David Costello Candidate from Lewiston looks to finish stong by using door-to-door politics and stressing his international experience

David Costello finds himself in familiar territory on this day.

The Democratic candidate – one of six in his party vying for the open 2nd Congressional District seat in the U.S. House – likes to stress his international experience. On a recent morning, however, the Old Town native is focusing on his hometown ties.

With little pull among traditional party donors, Costello, a former U.S. foreign assistance officer, is taking the day to canvass the mill town where he and his siblings grew up in a pair of tenements on French Island and later in a mobile home park in the Great Works section of town.

“Oh, I know you,” says a smiling elderly woman – who later reveals herself to be a friend of Costello’s grandmother – as she opens wide the door of her tidy Sixth Street home after the casually dressed Costello repeats his name.Costello’s family ties are strong indeed here, with his 81-year-old grandmother Pauline Baillargeon a lifelong resident of French Island, a once bustling Franco community on the city’s east end.

“You take care of my boy,” Baillargeon told a visitor earlier in the day as Costello, 41, and his brother, off-duty Bangor Fire Department Lt. Matt Costello, prepared for their door-to-door in one of the city’s middle-class neighborhoods off Gilman Falls Road.

Talking as he walked from house to house, David Costello conceded that he has little districtwide name recognition and is not surprised that he’s trailing in the early polls commissioned by some of his well-funded rivals.

In the waning weeks of the campaign, he’s hoping the door-to-door politics – in addition to a media blitz scheduled in the weeks before the June 11 primary – will give him the edge in the crowded race in which experts say just 20 percent of the vote could secure the party’s nomination.

“When they vote, hopefully they’ll remember that I came by and talked to them,” said Costello, who by himself gathered the vast majority of the 1,000 signatures – with his grandmother collecting more than 200 – needed to place his name on the primary ballot.

Now living in Lewiston, Costello also is hoping his geographic ties to the district’s largest city – where 5,700 Democrats voted in the last contested primary – give him an advantage over his higher-profile competitors.

“I certainly don’t mind being the only candidate on the ballot with Lewiston next to my name,” Costello said after one-time rival Kaileigh Tara, a former Lewiston mayor, unexpectedly dropped out of the primary race in mid-March.

While there’s still plenty of competition, none can claim his level of state and federal government and foreign service experience, he said.

Between 1994 and 2001, Costello worked as a U.S. foreign aid officer responding to political, humanitarian and economic crises in war-torn countries including Cambodia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia.

Before that, he worked as a high-level aide to then-Maine Secretary of State Bill Diamond, now one of Costello’s top supporters.

And while this is his first run for office, Costello is no stranger to the campaign trail, where he worked on three presidential campaigns – one for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and two for former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo.

But now the campaign issues are his own, and Costello is looking to make his experience in developing nations work for the economically challenged congressional district that has watched some of its best and brightest young people move south for better-paying jobs.

Like his primary rival, Lori Handrahan of Sorrento, Costello has some firsthand experience with the “brain drain” phenomenon, himself leaving the state, first for an education and, later, a career in Washington, D.C.

And after moving back to the state last year to run for the seat, Costello said he wants to go back to the nation’s capital, where he would work to direct federal funding to his home district, which has not received its fair share in years past, he said.

“The federal government is the great leveler,” Costello has said on more than one occasion, stressing the need for Washington to invest in disadvantaged districts to help level the economic playing field and realize a greater return on its investment.

Already pumping about $20,000 of his own money into his campaign, Costello in some ways is looking for a return on his own investment.

Although he has saved many of those advertising dollars for the last weeks of the campaign, Costello said he knows that, in order to win in June, voters are going to have to see his face someplace besides their television sets.

“I want people to know I’m working hard,” he said, stuffing a rolled-up campaign flier behind the screen door of an empty house.

On the Net: www.costello4congress.org.