You Can Run for Office. Yes, You! Just Ask RI Sen. Meghan Kallman!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:46 Thomas: And welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1059. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and in a moment we'll be getting on over to not only real-life attorney Matt Cameron, but a special guest.

Is something Matt's wanted to do for a very long time, and seems like the perfect time, because if I remember right, there were so many politicians, like, say, AOC and who were pretty, know, for lack of a better term, pretty much normal people, not career politicians, not people even, I don't know, Ivy League, on the track to become politicians, who won elections at every level.

It fruit of that labor are still being felt today, and I am thinking with the change in energy that has happened after Biden stepping down and Kamala choosing someone who I didn't know and is now my favorite politician, almost, Tim Walz, there is so much energy now. The polling's looking great. Obviously, we can never get ahead of ourselves, but knocking on every wood that's available, things are looking like they could be very good.

And hopefully we can see that same kind of inspiration in of getting people into politics or advocacy or activism, or whatever it is that we saw back in some of these other wave elections. Today's interview is perfect to get inspired and to stay inspired, because Rhode Island State Senator, her, Megan Kallman, was just a normal person until she ran for office.

Obviously, Megan is also pretty extraordinary, but in terms of, or the typical trappings that we used to think were the only way to become a successful politician to win election, is a professor of sociology at UMass Boston, not a lawyer, but someone who ran for something and won, and won another couple of times, and is making a real difference. It's so inspiring. Can't wait for you to hear this conversation with Rhode Island State Senator Megan Kallman. So after this break, which you can avoid if you go to patreon.com/law, get on over to the interview. You.

0:02:41 Matt: Thomas, I am very excited to introduce to you someone I've wanted to have on this show for as long as I've been here. Is my very good friend, Megan Kallman. She's not just an elected representative in the Rhode Island Senate, but she is a tenured professor of sociology, archaeology, author of several books, and a member of an awesome street band. So we got a lot to talk about today.

0:02:56 Thomas: Holy shit. And I can attest to that, too. You've been on the list since, like, email number one. So that's absolutely

0:02:57 Matt: Yeah, that's true.

0:02:57 Meghan: Oh, All right. Pressure is on here.

0:03:03 Thomas: True. For a while, I thought he was making you up, like I was like, Like, all right, yeah, okay, we'll have Megan on shore someday.

0:03:05 Matt: Yeah. Yeah friend in Rhode Island. Sure. Yeah so

0:03:13 Thomas: You wouldn't know her. She's from Rhode Island.

0:03:15 Meghan: Yeah,

0:03:17 Matt: We're in Rhode Island right now in Pawtucket which is the district that Megan represents. You want to tell us a little bit about Pawtucket just to get started? A

0:03:24 Meghan: Absolutely. So my district is District Senate 15, which is about half of the city of Pawtucket and a chunk of the City of Providence, which is, know, you like the east side of Providence. Pawtucket has a bunch of cool things in its history, including being the seat of both the Industrial Revolution and the labor movement, including the first women's factory strike. So lots of sort of trajectories and histories for us to be really proud of here. Contemporarily, we are, I would not just say a city, but like a state on the rise. We're a little state, but we punch, in my view, way above our weight on a lot lot of things, the details of which I hope we can dig into later on. We are a little state, there's fewer than 2 million of us. But think ahead of the curve on some things that matter, and we got a lot of work cut out for us as both a member of the community of New England, but also really particular place.

0:04:10 Matt: I want to talk about what you've been working on and your record and everything else, but let's, uh, first of all, I'm I want to talk about how you got into politics, because you've been a state senator for about three, four years now.

0:04:18 Meghan: Four years, yeah.

0:04:19 Matt: You're also a full -time professor of sociology at UMass.

0:04:22 Meghan: In the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development. Rhode Island has a part -time legislature, which is not that unusual. Most states actually have have a part -time legislature, although what that looks like depends on the state. So for us, we start in January, usually the first week of January, and we run usually through mid -June or sometimes the end of June. And we go typically Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in the afternoons and into the evenings. And so the design of this is obviously so that people can still sustain their full -time jobs, which is important because our stipend is, I think this year, It's around $18 ,000 a year. Last time I did the math, it came out to me, according to the time that I spent, a little over $5 an hour. So it's not designed.

0:04:58 Thomas: Jeez you get tips though or now the supreme court says that's okay I think So, hey, tip your local state

0:05:12 Matt: Yeah.

0:05:08 Meghan: No tips. Yeah, I mean, if the Supreme Court says so.

0:05:15 Thomas: Senator, everybody.

0:05:18 Matt: So what's your background as a sociologist?

0:05:20 Meghan: I actually was joking with a friend about this the other day. When I graduated high school, I bunked off and left the country. And I was like, I'm never going back to school. Joke's on me because I went back to school not once, not twice, but three times. And I became a sociologist. I got my PhD at Brown, which is actually what brought me to Rhode Island now almost 15 years ago. And back to school, actually, after having worked in specifically nonprofits, but also so like generally speaking, social movement organizations for a long time.

And I was just trying to figure out, you is going on in the movement infrastructure and in like the organizational infrastructure that despite so many like good and smart people here, we're having a hard time moving the needle on some really crucial issues. So that was what sent me back to graduate school both times. I wound up studying organizational sociology, which sounds a little wonky and a little weird. And it is a little wonky and a little weird.

But it's also like I do that because it's hard to study policies or programs or movements and make any assessment about their viability or, you know, their justice orientation if we don't look at what those movements and organizations, et cetera, do on the inside. So organizations are these like big kind of invisible things that like really shape how we see the world. We take them for granted. Right. Right. Because like you just go to school and school just but school is also socializing you. Right. They they put bells in school classrooms to train people to become factory workers. Right. So there's a socialization effect that goes on in most organizations.

0:05:33 Thomas: That's awesome.

0:06:52 Thomas: Can I get my kids to start doing some work around here then? I didn't know that. Yeah, I get in my own bell going, I guess.

