You're going to need someone different who maybe isn't afraid to be a progressive, who's going to energize the people who just don't vote. I have friends in New Jersey who don't vote because it's been a Republican hegemony for year after year after year... the Democrats often don't even run anyone.

And swing votes? You think you can get people to switch?

Listen, the number of notes dropped off at my office, people calling, editorials in the newspaper, people saying "I just want to support you because if you're honest about [the Pretty Penis Contest] what are you gonna lie about?"

Did that sort of thing make you wonder whether to run in the first place?

I held off running for a while. But then no one stepped up. After the April 7th deadline came and went, the party had gotten no one to run. So three or four days before the primary, sample ballots come out and there's nobody. And I thought, this isn't right! This is supposed to be a two-party system and even that has its drawbacks.

So the Democrats ended up later asking you to drop out of the race but they didn't have anyone else to run?

That was the whole baffling thing. I'm articulate, passionate, I'm sure as hell qualified. I went to Columbia Law. And people in my own party are telling me I should drop out.

Just over the Pretty Penis Contest story?

Well that's what they claim! But that was a huge red herring. You start to unpack what's going on and uncover that year after year after year the Democratic party in this district has just sort of been tacitly backing the Republican candidate. And then I find out that my own party chairman employs the wife of the guy I'm running against as a consultant and a lobbyist in Trenton at the statehouse. I just thought, hey, I wouldn't have brought this up but for the fact that you are telling me to drop out of the race over some lame reason! And it's widely known in New Jersey politics that the wife is the energy behind Senator Littell. She's really heavily involved politically and at the micro-level with his campaign. Now I'm thinking, maybe [the party chairman] should resign! Classic New Jersey sleazy machine politics and I think people are really turned off by that.

But was entering politics your dream in law school days?

I guess it's one of those things, where I've always been the debater talking politics all the time, and what could be more punk rock than actually saying, "You know what, we're gonna run for office." Now people are trying to take me down with this contest story. Meanwhile our president was convicted of drunk driving. And I made this point to my party chairman and he said, "Well one is an example of terrible judgment and the other..." and he just left it there. Yeah, because it's obvious that getting in a car drunk is serious! Whereas entering something like a wet tee-shirt contest where you show your penis is just laughable. Drunk driving is not laughable. A pretty penis contest is laughable.

So how did it come out? Did you just figure you had to get that out of the way when you decided to run?

I didn't bring it up. But I had done an interview for the Advocate in 2001 and they talked about it so it was on the Internet for anyone to find. I don't think anyone expected me to say, "Uh-huh, yeah, I did that. Please print that I won!"

Okay, enough on that. What do you want to debate Littell about?

Well there are a lot of important issues that I think have not been challenged in a long time for the Republicans. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation but the district that I'm in is really rural and really beautiful. So I think that the land use and the development choices we make, especially in this area in this state, are really, really important. You know, they just finished building a Home Depot in Sussex County in Newton, New Jersey. Within 20 miles, there are four other Home Depots. But one mile down the road at the old drive-in, they want to build a Loews Home Center, which is basically a Home Depot with a different name and a different conglomco corporation that owns it. Why? And what kind of tax breaks are they going to give to these companies to come in there while they claim on the flip side that they're going to lower our taxes by miniscule amounts? So each person can get ten dollars off their taxes at the end of the year after they've blown out an entire hillside in the beautiful part of the most densely populated state in the nation? It's not legitimate.

Right. It's the obsession with tax cutting.

And no Republican state official or elected state representative can say with a straight face that we need to keep cutting taxes. Because it's been proven that the federal tax cuts have been the thing that have caused each state to go into bankruptcy. It's caused huge budget crises. You know, taxes are more than payment you make on April 15, taxes are the things you're paying for by being stuck in traffic because you have lousy funding for your transportation system, or by being unable to get into the emergency room, or by having such a hard time getting health care, or by getting a lousy education because your school district is broke, those are all taxes! They're taxing to your life. Enough of the pandering of year after year with Republican politicians saying, "We're here to the rescue to cut your tax bill!" Taxes are so much more than that. You end up paying so much more in important ways if you reduce the payment everybody has to make by ten dollars every year on April 15th. It's a lie. It's a scam.

