In Iowa, A 'Pirate' Runs On FOI Issues

By: Mark Fitzgerald Call anytime, said the Friday morning e-mail from James F. Hill, candidate for the 1st Congressional District in Iowa: "I am hanging around today waiting for washer repair."

Not the way that my congressman here in Chicago, the money-raising machine Rahm Emanuel, would confess to spending a campaign day.

But that's Hill, a WYSIWYG candidate if ever there was one. He's running in the 1st District, for an open seat that both the Republican and Democratic national parties are targeting with tons of campaign funding.

Hill's not a Republican or a Democrat. He calls himself a Pirate. Correct that: a "drunken Pirate."

Of course, he doesn't have a prayer of winning the congressional seat, but I think he merits our attention for the average guy's passion he brings to government freedom of information and transparency issues.

There's this, for instance, from his campaign Web site:

"This pirate believes that holding public office demands real sacrifice. Every aspect of my personal life must be laid to the blade and exposed. My medical history. My financial history. My employment history. My family history out in the open for your scrutiny. It is my offer to you. It will be my way of showing real sacrifice to serve you. We as voters have not asked enough of candidates. For the $150,000 annual salary, candidates should be subjected to intense public scrutiny."

(I'm indebted to my former colleague Debra Gersh Hernandez, who is now coordinator of national Sunshine Week campaign, for pointing me to Hill's Web site. A tip of the Kersalt toupee, Deb!)

In a phone interview Friday, Hill was certainly true to his word. In the course of a half-hour he told me about his battle with alcoholism, his income, his wife's income, their credit card debt, the amount in their checking account, his education (dropped out of college after two months), his former job emptying oil traps and sludge pits, and the physical consequences of the 2002 workplace accident that laid him up. Some of this last category can be filed under Too Much Information.

"The thing that's funniest to me is, nobody's really asking me tough questions," Hill said.

So, it seems, Hill asks the tough questions of himself. He volunteers, for instance, that "I'm a terrible money manager -- of my own money."

When the Cedar Rapids Gazette asked all four of the 1st District candidates -- there's a Libertarian Party candidate running, as well -- how much they planned to spend on their campaign, only Hill responded in a straightforward way. Indeed, of all the candidates in all the congressional races surveyed by the Gazette, Hill is the only one who disclosed a specific cash amount. He says he's spending $3,000 of his own money, and nothing else.

If it were up to Hill, finding out where money goes in campaigns and government would be much simpler. "I mean, the way it's done now, if you're looking for financial records after you've drilled down four levels to get to them, they're still so vague and they don't tell you anything," he says.

Candidate financial records, and all other public information should be "translated to normal language so the average guy, the walking-around schlub, can understand it," Hill says.

That could be the motto of his campaign, if he didn't already have a catchier one: "Chain whip me if I ever ride in a limo."

Hill has the predictable complaints about the press you'd expect from a candidate who is neither donkey nor elephant, let alone a pirate whose Web site features photos of the candidate with full Fu Manchu facial hair inevitably wearing a do-rag.

Hill is particularly exercised these days at Ed Tibbetts, the political writer for the Quad-City Times, the district's most important paper.

He thinks Tibbetts is ignoring him, but the reporter responds, not unreasonably, that the paper covers any "viable" campaign, major party or not. And Editorial Page Editor Mark Ridolfi notes that the paper's candidate surveys went out before Hill filed.

"I just have not seen his campaign do anything in the community," Ridolfi said. "I know we're going to give him some coverage." But when it comes to print space in such an important race, he adds, the paper naturally devotes its attention to the two real contenders, the major-party candidates.

Those explanations don't satisfy Hill, of course, who says he spends most campaign days first taking classes at the local community college, and then mounting his motorcycle, riding from place to place in the district, and knocking on the doors of weekly newspapers.

"I told Ed (Tibbetts of Quad-City Times), look at my odometer if you don't think I'm campaigning," he said.

Hill is under no illusion he'll be taking the oath of office come December. He's motivated to run by many issues, not least his contempt for President Bush's Iraq war policy: "I see these over-age Guardsmen going off to Iraq, and see that man-child (Bush) and some days, I wake up and my back hurts, and all I want to do is go to the tavern, so I take that anger, and focus it on this (campaign)."

But Hill believes that in the long run he can also do some good for government openness, too.

"I just think if I manage to light up the election board a little bit," he said, "maybe somebody a little prettier and with better education will come along and make people see how important these ideas of openness and freedom of information are, and that will make it worth while."

Godspeed, Pirate.