0:06:55 Meghan: And yeah, yeah, get your own bell going. But like get getting people used to responding to bells is, you know, part of part of what the educational mandate was at the time. I'm, yeah,

0:07:06 Thomas: There's a really funny tweet that is absolutely 100% true for any parents out there where someone's like, I just started, a parent was like, I just start seeing the clean up, clean up everybody everywhere. And my kids all of a sudden activated like sleeper agents and started. It's so true. There's these songs they train them with, and then you do it, but I know there's a factory version of that, maybe we'll get a, yeah, coal mining song coal mine coal yeah

0:07:26 Meghan: There is a factory version of that, but the cleanup song, this cleanup song just activated that, that in me somewhere like a

0:07:33 Thomas: Yeah wow your office is so tidy now like

0:07:36 Meghan: 35 year old version of that. Yeah. Wow.

0:07:39 Matt: At some point you crossed over from studying organizations to actually deciding it was time to get involved in politics. How'd that happen?

0:07:45 Meghan: Um, so I actually, I did two terms on the Pawtucket city council before I ran for the state legislature. And, um, I ran my first campaign in 2016. I had sort of the dubious honor of sharing that election day with former President Trump. And there were a couple of things that went into it. I was just, so I had been involved in political organizing in Rhode Island since I had lived here. One of the real benefits of being a small state is that pretty much everyone lives within an hour of the statehouse if you're driving and a little bit longer if you're taking public transit.

It. But compared to something like, I don't know, California, we're very accessible capital. Absolutely. Right. And so as a grad student, getting into political organizing was like, it was a really, a good place to be learning a lot about that. And I will say, I was like not a political junkie in high school, not even in college. Like I've volunteered for congressional and presidential campaigns on and off over the years, but not ever because I just got off on it because it was interesting. The mechanics of it were super interesting to me because they weren't.

Were always sort of a means to an end. So I did two terms on the city council in 2016 to a really wonderful colleague. We actually are both in the Senate now and we sit next to each other. She represents the other half of Pawtucket. She and I were the the only women on the city council for much of that time. There was a short She went up to the Senate in a special election, and there was a short moment when I was the only woman on the council.

0:08:20 Thomas: Where I am yeah that's fine because there's probably not any women in the city you're in though right so it's like representative and

0:09:13 Meghan: No, no. Uh, yeah. We we're, we're made up. Um, As we know, tends to skew male. It tends to skew white. Turns to skewer a little bit older. And so I've always been on the younger side of um, body I'm in. So there was, you know, I went to a couple of campaign trainings and I, like, I'm digressing a little, but I think it's interesting that were designed for women specifically. And there was a lot that went into that. So like, for instance, women tend to to be more concerned than men on average about like their political opponent digging up a bunch of dirt on their past, um, like some, you know, really minor but questionable decision that was like documented on Facebook. So, uh, so there's like different patterns in obviously how women and men are perceived. Yeah.

0:09:59 Thomas: I would love if if there was a study to like grade the awfulness of the stuff people are digging up by men and women, because I feel like the stuff on the men is like awful. Know, whether it's like sexual harassment, allegation, whatever, you know, like that's crazy to me, because for the most part, it seems like women in politics don't have the same kinds of scandals on average that men do.

0:10:18 Meghan: That's certainly my experience. Right. But I think what people are worried about, and certainly what I was worried about, as, like, I was 32, I guess, when when I started that, um, it was like, someone was going to find a picture of me, like, you know, that someone had been taken at a party when I was a senior in college or something like that, right? That are unflattering, but not scandalous. Um, you know, so there were pieces of that. There were pieces like, what does it look like to speak in public where you're going to be judged differently than men? And that obviously changes sort of depending on your race to, uh, you know, public speaking classes, presentation classes, fundraising stuff, which also tends to be something that women struggle with, probably because we're socialized not to ask people for anything, for the most part.

So asking, going from that to asking people for money can be a complicated transition. There was even, this was a memorable one, but there was a class on, I went to a women in, like a women -in -governance conference a couple of years ago, and two of of their like kind of elective panels.

One was fat, attire or apparel, communicating things via apparel for women in politics, which again, is the thing that like, you kind of don't want to spend time on because it sounds not very important, but the reality is, is that people are judged quite harshly on that. Then again, another one was nutrition, right. And nutrition for busy women or for women who work like, you know, really off schedules or under high stress and that kind of thing.

So So I really know where I got going on this, but that training for being in office is obviously a lot about policy. It's a lot of about the sort of art and science of running campaigns. But then there's just some nuts and bolts stuff too about like, know, myth busting about what it looks like to do this stuff on the ground.

0:10:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:53 Matt: Yeah, that's actually, so one of my ulterior motives in having you on is that I am of the belief that there are a number of people listening to this show who should probably run for office. And I think that statistically, there's a good chance that many of them are women. Just like to have you talk a little about what a regular person can do right now if they're thinking about running for office and what that looks like. Because, I mean, you're very accomplished, but you're not a lawyer. Don't have any background in the law, if I remember right.

0:12:15 Meghan: No, I just make them.

0:12:17 Matt: That's right. Which is one reason I want to talk to you, because I think it's interesting.

0:12:19 Thomas: Yeah. Just just to clarify, you were just a normal ass person and then you're a politician now, right? It's not like you're a distant Kennedy or something that we don't know.

0:12:28 Matt: And

0:12:24 Meghan: Yes, yep, yep. No, no, I wish. There's not that many Kallmans floating around and political power structures around the country, I'm sorry to say. So is that you have to belong to a group or groups, right? And through that, you can figure out what issues matter to you and what trajectory is for you to get involved in things.

So my colleague and I just wrote a book about climate and just sort of nominally about about families and family planning and climate change and like majorly about how about social activism in an era of climate change in worsening climate change. And that's one of the things that we really talk about it.