What about how taxes are used?

Well, we need to end the system of using property taxes to pay for schools. Because what you end up with is that really rich districts have really awesome schools and really poor districts have really bad schools. Property tax funding to schools is regressive and unjust. And no one talks about that. Politicians don't care about the other district. They don't care about the fact that as a community we need to worry about the schools in the state as a whole. The New Jersey Supreme Court came down with the Abbot Decision last. They ruled that the Abbot school districts, a collection of lower income economically depressed areas, have to be funded by the state up to levels of the highest school districts. And it's caused a huge controversy. Of course all of the rich areas are complaining about "Oh! Oh! Our money is going to go to these people?!" I'm thinking, wow, jeez I'm so sorry that you don't want kids in the state to be better educated! That all you care about are people within a 15-mile radius of you.

And is there anything a little more personal that you'd like to address with Littell?

Well they had this Republican primary battle and he was challenged by some Republicans because Scott Garrett vacated his assembly seat. So Littell essentially just filled that seat with his daughter, as if this is a dynasty. Littell's father was in the legislature and there's just this arrogance of assuming the seat is his. So I think that needs to be challenged. But another issue is that he and his running mate, his daughter and the other assemblyman, they called their ticket "the United We Stand ticket." And that to me is shameful. To use a phrase associated now with nonpartisan response to the attacks on our country is tantamount to suggesting that your opponent is against standing united. The subliminal suggestion is that the other guy is al Quaeda! That's what it's meant to trigger in people's minds. That's shameful. How dare you appropriate that for your own partisan goals? Wrong!

Okay, what does the word "liberal" mean to you?

Well what's happening all over the country... and it's scary, I don't mean to be Mr. Alarmist...but look at the Republican funding machine, look at Bush, he wants to raise 250 million dollars for his campaign! And before the Iraq war, if you questioned any of the justifications, you were smeared as unpatriotic. And now it's only getting clearer that there was a lot that deserving of debate. And you're left feeling like, jeez, what happened to all of us Americans who were saying we need to make sure we're going about this in the wisest way possible? We were being told we need to watch what we say by Ari Fleischer or John Ashcroft.

That's right. You can't even point out that Al Gore got more votes without being told you're out of line.

People say "Oh we have to move on! We have to forget that." I don't think we do! Because we have major, major problems in the system like the electoral college. This system has proven that the central tenet of democracy...one person, one vote...is not working here. At all! If you live in a heavily populated urban center, your vote clearly does not count as much as someone in a smaller state. That's a huge problem.

It seems that Americans are always forgetting how quickly tides can change to favor one party over the other though.

Well it's depressing for a lot of people to see the political system as it has been for the past few years because if you look at the current administration there's a complete agenda to de-fund the government to the levels of the turn of the century, when if you needed the slightest bit of help you had to turn to the church charities and get whatever assistance you could get with a religious message attached. The McInley era. These are people who are still angry about FDR's New Deal. And that's the kind of message that as liberals or Democrats, we need to drive home. We have a choice here. We can have a society that cares about people, a society that says, you know why we pay taxes? Because we care about health care, we care about the environment, we care about science, we care about education, we care about the arts...we can have that or we can have a society where you have to be rich enough to buy your own health care, buy your own arts, buy your own education, buy it all for yourself. There's nothing wrong with the idea of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" but I think we're better than that. I think we can care about everyone in our society.

Right. Something is really off when the idea of health care for all is painted as some kind of morally dangerous concept.

Healthcare for children...kids under 18...why not start with that? A national plan for everyone under 18. If a society can't do that, what's wrong with it? For about 50 years we've been told that we have to protect the world from the Red Menace...okay in 1991 it collapsed! So where's the peace dividend? We were the guys who stood guard over everyone else and spent all our money on defense, while the Marshall plan in Western Europe got them these awesome social democracies...great healthcare, 6-week paid vacations! So okay we won, but what happened? We're spending even more year after year on defense! Why do we have to live in the Wild West like that? I think that's the difference between liberal and conservative.

You must get to talk to the average voter a lot when you're selling your tee-shirts.

