected, there's a strong possibility the Senate will have a GOP majority in 2009.  I don't think an independent candidate will win, and I don't want to be blamed as a spoiler. 

JB:  Why Minnesota?  Why not Maryland, where you spent a great deal of your professional life, or North Carolina, where you are now?

P. Agre:  I considered running for office in Maryland, but Maryland is a place that's overrun with qualified people.  North Carolina...I'm not a North Carolinian in my heart.  Someone can tell you again and again that you're right-handed, but if you're left-handed, that's the hand you're going to write with.

JB:  Which brings us back to Minnesota:  what makes Norm Coleman so bad?

P. Agre:  I think the national Democrats really thinnk Norm Coleman's more vulnerable than he is wicked.  In terms of votes, he's closer to the Democrats than a lot of Republican Senators.  Kofi Annan isn't a saint, but he's pretty close, and when Coleman went after him, I lost a lot of respect for Coleman.  The same when he and the Republicans went after Joe Wilson for bringing up issues that, had they come out before the war, it might have literally changed the course of history.

JB:  What are your major issues?

P. Agre:  I think discussion of issues really has to start post-Iraq.  Clearly we have to get out as soon as possible, and we have to withdraw in an orderly fashion and make sure we get innocent people out of the way.  But at that point it's a matter of refugees and what we do about them.  Jordan currently has about a million Iraqi refugees in a country with the population of Minnesota.

After Iraq, I think the biggest issue is health care.  It's amazing that we're the last industrialized country in the world to provide health coverage to all our citizens.  When the median health premium now costs about $12,000 and American families have a median income of about $45,000...paying 30% of your family's income for health coverage isn't affordable.  We need to be funding physical education, public health initiatives, and start not at age 50, but with children to build healthy lifestyles, and get our information from knowledgeable sources.

I think Democrats are going to have to do some soul-searching on this issue too, because the reality is that personal injury lawsuits do raise the cost of health care...Doctors shouldn't have to work three days a week just to make their malpractice premiums.

JB:  You're a man of science, something that would be rare in Congress.  Do you think religious conservatives have had an adverse effect on public policy in America?

P. Agre:  The religious right has certainly acted as a voting bloc, but I think that's falling apart without a Republican candidate with the perfect constellation that George Bush had.  I think in what we know as the religious right, there are a lot of good people with scars, and we have to be careful not to villify a group of people while still not protecting leaders like the recently-deceased Jerry Falwell. 

Leaders in the religious right like to villify gays, but I know the Bible pretty well, and I've read 2nd Samuel and the story of the love shared by David and Jonathan.  That can certainly be read as a gay love story.  Faith gives many people strength, but when it hurts others, that's not good, and it's certainly not Christian.

JB:  Favorite...
Ice cream flavor:  Coffee.  It's for the coffee, though, not the ice cream
Baseball player:  I grew up watching Harmon Killebrew and Tony Oliva play, but since the strike in '94 and Cal Ripkin retiring, I haven't been able to get excited about it.
Leisure activities:  I like movies, I love to travel...
This is an original one:  commenters at MNCR mentioned one of your notable features that I can see is gone -- your moustache.  P. Agre:  Ha!  I had that moustache for decades.  When we went up to the Boundary Waters, often I'd come back with a beard...but every year the moustache got a little whiter, and eventually I looked in the mirror and thought I looked a bit too much like John Bolton, so I took off the moustache a couple years ago.  You're around the age of my kids, Joe, but I can tell you that when you get up around fifty, you appreciate people saying "you shave the moustache -- you look younger!"

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Throughout the summer, Agre will be in Minnesota examining all the factors feeding into the Senate race, and hopes to make a decision by August.