We interviewed actually somebody who was really devastated by the Sandy Hook shootings, and she got active with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, like either the year that year or the year after the Sandy Hook shooting. She became a really strong advocate for gun safety and gun safety legislation. Then it turned out that she ran for office and won her election a or two after we had interviewed her. So there are some like, you know, sometimes that trajectory will bring you into office.

Sometimes that trajectory will bring you into kind of major roles in organizing spaces. But, I guess I would say, you of you who are members of unions have some built in kind of like political education, I would imagine in the work that you do, whether that's, you in whatever format, but, in every state in the country and in most cities in the country, there are groups of people doing things that you probably care about. And step one is to find those people.

Um, and through that kind assessing of like what the movement landscape or the organizing landscape or like the progressive infrastructure landscape is, can um, often give you a pretty clear sense of, that. Of um. Would say certainly with a like Like Harris Wall's campaign being what it is, if you want to, I feel like if you need to get your feet wet, you can start with the Democratic Party and go door knocking.

Like I actually I was meeting with a group of retired neighbors who they They have a mutual aide society in they run errands for each other and take each other to medical appointments, et cetera. And they're also increasingly politically engaged. Staged, but one of them was talking the other day about how he had knocked doors in New Hampshire during the last presidential election and how like it's just a really beautiful cross-section of America. That has been my experience on the doors as well.

So you know, a political campaign like this one offers, you know, like real beginner opportunities for phone banking or calling or door knocking or something like that. Advocacy efforts require like a huge amount out of on-the-ground jobs. And those on the ground organizing can be a really good way to get your feet wet. Really good way to understand how campaigns political, like, electoral or political or generally like issue-based work and a way to learn some strategy.

So that's, I mean, that's a good option, but there are climate groups all All over the country, there are transportation and housing advocacy groups all over the country. Faith congregations often have like legislative advocacy arms. You know, the Rhode Island, the network is small and dense. And so everybody knows everybody. And obviously in different states, that's going to look different. But, know, you groups like the Working Families Party usually have a legislative agenda and they have one in most states.

And so, you're looking to get involved with particular legislative issues, whether that's like a millionaire's tax or whether that's transportation infrastructure or housing or whatever it is. Groups like that that have local organizing bases are often also really good ways to plug. There is a group here called Reclaim Rhode Island that formed sort of in the aftermath of the Bernie campaign. They started as like a sort of progressive, let's help get progressive elect progressives elected.

Um, and what they turned into is a very, very strong tenant rights and housing advocacy organization. Um, they're incredibly strong and they've built up a lot of power and credibility in a very very short period of time. Um, number one is find other people.

0:12:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:16:04 Matt: You got your start through climate advocacy, is that right?

0:16:06 Meghan: Um, the actual story of how I decided to run is that somebody um came to my door who asked me what I was concerned about. Um, it it was someone who had never held office and he never wound up winning. He asked me what I was concerned about and I said, climate change. And he looked at me like kind of incredulously, as though it hadn't occurred to him. And I closed the door and I was like, you know, that's not really an acceptable position for somebody seeking, seeking elected office.

0:16:28 Meghan: Uh. Bet I can do better than that. Um, so I wound up running running for city council, um, against an incumbent. I won that race. Then in the Senate it was a, you three -way for an open seat. Yeah, the thing that motivated me to become politically involved in the first place. Like, you know, I, and know, you everybody younger than me is of the generation that has watched things unspooled very, very quickly and has watched just like, you knows, massive inaction over the course of 25 years. And it's a, it's pretty crazy making experience. I am very proud to say that Rhode Rhode Island has really been aggressive in our climate and environment legislation. This is the kind of thing that also illustrates like way that states can be effective in the absence of meaningful federal policy, too.

0:16:27 Matt: Your I was going to ask you about that, because in your book, The Conceivable Future, you talk about how the best chance we have at real climate legislation is actually through the states, which isn't something I really would have thought of. And, you know, in a place as small as Roto, true.

0:17:14 Thomas: Oh, man, that's because there's no legislation on the federal level anymore. They got rid of that.

0:17:19 Matt: Yeah, they're just not doing it. That's true

0:17:21 Meghan: You know, and I guess I wouldn't say the best chance, but I would say certainly a very good chance and largely for that reason, right? Like infrastructure bill was incredible, like, a once in a generation investment in climate resilience, but how that money gets spent is largely up to the states. And particularly, you know, in an environment of gridlock at the federal level, the places where you see aggressive climate legislation coming, like being signed into law, are at the state levels.

And especially in New England or in the Northeast, we're pretty closely networked. You know, we watch what each other is doing. Rhode Island in 2021 passed a sponsored by my colleague who did a ton of work on it. She was at that point the chair of the Environment Committee. But her name is Dawn Euer. She is a lawyer. It committed us to binding emissions reductions. Right. And it was a fairly high level law that said, we just we have to do this.

So the work of the subsequent years has been like, how do we do this? Right. So I will talk about building decarbonization and transportation and all that other stuff. But it put it on the books for us. Other states have similar laws. Right? Has one. New York has one and that, you know, we're legally legally accountable for that. And we, you know, for cleaning up our economy and for greening our greening, our economy.

That's not a thing that we're going to see, in my view, at the federal level in the conceivable future, and, and therefore a thing that states can lead on and should lead on.

0:18:36 Matt: Know, as a regular person who's not a lawyer, kind of training or preparation, do you get to go into a statehouse once you've won one of these elections to actually write laws? How does that work?

0:18:43 Meghan: That's a great question. Think it's going to depend on the state, because we are a part time legislature, we don't have a ton of of that. What we do have our staff, staff and legal staff who work very closely with us. So we rely on their expertise a lot. I guess I would say the other way that we often work on bills is by working them through community advocacy groups that have, like, counsel on their staff.

