Walking Tall
BY DAVID STEINBERG
FOR THE JOURNAL
Persistence, stamina and patience helped Dede Feldman endure the rigors of public life.
For Feldman, those qualities infused her passion to walk door-to-door for days on end, campaigning (unsuccessfully) for Albuquerque City Council and then campaigning (successfully) as a Democrat for the New Mexico Senate.
Her recent behind-the-scenes memoir, written in a sharp, personable style, is “Ten More Doors: Politics and the Path to Change.”
The title points to a “what if.”
What if she had gotten 10 more votes? It would have been just enough to overcome the nine-vote loss in her 1995 council race.
Feldman didn’t give up.
She persisted and learned from the loss.
She redoubled her efforts going doorto- door for the District 13 North Valley seat in the New Mexico Senate. She won the seat in the 1996 general election and held it for 16 years.
In doing so she showed that a progressive, a woman and an Anglo from the East Coast could win a Democratic primary in a Senate district long-dominated by Hispanic politicians.
“My first instinct was right. If I simply got to know people in person, they would see that I was not a threat,” she wrote.
Her shoe-leather campaigning leaped beyond politics.
“I looked for voters, but I found community.
That probably was my most important lesson,” Feldman said in a phone interview.
She got to know the community’s fears, hopes, complaints, tastes and hot-button issues, and the community got to know her, her volunteers, and her plans for reform, Feldman wrote in the memoir.
Drawing close to the community “sharpened my compassion and empathy for the ordinary people who lived all around me, my neighbors for years,” she said. “But I never really knew them until I knocked on their door and found out what their life was really like. The knowledge and the courage that ordinary people had, that’s what really kept me going in the legislature.”
By campaigning, Feldman became aware of these hundreds of ordinary people. In her eyes, many became extraordinary and in some cases even heroic. In her first campaigns, she wrote, she heard stories of hardship, of success, of mental illness, of religious belief that formed the backdrop of policies she promoted as a lawmaker.
Feldman developed an understanding of her constituents.
She was chief sponsor of the 2001 New Mexico Kinship Guardianship Act. The law gave grandparents and other family members the right to raise children whose parents are unable to, according to Feldman’s reading of the law.
She also learned that passing legislation doesn’t always happen because a lawmaker wills it. Think of it “as a long game, especially when it comes to state and local policymaking. You start to think in maybe incremental successes,” Feldman said.
In one chapter, Feldman, her husband Mark and her students from a Pennsylvania Quaker school spent the summer of 1972 helping build a classroom in the central African country of Uganda.
Feldman writes of quizzing a class of Ugandan kids about the meaning of power as the country was on the verge of descending into terror under dictator Idi Amin.
Another chapter takes the reader back to 1955. The author, then a preteen, and her parents were on a family road trip in a new Plymouth station wagon from West Chester, Pennsylvania stopping at the Casa Grande Lodge near Old Town, a few blocks from where she would later move. What’s equally intriguing is that it’s the same year Feldman changed her name from what she considered stale — Mary Elizabeth — the first names of her grandmothers — to Dede.
Though no longer a candidate nor a public official, Feldman still goes door-to-door for other candidates. She encourages people to participate in public life “whether you’re inside as a legislator or outside as an advocate, an activist, a journalist or an ordinary citizen.”
Feldman serves as communications director for Common Cause New Mexico.
Its mission is to promote open, honest and accountable government.
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