Chellie Pingree addresses COA graduates

BAR HARBOR – It may not have been a stump speech – primary elections are not for another year – but it was clear Chellie Pingree was preaching politics to the converted when she spoke over the weekend at College of the Atlantic.

Pingree, a 1979 graduate of the small, environmentally conscious college, gave the commencement speech Saturday at COA’s 35th graduation ceremonies.

She is one of several Democrats who have declared they are running for the seat currently held by Tom Allen, a Democrat who has decided to take on Republican Susan Collins in her re-election bid for the U.S. Senate.

A former state senator and president for the past four years of the national public interest group Common Cause, Pingree appealed to the graduation audience’s sense of citizenship. She said that democracy works only when people are involved in the process, because too often special interests have the ear of legislators.

“The list of problems in our democracy is endless, and I think it’s only getting worse,” Pingree said. “If we don’t engage and fix our democracy, it will not be a place where we want to be.”

The former U.S. Senate candidate, who failed to dislodge Collins from office in 2002, did not level any criticism at other political parties or philosophies. She did have some choice words for big corporations and their lobbyists, who she said have too much influence on the political process.

She was critical of pharmaceutical companies’ attempts to avoid accepting reduced prices for prescription drugs, a political battle she was involved with as a state senator.

She praised Maine Democrats and Republicans alike for recently banning the chemical deca BDE from household appliances and furniture sold in Maine, and took chemical companies to task for opposing the measure.

She also commended Sen. Olympia Snowe for supporting the concept of net neutrality, in which telecommunications companies would have to treat all Internet sites equally rather than giving preferences to those run by big businesses.

When it came to media ownership, Pingree decried increasing consolidation in the industry and specifically criticized broadcasting conglomerate Clear Channel for banning the Dixie Chicks and John Lennon’s “Imagine” from its stations as the country was debating whether to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

In encouraging COA grads to stay involved in democracy, Pingree recounted how she first became involved in her island community of North Haven. A transplant from Minnesota, she wanted to volunteer at the local school in the early 1970s, but the principal later told her the school board did not want her interacting with the students.

She decided to attend COA and then returned to North Haven, started farming, and got to know her fellow islanders better by delivering vegetables to their homes.

Twenty years after she was effectively prohibited from volunteering at the local school, she said, she was elected chairman of the North Haven school board.

“I learned about patience in politics,” she said.

Student speakers at the event, one of whom went barefoot as he took the podium, alluded to COA’s liberal reputation in their remarks and even poked fun at it and themselves.

“Just this year, we finally got a machine that lets us make proper college ID cards,” said graduating senior Brittany Quinn, eliciting sarcastic cheers from the crowd.

Fellow speaker Juan Pablo Hoffmaister, a senior from Costa Rica who has received a Watson fellowship to study adaptations to climate change around the world, told of his decision to attend college in the United States.

He said he was apprehensive at first, worried that the country’s wealth would mean its citizens were oblivious to the problems of the rest of the world. When he found this not to be the case, he attributed the difference between Americans’ attitudes at home and the policies federal politicians project abroad to insufficient citizen participation in the political process.

This realization, he said, inspired him to get involved and has made him appreciate his COA education all the more.

“Coming to COA has fundamentally changed the way I see the world,” Hoffmaister said.