Twenty-nine years ago, Bill DeWeese got bitten by the bug.
"If you get the bug to get into politics, it never goes away," said the Democratic minority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
DeWeese, a rural Democratic stalwart, spoke at the Fels Center of Government on Friday.
He described his ascent toward the pinnacle of his party's organization in Pennsylvania, including how he knocked off a fellow Democrat to claim the top spot in the House.
"The certain way to lose in a crisis is to absent oneself from the scene of the action," DeWeese said, analyzing his opponent's failure.
Being involved in state government in Harrisburg for 29 years, he extolled the virtues of "strong speakership and leadership," but reminded his audience that he is "a partisan leader," and "politics is everything" in government.
Using the full range of his vocabulary, printable and not, he launched into an attack on his Republican opponents, claiming that they "have the range of power and do little with it," and that "there's so much hypocrisy at the top level."
"Tom DeLay is the quintessence of everything that's bad about government," DeWeese said of the Republican U.S. House of Representatives majority leader.
Despite his long tenure, DeWeese was not afraid to point out his own weaknesses and shortcomings, calling himself "a minor-league ballplayer who's been MVP" and revealing his disappointment at having "never made it to the show" in national politics.
On the recent presidential election, the self-proclaimed "first Democrat to come out for Kerry" was introspective, as he voiced concern about how his home county went Republican for "the first time since Nixon." He told the approximately 30-person audience that "I don't have a good answer [on the Democratic Party's defeat], but maybe that's why we got beat."
DeWeese was quick to say, however, that the United States has "a marvelously adaptive and resilient national fabric."
The modern American political system did not escape DeWeese's scrutiny, as "even at [his] level," he explained, there is an "absolute reliance" on television.
Many students came away from the speech surprised and impressed. "I didn't expect him to be so articulate," College senior Jeff Pyatt said.
"He was incredibly insightful," Pyatt added after praising DeWeese's vocabulary and amusing analogies.
Graduate student Samantha Tubman voiced similar sentiments, calling DeWeese "dynamic" and "very personal."
She said that DeWeese was the first speaker she had heard from who could "open up and put it out there."
"It makes me feel a lot better about who's representing me," Tubman said.