Oh yeah. It's really great to get through to people in conversation. Because the average Joe can become a sponge for... well, I don't want to say propaganda, because a lot of it isn't quite that, a lot of it is just towing the line of the one-sided message. If you want to present war as a video game you want to be consistent. Now, once again, we're being reminded that oops, war is not a video game.

That reminded me of something Eleanor Roosevelt said. That the people just need you to explain, explain, explain.

That's right...it works. The difficulty is that with our media culture, if you can't get your message out in 30 seconds, the danger is you're not heard. There's so few shows out there that aren't just soundbite, soundbite, soundbite and then they cut to the pie eating contest. Why are they spending five minutes on the pie eating contest when there's so many awesome issues out there! And then there's ten minutes of weather!

You think that's deliberate? Like Rupert Murdoch wants us focused on pie eating instead of what's going on?

Well look at the whole media conglomeration issue. The problem is that they all want the same stories that they can go with in every single market, so you lose local reporting on issues that immediately affect peoples' lives in their own neighborhoods. So when you have the story of the disappearance of a little girl getting major national coverage...but you notice that it's an upper-middle class girl from Salt Lake City...it leaves you scratching your head thinking, well how many little girls have disappeared in this neck of the woods?

Okay, so did you consider being a third party candidate?

Well, maybe a lot of my views are more typically third party. But I firmly believe that there are some great advantages to the two party system, at least from a philosophical level. Do I think we should have more third party involvement? Absolutely, yes. Because I think we have some serious problems with the two party system. But at the very least, in any race, there needs to be a Democratic candidate. And I've always been a Democrat and I do think that we really need to really be Democrats! Because I think the party as a whole are not being Democrats. Why vote for a Republican-lite? If you're that interested in funding the military, you know that the Republicans are going to fund it to the hilt, even if it's just to pass favors to their cronies in the defense contracting industry.

Here are two difficult questions. What does September 11 mean in the nation's story at this point and what would a similar attack anytime soon mean for us?

Well, I was against the war in Iraq. I don't think it was the right approach to the war on terror or the right time to do it. And New York City, in my experience, is not as liberal now as it should be and that's in large part because of the attacks. Notwithstanding that, it surprises me that, now that people in New York know what it's like to be bombed...to be attacked from a projectile that kills hundreds and thousands of people. So I was disappointed that there wasn't more of an outcry of solidarity with the innocent people on the ground in Baghdad. The kind of bombing which results in random, innocent deaths...that did happen in Baghdad and New York knows what it's like to be assaulted in that sense.

We didn't target office buildings in Bagdhad.

Of course not...and that's a huge, huge difference. In the big picture though, beyond the pure evil of what was done to us, I wish that we could look at why such things happen. But after 9/11, to suggest that you even wanted to look at the reasons these things happen, many people reacted as if that would be an acknowledgment of our enemy being right in some way. That's not the case! It's okay to think about why people do things! Why people would feel that they must take up arms in that way. Because Osama bin Laden, and like-minded people are dead wrong and they're evil. But the larger problem is that ordinary people living in some places like Palestine, they're in a position that that message of bin Laden's may not be falling on deaf ears. It falls on ears that are apt to be persuaded by his message and that's where our struggle is. We have to go after bin Laden, obviously. But we need to examine that core population of people that he's trying to win over, that are in a state of grievance or suffering and that could shift either way. It's not wrong or unpatriotic to examine and re-examine what America's role is in those peoples' lives! And listen, there's certainly a lot of good things to be said about what the Bush administration appears to be trying to do in the Middle East, it just remains to be seen how much pressure they're willing to exert on the Israelis. Anyway, to return to your question. It's hard to say what 9-11 means now or is going to mean. I guess my hope is that it causes us to be more sensitive to the rest of the world. But this administration seems to be doing just the opposite. Because the day after 9-11, we had the French and Germans saying "We are all Americans now!" But since then we've gotten to a position where the sentiment is exactly the opposite. How did we get there? We got there by an administration that has basically been saying, "Screw you, world." Kyoto, International Court of Criminal Justice, all of these things, we've been saying, "You know what, we're going to do it our way." And it's a mistake. So I think the 9/11 lesson is the opposite of where we've been going, from civil liberties to how we treat the rest of the world.

