“I’ve always wanted to serve others. That’s why I went into journalism after I got out of Princeton,” Pike, a Wilson School major, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.
While in college, Pike’s friends did not consider him a burgeoning politician, though he exhibited a high level of intellectual engagement with political issues and is remembered for his thoughtful, levelheaded perspective. But a series of editorials Pike wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for 14 years, eventually inspired him to run for office.
The editorials accompanied a series of articles titled, “America: What Went Wrong,” which discussed issues such as “the dismantling of the middle class, jobs getting shipped overseas, workers losing their pensions,” Pike said. “It made a difference.”
Pike said he realized that he could better address public policy problems outside of journalism. “I decided I could do more good being a member of Congress than I could just writing about problems,” he explained.
Politics have influenced Pike’s life at least since his undergraduate years. He described the University as a “ferment of ideas” during the Vietnam War era.
“Doug maintained a level head in those days,” Kevin Baine ’71 said in an e-mail. “He had a better sense ... of the political complexity of some of the issues we were all talking about.”
During his freshman year, Pike ran a spirited campaign for class president, his friend Frank Camm ’71 recalled. “The rest of us watching him were sort of amused because he was so enthusiastic about it and the rest of us were trying to be very cool,” Camm said.
“In the fervor on campuses at that time, Doug’s cool head and thoughtful tone did not lend itself to elective politics,” his friend Mark Mazo ’71 explained in an e-mail, noting that Pike “was not a campus politico.”
Pike lost that race and, thereafter, he focused more on journalism than on politics, Camm said. “Until he told me that he was going to run for Congress about a year ago, I would not have predicted it,” he said.
In his academic life, Pike “managed to fly under the radar” without selecting a senior thesis topic until three or four weeks before the deadline, Mazo said. “When he finally did select a topic ... we learned that in fact Doug had been planning three alternative topics all along and had the entire thesis planned in advance.”
Mazo said that Pike produced his thesis — titled “Student Conceptions of International Affairs” — “coolly, effectively and in record time. We were impressed.”
No matter which way Pike’s interests pulled him, however, he always had a familial tie to politics. Baine attributed part of his friend’s understanding of political issues to exposure through his father, Otis Pike ’43, a nine-term Democratic representative who served New York’s first congressional district from 1961 to 1979.
For his own campaign, Pike explained that he plans to address a number of issues, focusing primarily on the state of the economy.
“The number one issue is getting the economy growing again, growing strong enough that it’s creating a lot of jobs,” he said. “I think the president and his supporters are on the right track, investing more in our crumbling highways and transit systems, and investing in clean energy jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.”
Pike, who served as president and chairman of the board of trustees at South Oaks Hospital on Long Island, said he also plans to focus on health care. Though he endorsed the passage of the recent health care reform bill, he said that more work remained to be done. The plan, he said, “should have a strong public option to increase competition and hold costs down. Until it does, I have pledged that I will not accept the government health care coverage that members of Congress get.”
He also stressed the importance of improving the country’s educational system.
Pike will face Iraq War veteran Manan Trivedi in the May 18 Democratic primary election. If he advances to the general election, he will most likely face incumbent Jim Gerlach, who is expected to defeat electrician Patrick Sellers in the Republican primary.
Despite his delayed entrance into the political arena, Pike said the decision to run was not entirely spontaneous. “I’ve always had the idea of running for office in the back of my mind,” he said. “For me it was hard to decide after college in what field to pursue my desire to help people.”
Baine said he believes this deferred decision to enter politics sets Pike apart from other individuals who come from political families.
“What distinguishes Doug from so many sons of politicians is that it took him so long to enter the field of politics himself,” he explained. “I think that is because Doug is instinctively drawn more to serious discussions of policy than he is to shaking hands, kissing babies and pleading for votes.”
This is the second of three articles profiling Princetonians running for Congress.Read More
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