For instance, I had a bill a couple of years ago, years two ago, that enabled physicians to prescribe FDA approved hormonal contraceptives. And the idea was that people were, like, waiting for three months to see their GP to get a prescription for birth control pills or whatever. And by that time they were already pregnant. It just, you know, there was, there's a backlog of GPs, et cetera, but they had a lawyer on staff who had drafted that for them.

So in a, in a state like Rhode Island, we wind up up relying a lot on the expertise of both community -based advocates and also of our staffers. Then a lot of it, there's a real role for mentorship here, right? Like, I joined when my entering class in the Senate made the Senate, Rhode Island Senate, gender balanced for the first time in history. Lasted one year and then one of our women got poached to join the Biden administration, which was great for her.

Very fortunate coming in that there there were other people who would tell me how things went, right? Me the ropes. And it bears saying that I entered the Senate in 2021, which is, people will recall, was rather taken up by COVID. And so, you know, my first session, we were meeting, like, our committees were meeting via WebEx, and we would meet on the floor once a week at Rhode Island College, sitting, know, 15 you feet apart kind of thing.

It was far from a normal state of affairs. But is is really, I think, an important role for seeking, receiving mentorship from people who have been there longer, both on the policy side specifically, but also just on the culture of the statehouse, which varies from statehouse to statehouse, and even, I would say, from class to class. Would say too, that, you know, the not being a politician to being a politician, there are a couple of skills that have really served me.

And the thing, number one, is being a teacher. Thing number one is beinga teacher. You're, you're a teacher, you're in front of a class, right? So you have to be confident talking. You have, there's, a, there's equal parts talking and listening. You know, there's this sort of reading the room. There's this playing the long game kind of thing that you do when you are a teacher or a professor or an instructor in settings. And I would say, without a doubt, that is the skill set that I rely on most.

0:20:58 Thomas: Love that. It's like our new VP.

0:21:00 Matt: Exactly. I thought of you immediately when I saw the Tim Walls, once I started reading about Tim Wall's, because a very similar background as an educator who just thought it was time to run for office because somebody had to.

0:21:00 Meghan: Yeah, yeah.

0:21:07 Thomas: I was gonna make another comment, uh, you're talking about knocking doors earlier, right, when you were talking about that. I knocked doors once for, in the primary. Uh, it's hard as a, as an introvert, a hard thing to do, but I did do it. It was rewarding. But just, it occurred to me, like, how much those intangibles of the campaign matter, you know, like, we can't really, the average person, I don't know who's knocking doors or whatever, but when you think about the energy, energy that was Biden and now the energy that's Kamala and Waltz, it's like, well, yeah, people are going to want to knock doors now. It's like, so it's such an intangible, really, but so important to have that excitement to go spread the word and stuff.

0:21:39 Meghan: It's a real phenomenon, right? Both doing that for other candidates and doing it for myself and having people do it for me. I've been really honored to have a couple people with that level of enthusiasm, like, you pounding doors for me. You And, know, it really is, it's a thing. Um, and people respond to it. And you know the data is pretty clear about this too, that the best way to, the best way to get people excited about something is have a conversation with them. Uh, the second best way is phone calls and texts is sort of a distant third. And then there's mailers and there's access questions obviously.

And at the risk of sounding a little bit Pollyanna -ish though, the conversations on the doors are so invigorating in that that's like when you look look at it, it's like, oh yeah, democracy can be really awesome when you have capacity and when you have time. I was door knocking yesterday, myself and a candidate for the school committee here in Pawtucket. We had just like great conversation after great conversation, after great conversation. In fact, a couple of days ago, I knocked the door and I got this guy who had immigrated from Ireland Ireland in 1971. He had lived here ever since he'd raised four kids and a bunch of grandchildren here.

Um, and he, you he was listed as unaffiliated, which is like the Rhode Island version of independent. He had really strong opinions about universal health care. Um. And so sometimes when someone's unaffiliation, it means they lean right. And sometimes it means they leave left. And this guy leaned very, very strongly left. And he said, you know, I would had gone home to a family reunion in Ireland. I got COVID.

I had to stay in the ICU for five days because I'm an old guy and I got very, very sick. And he was like, and I came home and my heart was in my mouth about like how much they were going to charge me. And the answer was nothing. And He was like we're so wealthy. Ireland doesn't have nearly the money that we have. Like why can't we have that?

0:21:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I

0:22:16 Matt: Yeah,

0:23:12 Thomas: Yeah

0:23:12 Meghan: It's like great question, sir. Then you get, you Know, people making you tea and they show pictures of their children and their grandchildren. And one guy showed me his with garden like the most beautiful cabbages that I've ever seen, right? There's like really a beautiful cross section of community in knocking. And it's like a beautiful, it can be a really beautiful experience. And I will say that in eight years of doing this, I have only had two really bad interactions on the doors, which is like an incredibly good batting average I

0:23:13 Thomas: No kidding.

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0:26:37 Matt: When we first booked you to have you on, we were looking at a Biden election campaign, and we're on a very different position now. Are you feeling that energy right now as a Democrat and as somebody who is active in organizing?

0:26:47 Meghan: Like, it, um, have wished to see this earlier, um, I think it's not even the same race. I read some headline this morning, they're like, "Kamala has fundamentally changed the race," and I turned around, I said to my dad, like, this, this is not the same place, it's a fundamentally different race. I think, think there's a few things. Think her energy and her intelligence and her drive are really inspiring. I'm of trying, go -getting is inspiring.

I also think she responsive to protest, etc., on Gaza, which is the sign of a politician who is listening. You don't protest somebody who's never going to change their mind. You protest somebody qui is movable on an issue and who exhibits a willingness to listen to their community, wherever that is. Her choice of running mate was awesome for a couple of reasons.

One is that, he, you, was a teacher, a guy who got into policy because he believed that policy needed needed doing and that there's a way to do that more fairly and more robustly. Also, I think he's like he is. I, he does a really nice thing in that he is a sort of man's man in some ways.