So how do you get your news?

Oh jeez. Tivo-ing BBC News, French News, German News, all the American news outlets...recording all of them everyday and watching. It's pretty geeky!

Which do you like?

Well, BBC coverage is better than our coverage is. That's a shame to say, but it's true. French coverage is weird because it's very French-centric, it's oddly like American news in that way. Whereas British and German news is more outwardly focused, the big world picture.

You speak these languages?

French, yes. I speak a little German. And now I'm taking Arabic. It's an important language right now for what our nation and the whole world is facing.

Are you often of two minds on how to address an issue?

Well, my urge is to always immediately speak my mind, to a fault I think. Of course, that can be an asset in politics, but theres a degree of having to moderate your tone. I can get kind of ranty...which can serve you well on the street, but in a context like this interview, I have to watch that I don't get too aggressively focused on a point. I'm a good listener, but I'm also stubborn. Once I think something, I want to see it through and argue it and maybe that's the lawyer in me, advocating my position until it's proven wrong I suppose.

How are you dealing with money?

I'm trying to run a campaign not taking more than a $100 a person. No corporate money, no special interest money. If you're not a voter ... because you're an entire corporation or something...you shouldn't be giving candidates money. And people tell me, "Aw, you're never gonna get anywhere." And all I can think is, well it's gotta start somewhere. At some point the voters calling the representative from their district have got to want feel like the call from the chairman of AT&T in Manhattan is not going to be answered ahead of their call.

Tell me about past confrontation you've had with people who disagreed.

But I would say that the average negative reaction I get to the tee-shirts are that people kind of scowl and walk away in silence. Maybe that's a classic Republican response. Not wanting to engage "the riffraff." Not wanting to really talk to the little man. But that's what we're supposed to be about here. And that's been a problem these past two years...the inability of so many people to accept that what this country is about is all of us debating and debating and debating and then saying "Whew! Okay, this is what course of action we're going to take." Instead lately, you start debating and you get the reaction "You're un-American!" And that's scary and sad.

Yeah, you know the Germans used to use that same construction in the 30s and 40s. "Un-German" they'd say.

That's true. And it's like that Goerring quote. All you have to do is tell people they're being attacked and accuse the pacifists of lacking patriotism. You know, just drum home that criticism is treasonous. Eventually you'll get whole sectors of the society on board. That's scary.

What does your being gay mean for your candidacy?

It's not relevant at all. The percentage of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people running for office should be reflective of the percentage of those folks throughout the society. But I don't think my sexuality fuels my politics at all. Do I think we should have gay marriage? A hundred percent. But I think that's a legal equal protection issue.

Right. You'd feel that way if you weren't gay.

Yeah and you know, the Star Ledger ran a piece on me by this guy Jim Lockwood and he was just a little bit adversarial with me. Anyway, in what he eventually printed, a key point was that I was "openly gay." Which to me seems like code language. I mean, would you write that a candidate was openly Jewish? Of course not. When you say openly gay, an effect it has is to put in people's brains "this person is overtly something that you're not...so watch out!" To print that I'm openly gay makes it sound like I'm marching in here with an agenda, that that's what my candidacy is about.

Whereas the real story might be that you're more in touch with the voters.

Right. It's like how many candidates can relate to their constituents by saying, "You know, I don't have a lot of money in my bank account this month. You think my opponent ever worries about that?" It would be awesome to have people represent us who were in touch with our problems.

So give me an example of a decision you made under pressure.

Well when the first reporter asked me about the Pretty Penis Contest, there was that moment of, "Oh jeez, what do I say?" But what I'm really trying to do with the campaign, with myself, with my life is to not give in to that urge to wonder what the smoothest thing to say would be. When that moment came up, what popped into my head was, "Honesty. Be honest." That was a decision. Let's have more of that! Let's have politicians where you don't have to worry that their going to be having all those moments of rolling through their program of acceptable things to say.

Just from watching the news, anyone who might think to run will also end up "programmed" because they learn the way the political babble is spoken.

Exactly. And my candidacy, for me, is about a conscious decision to be unconsciously honest.