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David Obey
Wisconsin, 7th
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Dave grew up in Wausau where he and his wife, Joan, both went to St. James Catholic school. Both graduated from Wausau East High School together and both went on to receive Bachelor's degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
Dave did his graduate work in Soviet politics at the University of Wisconsin under a National Defense Education Act three-year scholarship and fully expected to be teaching Russian and Chinese politics before he took a turn toward public service.
Dave's experiences while growing up have shaped his convictions and priorities in the work he does in Congress today.
Working in his father's floor covering business for a number of years, Dave sometimes worked with asbestos products. It was not until he began his service in the Congress that he discovered that asbestos caused cancer, although one of the manufacturers had known since 1939. That is one of the reasons why Dave fights for measures to protect worker health and safety and to give workers and neighborhoods the right to know what kind of dangerous chemicals and compounds they are being exposed to.
When Dave was very young, his father went to the hospital for an operation and came back with his arms paralyzed. "Nobody knew what caused it," Dave said. "But after a number of months, he slowly regained the use of his arms. We were scared. That experience taught me that working families are often just one paycheck away from economic disaster. And it showed me first-hand the importance of every family having access to good health care."
The month that Dave went away to Madison to finish his college education, his father lost his job at 3-M company (his father often worked at two jobs to make ends meet). "That scared me," Dave recalls, "because I had no idea how much help I would get from home in finishing my education. And that experience burned into me the conviction that access to education ought to be based on how much you are willing to learn and how hard you are willing to work, not on how many dollars your family has in their bank account."
During his college years, Dave worked summers at a local paper mill where he gained a healthy respect for how hard some people have to work in order to make a decent living for their families.
He also witnessed some things that he vowed he would change if he ever had a chance. "I remember taking our 20-minute lunch breaks and sitting on the steps on the back porch at the plant and seeing these huge pipes pour this junk into the Wisconsin River," Dave recalled. "I vowed at the time that if I ever had the chance to do anything to make industry stop using our rivers and streams as liquid dumps I would do it, and we have made some great progress through the years."
"I also remember that every time I visited my grandmother, who lived on Third Avenue in Wausau, you had to take a rag and wipe off the chairs and the porch swing because the were covered with dust and grime from the junk that was coming out of the smokestack at 3-M Company. Today, that doesn't happen anymore, and I am proud to have been able to play at least a small role in bringing that progress about."
The same year that Dave married Joan Lepinski, he ran for the State Legislature and won. He served three full terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing Marathon County, rising to the position of Assistant Democratic Leader. He played a key role in creating Wisconsin's modern system of Technical College Districts, for which he won national recognition, and in establishing the state's network of public broadcasting stations. He also was an early sponsor of Wisconsin's pioneering Homestead Tax Relief Act for senior citizens and served on the state commission that established Wisconsin's first Medicaid law.
When Dave began his service in the Congress — succeeding Mel Laird, who was appointed Secretary of Defense — he was the youngest Member of Congress in the United States.
Dave has become a leading spokesman for political and congressional reform.
As a junior Member of the House, he threw his support behind efforts to open committee hearings to the public (when Dave first went to Congress, many of those public hearings were held behind closed doors). In addition, Dave sponsored and pushed through rules changes which required powerful Appropriations Subcommittee chairs to be voted on by the full Caucus, rather than simply becoming Chairman, in order to make certain that they were not arbitrary or out of touch.
He was appointed by the House Speaker to chair a commission which wrote a new Code of Ethics for the House, under which more than 20 Members have been disciplined. Under the Obey reforms, for the first time, Members of Congress were required to provide meaningful disclosure of their financial affairs in order to alert the public to any to any potential conflicts of interest. Those reforms also placed severe limits on what Members of Congress could make on the side moonlighting, again in order to minimize conflicts of interest. Up until that time, a number of Members had earned more than $100,000 a year practicing law on the side — even sometimes representing lobbyists as clients!
His reforms also ended the ability of Members of Congress to put campaign fund surpluses into their own pockets when they retired.
Dave's support for reform is undiminished today.
Rep. David Obey's Official Website
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