You know, he's a sharpshooter hunter and, you, you know, he was served in the military for many years and very accomplished in some of these sort of like traditionally masculine things. And also he's like utterly unintimidated, uh, by a more inclusive world, which I think is awesome. And that's

0:28:00 Meghan: A really, really beautiful thing to model, right? Like, yeah, It's, it's great. And I think among the things that it demonstrates is that like we can have an awesome world with room for everyone and no one is losing, right? We're all winning. Pretty hard also to troll a picture of a guy who's holding a cute little piglet and smiling so hard he's going to break his face. And I think, honestly, that the US public has been starved for examples of kindness in their leadership as well.

And we see that out of both of them, like a more folksy version out of Walsh and a more policy -oriented version out out of Harris. There's things about both of their policy platforms, or particularly Harris's policy platform, that I would like to see different. And I'm committed to doing the work to make Rhode Island the most fair and the most safe place that it can possibly be. Said, I will note that a vote is not like a valentine.

You're not pledging fealty to someone for the rest of their life. You are making a strategic choice about the for for your country and your community. It is really, really nice to be able to feel some enthusiasm about that.

0:28:00 Thomas: Yeah well

0:28:02 Matt: Yeah, they're

0:29:00 Thomas: I think this links back to what we're talking about too, like for just so normal, Waltz is the most normal person I've seen on the political stage at this level in my lifetime that I can remember, and I obviously don't, to some degree he's a politician, like, has to be, he has be somewhat you political in different ways, but he, he comes comes across as somebody who's willing to kind of say what he thinks. That used to be what they'd say about Trump. He says what he things. Well, you know, it's all racist, xenophobic garbage and sexist garbage, but he says what do you think? And it's nice to have like the not evil version of that. That's like, yeah, he says, what do he thinks? And also the things he thinks aren't insane. So that's good.

0:29:25 Meghan: Think it is deranged.

0:29:34 Matt: Decent.

0:29:35 Thomas: Yeah,

0:29:35 Meghan: It is good. And I think there's like that, think that's the thing that people, um, respond to, right? Like being able to, you cut the bullshit sometimes, um. Be able to cut the more often than not. Um. And you politician has to watch what they say. A, that's Just like a piece of it. But I think we get the sense from both of them that they're engaging with integrity, which is the thing that was radically or noticeably absent during the Trump years. That, you think the about the way the election was likely to go and their unwillingness to have a really open conversation about what that meant, I think comes across as dishonest, even though it was not dishonest.

0:29:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:11 Matt: I think another thing that really helps is that this is the first time, as I understand it, since 1980 that we've had a non -lawyer at the top of this. And I was going to ask you, is what it like as a non -lawyer in politics? Because I think at this point, most people assume you have to have a law degree to be a legislator.

0:30:18 Meghan: Yeah. I will say that Rhode Island has, I Think, maybe not like the lowest number of lawyers ever, but a pretty low number of warriors right now. Like We've diversified our legislature a huge amount, and I'm not sure actually like what that's due to. I would, I mean, I guess I would say that think I that training as a teacher and as a sociologist has prepared me at at least as well, if not better in some ways as legal training.

Again, the point of a sociology degree is, or the pointof sociology as a, a as practice is to look at the bigger implications of things like, you know, what is this system built of and how do we find some levers in the system to make it better? Um, and who are those levers going to affect and how do we think about it? How do we talk about it, et cetera. I guess I I would say I haven't felt a pinch necessarily.

And we are, as I said, supported by really good, competent legal staff, both in the statehouse itself and in the community. And so I need a legal opinion, I've got about 10 places I can go to get one.

0:30:33 Matt: Surprises me.

0:31:18 Matt: You're coming at coming it from such a more practical position, I think. I mean, nothing against your lawyer colleagues, but do you feel the difference there when you're talking to them about policy, about how to get things done?

0:31:26 Meghan: Guess I would say that is all about studying systems, right? We study what systems do, do what effects exist intentionally and what effects exist unintentionally. And because our job is zooming out, right, like that's, I would say, an important piece of laws and of making policy. So, you know, I don't know. I'm that is one of the reasons why we need to have people of a ton of different walks of life and a ton of different skill sets making policy, right? Because we're all attuned to different stuff and all see different things and we also see different implications. And that's important, right? There's a tonne of data about this that like teams of diverse backgrounds and orientations, et cetera, solve problems in a better and more sustained way because we're not all thinking the same thing and we don't get into the groupthink thing. So, you know, being a non -lawyer prevents me from being part of lawyer groupthink. I think if, if we were rotten with sociologists, we'd be in a different kind of trouble.

0:32:12 Thomas: Sure. Well, it's just the overall I was making too is again, a normal person, I think more than ever now is not a disqualifier for politics. And it's a good thing. And I was getting at too, encouraging more people to uh run for things uh

0:32:24 Meghan: And be real, like are things that are annoying about running for office, right? There's, to figure out how to get your finance, like raising money, for instance, is not optional. It is distasteful, but it is not not optional. And Uh, so you can't do things like meet the voters you're going to meet. Um, if you can't send mailers, right. Because not every, I, you know, Pawtucket, and um, also the portion of Providence that I represent, they're both Nate, like all it's all triple deckers, duplexes and triple deckERS. And frequently you can, you have the bells are broken and you can have actual conversations with everyone for a series of reasons ranging from like their work shift to the fact that you, you can be heard knocking on the door over the air conditioner. So you You have to be able to do things like send mailers, send email blasts, hire canvassers, that kind of stuff. Raising money is a, it's a skill set, and skill sets can be taught. Right, so it's not a disqualifier. It's intimidating and it's not fun, but it's also totally doable.

0:32:42 Thomas: And the more local level you are the less money it takes to run so

0:33:23 Meghan: And I think it really depends on where you are in the country, et cetera, and how competitive the race is. My district is very compact. I can walk around it, right? Are people who run in other parts of the state where they have to drive door to door. And that obviously takes a ton of time. And so I can, I can knock way more doors in the same period of time than they can because of just the density of being in the city, right.

So there's, there's all sorts of considerations like that. The other thing I will say is that there are also many, many training programs about how to run for office.

PCCC, it's called the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, um, don't know if they're still working under the same name, but for went to two trainings there, they're like three -day trainings and they cover everything from like how to talk about policy in a way that's digestible to your average voter to fundraising to um codes of ethics to how to put together a campaign team and like how to think about a campaign manager and how you manage volunteers like like these, again, these are, these are skill sets and they can be kind of intimidating to look at, but when you break them down, people have been doing this very successfully for a long time. It's an infrastructure. The more you you do do it, the better you get at it, right?

0:34:23 Thomas: I'm thinking they must have one that's like how to talk shit on social media now because that's what politics is apparently for the maybe that's more the right wing version of it but

0:34:30 Meghan: Yeah. So, God, I'm trying to remember. You're tickling my memory. There was like a talk I saw at a conference. I think it was a talk. Yeah, it was definitely a talk I saw in a conference about partisan differences and talking shit on social media. And they did obviously find that the right Right. Does that significantly more than the left, but that judicious use of it has benefits sometimes on the left too. In general, I try to not talk shit about anyone and try to just lead with my best foot forward, right?

So instead of debunking all kinds of garbage and trolls, I tried to just talk about what I'm about. Um That's not because like I'm inherently a sunshiny person all the time, and I don't get upset about it, but it is because I have found it to be the much a much more effective way of communicating what I'm about, um, the alternative, right? So if I'm always back on like the defense of talking shit about someone who's talked shit about me, uh, we're just in an endless cycle of shit talking, and I don't like, it's not a great use of my time, um.

0:34:43 Thomas: That sounds yeah yeah yeah

0:35:20 Matt: You're not really passing laws at that point either.

0:35:22 Meghan: Yeah. Right. And So, yeah.

0:35:23 Matt: Yeah.

0:35:23 Thomas: But even Just like campaigning, you know, like I, it reminds me of you, I think, broke through a lot in 2016 because of just that relentless message that was you, of simplistic in its rhetoric but really effective, and it wasn't a whole lot of time wasted on you with other politicians, nice.

0:35:26 Matt: Yeah,

0:35:38 Meghan: And I mean, I think the temptation, like a lot of minutia involved in passing good legislation, and like a lot of weeds and a lot of rabbit holes and a lot of, you know, and so that the temptation I think is to go down those rabbit holes and to get into those weeds, because those things matter for doing it successfully, including, but like who the bad guys are.

But like, I will do some judicious shit talking, like so, at the end of the session last year, for instance, I have a bill to ban PFOS, which are those nasty forever chemicals, they're endocrine disruptors, they're just awful in consumer products, um, and at the 11th hour, uh, uh, industry started trying to throw their weight around, like getting a Mass, like gutting the bill on the floor as it was going through, um, and this caught the attention of an environment reporter in one of the local local papers.

And she called me and was like, "Yeah, what's going on with this?" And I said, "Yeah, this is like total nonsense, right? It's not transparent." And that's not, we have a committee process and they didn't show up to the committee process. That's not honest. And it's not, you know, it's legal, but it's not ethical. And then she looked up how much this guy was getting paid by the American Chemistry Counselor, whatever it was, and it was like an obscene amount of money, and she printed it.

So like, we took a judicious, and I think totally justified, swing, and we won, and we passed the bill, and the bill was signed into law, and now it's there.

0:36:51 Meghan: Go for the jugular, but only, only when it really matters when there's other ways to do it. I think consensus building does more to bring along. It does more to provide on-ramps or entryways into getting, together. Not the same as not having boundaries, but it is, it an ethic of governance that I I think is important, or I guess I should say that has served me.

0:36:50 Thomas: You

0:37:09 Matt: That's one of the, well, I have a lot of favorite things about you, But one of my favorite things about you is that you do actually bridge that gap between activism, advocacy, and actually getting things done. Just seems like you've really managed to figure that out. Wanted to talk about, just a kind of a microcosm, because we've talked about a lot of you've worked on. But just kind of because I think state legislatures, at least for me, are kind of in a mystery box. I don't really know what's going on in there, and I think most voters probably don't. Something as simple as today, the day that we're airing this, it is Victory Over Japan Day in Rhode Island.

0:37:37 Meghan: Yeah.

0:37:37 Matt: Still for some reason. Rhode Island took it on.

0:37:41 Meghan: Single -handedly.

0:37:43 Matt: And it is the last state. Rhode Island is the state. Casey's been talking about this for years, about how Rhode Island is the last date to still have a VJ Day celebration. And I understand that's something you've been working on. This is one of those little tiny things, like a little nudge that the state needs to just fix, right? And how hard is it to fix something small like that?

0:37:38 Thomas: Guys beat japan sweet yeah what

0:37:58 Meghan: Depends on the small thing, right? So as you say, I've had that bill. This is my second year having it. I want to, my, my colleague, representative Jennifer Stewart, who I overlap with, she, she's a house member who represents some of the same part of Pawtucket. So she's, also carrying the torch on this one. Sometimes it's really easy. And sometimes it's harder than you think. Victory over Japan Day is not a thing that we should be celebrating, right? So the bill proposes to change. It's a state holiday, so people get the day off. The bill would keep the holiday and the day off and would change it to Peace and Remembrance Day, which is a way of honoring and acknowledging the sacrifices of the military, of the victims, of everybody who's been negatively impacted by war. To be a more healing appealing orientation towards wasn't at the House hearing, but it had a very positive hearing in the Senate, including, a know, number of veterans who came out to speak in support of that. Bill did not make it through this year.

0:38:46 Thomas: Who's on on the other side of that issue just people who don't like anything changing ever oh

0:38:49 Meghan: I think, you know, I think in some corners there's the sense that it's disrespectful to the sacrifices of of veterans, which is obviously not a perspective that I agree with, but I, that's the feeling. I think the other thing about legislation too, is like where things sort of fall in the priority that Rhode Island, here's something like 6,000 bills per session. So everybody is sort trying to rank their priorities, et cetera, etetera. And so there's a bit of a, a bit of just like jostling for what, matters. What that I think is a piece of it.

I remember a couple of years ago, we passed a There was something in the law about you could train to get a motorcycle license on a three wheel, like a tricycle motorcycle, if you have a disability, but you had to still take the test on a two wheeled motorcycle. Cause that was just like in the lot, it was like, you know, the residue of, of the original law, but it was meaningfully affecting people's lives. So we had to change that and, you don't have to go through the hearing process. So it takes up real estate on, you know, it takes up legislative real estate because we have to do things like that.

So I depends on the issue. But I would say that certainly we spend a fair portion of our session doing things that are either enabling legislation for local cities and towns or cleanup or something, right? So, you know, nobody's omniscient. We make bills and then sometimes like, turns out we've written it wrong, or it has some weird unintended consequence. So we have to go back the next year and tidy it up. And, you there's a piece of that that's to be expected, but also in a part -time legislature, it becomes a that we wind up spending like a significant portion of our time on.

0:39:09 Thomas: Yeah yeah fair right you put in like overtime hours you know like yeah

0:40:23 Meghan: I think that falls in the category of tips.

0:40:25 Thomas: I'm gonna work a long weekend I'm going to get this tricycle thing changed whatever the hell that was sure

0:40:31 Meghan: Single one of those matter to the person or people who are are experiencing it. That Right. And, was the thing that, you know, when I ran, I was thinking big policy and I still do a lot of work on big policy. And also there are things that I like knew was an issue until I had a constituent come to me and be like, oh my God, this is such an issue. Can we fix it?

0:40:33 Thomas: Yeah well and fair enough because I forgot you know again the difference between state and federal like I still Still, I'm in this mindset, which we really shouldn't be like we should obviously pay more attention the more local it is. But we seem to do the opposite. But I completely forgot the idea that like, oh, no, we're just we're doing a lot of stuff. And like can't always squeeze everything in because nationally it's just record breaking low amounts of bills passed every year. And it's like I forgot that. A state level, it's Like things are actually possibly being done. And so you don't have the time.

0:41:14 Meghan: That is where everything important gets like expressed. Right? So we will often get funding from the feds or enabled by the fed's in one way way or another but like how that shows up how we spend our infrastructure money how we choose to make the transition off fossil fuels like those things are decided increasingly regionally and at the state level like um think it's increasingly important to figure out how to stay informed about state level decisions like that's where things like minimum minimum wage, access to abortion and contraception, Medicaid and Medicare, and insurance reimbursement rates, which in turn determine the cost of healthcare and the availability of healthcare.

All that stuff is decided at the state level, right? So the things that touch people's lives most immediately, that's here. And in Rhode Island, again, like little states. So everybody has a much sort of easier access to the place where those decisions are made.

I obviously that can't speak for a place like like Nebraska or California or anything but um but it is really important and I there's some civics education here there's some media access questions here there's I mean there's a lot of reasons um why that I think is not a common perception also I think like the media talks about the national politics as though it's the only definition of politics and

0:42:20 Meghan: I find that both and like really untrue. You and also there's like the decline of local news sources and that, that plays a role in it too. You Know, it's nobody's fault, but it is an opportunity for all of us.

0:42:20 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

0:42:34 Matt: Did want to ask, last chapter of your book, The Conceivable future. I've gone back and read a couple of times now because I found it to be really inspirational. You're talking about the big yes. And I want to see if we could close by talking about that because we've been talking a lot about running for office, which is something that I think that everybody should consider if they're in a position to do that. Been talking on this show since I've joined about different ways that you can get involved beyond beyond knocking on doors, beyond getting out the vote, beyond voting itself. And you give so many great practical examples in this chapter of that. And I just wanted to encourage you to share some of those and talk to listeners about that.

0:43:04 Meghan: Yeah, sure. So the last chapter, the last two chapters of the book are called the big no and the big yes. And the way that we think about, you movements to make the world better, safer, healthier, more just are broadly in two categories, right? Stopping bad shit and dreaming up and implementing good shit. And one is is not not inherently better than the other. In order to explain the big yes, I have to explain the Big No really quickly. But the Big Know is like everything that we needed to stop yesterday, Bad right. Money, bad laws, bad infrastructure, more fossil fuel infrastructure in poor neighborhoods, like, the bad stuff that makes makes the world less safe, less kind, less just. And so that chapter has a bunch of really interesting examples of people who have figured out how to say no, including the guy in Charleston, South Carolina, who played the tuba. He trolled a bunch white supremacists during one of their marches on the State House,

0:43:25 Matt: Sure.

0:43:50 Matt: My favorite.

0:43:51 Thomas: Oh, is this where you got this anecdote, Matt?

0:43:52 Matt: Yes.

0:43:52 Meghan: Right? He great. There's a YouTube video floating around somewhere. And he was interviewed about it a couple weeks later. And I couldn't stop the a rally, but at least I could make fun of them. Like I wasn't just going to be silent. So he followed them down the street playing like big farty tuba noises as they were making like really shitty racist chants. So that's like a one man no, but there's other kinds of no's where that means blocking, bad projects, where that mean divesting from things. We have a big chunk about divestment in that chapter.

0:44:26 Meghan: And and some people are like dispositionally more inclined towards no or yes, but really most of us kind of flop back and forth depending on what matters in our local communities. The big yes is everything that we need more of, whether or not we have imagined it yet.

So everything from full reproductive health care delivered in a just and accessible way to humane immigration policies to fewer prisons to local food systems to local energy systems to community solar to fast and comfy and efficient public transit to knowing your neighbors. To like all of this stuff that makes life better and richer, the things that we can list and also the things like nobody's dreamed up yet or that I don't know anything about. And so we folks to just sort of think about that.

Like somewhere between the no and the yes is a job for everyone. Most of the time, there's a couple of jobs. So it kind of depends on like what your orientation is and what your proclivities are. It turns out that I'm like a massive transit nerd. I would never never have expected that. But yeah, as Matt said, I piloted a couple of years ago. Was one of my legislative initiatives. Rhode Island made one of our rapid transit lines free.

It turned out that doing the research and working on that bill, I was like, oh my God, this is awesome. I love this. And that's like kind of a yes, right? Like, yes, more transit. Yes, let's make it free. Yes. Let's see where we can go with that. But um, there have been other things that like, our you knower about stopping bad stuff.

You know, the examples that we give in there range from, you people doing food systems work to doula coverage, you to Medicaid coverage for doula care, which is like a big predictor of mortality. And there's like a particularly egregious racial divide between black women and white women. A number of examples in the book ranging from reproductive healthcare to building up local food systems to public transit to knowing your neighbors to street parties to all of that kind of stuff that makes life better and richer.

I think that for of us, we have to live a little bit in the no and a little but in the yes, right? So what are the the things about our lives, about society, about our cities, about our communities that that are not healthy and are not serving us. Like, how can we move through those and get to things that are, was

0:46:29 Matt: Just the kind of stuff that I want to be thinking about right now. I feel like we're in a time of real hope. I'm feeling a wonderful sense right now of how things can be better in a way that I haven't felt in a while. And that's one of many reasons I wanted to talk to you because you've always always inspired that. Oh, just very quickly, just want to ask you too about the role of music in all of this, because you're in a play trumpet and a street band and a performance. You can just tell us a little bit about how music plays into your activism.

0:46:51 Meghan: I also want to say that like most of the things that I learned about music have come from this band. And so I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to, everybody who's been a member on and off over the years. Yeah, so we're called the Extraordinary Rendition Band, and we are an activist street band.

And importantly, we are an open band, and the idea is that we accept musicians of all skill levels, and that as we hold ourselves to account, we can grow into a strong level of musicality without being shitty and exclusive.

Also practice outside in public, um, you believe that the music can be a motivator, it can be an inspirer, it can make everything easier, um, it can mark the solemnity of a moment, right, during the Women's March in 2017, uh, band actually split into two bands and half, half stayed here in Rhode Island, but the other half, and I was a member of the half that traveled to DC, and we, uh, and we played the Women's March, um, you know, we're a small band so we're not like playing for for the whole march, we're just kind of marching with everyone as a band.

Is an anchor, it's a feeling, it, a drumbeat can give people something to chant to. One of my favorite moments from that Women's March is we were walking back to the train or something after the march was over. There were a bunch of guys with Trump, like, like riding, riding through on motorcycles, kind of, you know, revving their engines, et cetera.

They and were coming up to this corner and there were some folks with the black block who were also coming up the corner and they were sort of set to converge on this corner. The group looked at each other and were like, oh shit, this is going to go downhill real fast. For whatever reason, one our saxophone players broke into Hava Nagila.

And so we, we played Hava, then there was a group of Native American musicians, like flautists, flute, who were walking back, we never actually talked to them, but they saw what was happening and they kind of joined in, and so we had like this street band plus, uh, Native American physicians playing on the street corner in middle of like what could have been a confrontation, um.

0:48:40 Thomas: No one's going to do political violence to that. Yeah. Play yackety sacks. Nobody's going to. What are you? There's impossible. You know, they got to bring this to the police, too. The police think de -escalating. They don't believe in that, but they just wave a gun and escalate. If every police officer were trained to play yakisaks at the right moment there no more violence perfect world yeah

0:48:47 Meghan: Exactly right it's attention to future and and I would say that like that was not that was due to this saxophone player's quick thinking where I think, I mean, I don't even know if it was a conscious decision on his part, but he looked around and was like, oh shit, Hava Nagila. And so we played there for a little while and it turned into like a dance circle. I would say that neither of the two groups who were originally headed for confrontation participated, but they went their separate ways, right?

0:49:03 Thomas: Yeah

0:49:26 Meghan: Which was like, to me, you know, and nothing like that has ever you know, we've crashed the mall a couple of times, you spaces where people are bored and unhappy, like we will play for them. But it was a really meaningful moment to me, because it was that moment where I was like, oh no, this isn't just like a feel good thing. This is like an actual diffuser, diffuser of tension, like a way that changes energy really substantially and changes commitment to what you're doing in the moment. Know, and again, we're a street band, we play outside, which means that we're have a fairly irreverent perspective about like what constitutes public space, uh, including, you know, uh, places we've been asked to leave, um, also that that people together even if it's just temporary, for the space of a song or two, like, has the ability to build a connection between us, um, is strong, and it's healthy, um, that is, I think, part of being happier humans in the world, um.

0:49:26 Thomas: All

0:50:12 Matt: Sure, any closing thoughts for anybody who might want to run for office who's listening to this?

0:50:16 Meghan: Would say, first of all, um, first step is figuring is out who your local organizing groups are, and they don't have to be like partisan or party -based organizing groups, but issue -based stuff, um, get into the network, um, organizers who are working on stuff that is, it's a really good way to understand what the field looks like, and then take a campaign training, um, get involved with or get involved with an election, just get involved with something, and I think going from part of the work of getting elected, um, if you want to run, is having an understanding of who the networks are and what infrastructure looks like in your community. The best way to do that is to be part of it.

0:50:49 Thomas: Hey, uh, toss out plugs if you want people to go find out more about you or anything you want to send our listeners to.

0:50:54 Meghan: Written with my very dear friend and longtime colleague, Josephine Ferrarelli. It's at conceivablefuture.org. And my political website is electmeghan.com.

0:51:05 Thomas: Right. Thank you so much for joining us today.

0:51:08 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:51:25 Meghan: You. I will do some judicious shit talking like oh shit, Hava Nagila.