Alex Reber, Dauphin County Delegate
“I didn’t know about the sacrifices that my parents made for me until later in life.”
From Beaver County to Bucks County, delegates are traveling across the Keystone State to support Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. This week we’re sharing the delegates’ remarkable stories of resilience and tenacity.
I have been involved in politics since I was a young kid. My mom’s best friend was our state representative and we handed out pudding cups for Sheila Miller at the polls. Her daughter and I went to K-12 together in a small rural area. My grandparents had a farm and we had a lot off of that where we built our house in the middle of Berks County in the northwest tip of the county, bordering Lebanon and Schuylkill County. Literally in the middle of nowhere!
Growing up in rural poverty early on, especially as my dad was starting his business, we struggled at times. I didn’t see that because my parents worked so hard. My dad was a short-order cook and my mom was a waitress at a diner. Dad worked two jobs and my mom took other jobs as well.
When I was born, they knew I had a benign tumor. It was a little tumor right above my eye. It wasn’t getting bigger, it wasn’t metastasizing, so that was good. But eventually they knew it would crush my ocular nerve and could cause blindness. My doctors knew that they needed to do surgery. It was a pretty simple procedure — cut and dry, no risk involved. But we didn’t have health insurance.
My mom had a good job. She really liked who she worked for and they were really nice people, but they didn’t provide health insurance. My dad didn’t have health insurance with any of his jobs either. So my mom took a new job. After one year at that job, which was not a good place to work, she qualified for health insurance and I got my surgery. She quit the job as soon as I had my follow-up appointment and went back to her previous job.
I didn’t know about the sacrifices that my parents made for me until later in life. To me, health care should be a right and it should be something that all children have access to. Hillary’s work with CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) and other programs like it are really important to the middle class. When my dad took over my grandfather’s business I was able to go to college. Growing up, we didn’t initially have a lot. I believe everyone should be given the basic starting block of knowing that they won’t have to worry about their health care. That’s something I’ve always really respected about Hillary.
Having insurance allows you to be an entrepreneur. I work for a small CPA firm and we work with lots of small businesses. Health care costs are climbing. The Affordable Care Act has helped a lot of people, but there are still issues and there’s still work to be done. I think that’s one of the drawbacks for people leaving their jobs, starting businesses and keeping the entrepreneurial spirit that has made America as great as it is. Without health insurance, people are more afraid to go off and start businesses.
I don’t think people always think about Hillary’s involvement with CHIP when they think of all the progressive things she’s done. She is a progressive leader. Right now, do you live in Harrisburg?
I live north of Harrisburg in a town called Millersburg. It’s about thirty-five minutes north of Harrisburg if there’s no traffic. I just recently moved there from Harrisburg. My husband and I got married two years ago after gay marriage became legal here.
We’ve been together for a little over eight years. He owns a house in Millersburg. He’s the president of his town council. We really love the community. It’s a great community. He bought the house when his work was very close by. Unfortunately, with the economic downturn, his company went from two hundred employees down to forty and he was laid off. He was eventually brought back again as the only full-time employee, but they went down to thirty employees and let him go again. Luckily for him, the economy had picked back up at that point and he got another job that actually paid much better.
You go to school and you get a degree in engineering and everyone thinks “Oh, that’s a job, I’ll always have a job.” But mechanical engineering, as the world is changing from manufacturing, is different than it once was.
Especially here in Pennsylvania. I know there are a lot of factories that are closing or have closed over time.
I live in a pretty Republican town and you get to learn a lot by going to the barber shop. I go a block down the street to get my hair cut. You sit there on a Saturday morning and listen to what people have to say and you learn a lot about what people are thinking. I think there are a lot of people who used to be able to get jobs at the factory and have enough money to take care of their family. They could go to Disney World once every few years and have a basic middle class life that gives them comfort and happiness. I think that we’re losing that, and I think we need to find ways to re-train folks for the new economy and really help them get the tools they need to be able to be successful.
How do you think Hillary will help that if she becomes president?
One of the things Hillary hasn’t talked about as much in this campaign as she did in 2008 is starting green jobs. I know it’s something she cares about, but there’s just always so many issues. There are a lot of things we can do with our housing stock to make us more efficient: there’s solar work, there’s wind power. Katie McGinty did a lot with it when she was DEP Secretary. She understood that we had tremendous challenges in diversifying our energy into renewable resources. But she also understood that it was a great opportunity and found ways to partner with different businesses for Pennsylvania to grow.
I think that’s the future. We’ve got to understand that we can’t go back to the past. As much as that may sound idyllic and nice, the past wasn’t always good for everyone. The question is: How do we take where we’re at today and know where we’re going to be moving forward, and make sure that people have the right skills to meet the jobs and be able to be successful in life? I think that’s the big concern.
I’m a current MBA student. We talk a lot about big issues and what’s going on at the macro level and there’s lots of jobs and opportunities in the new economy, but it’s getting people trained for them and figuring out how they can fit in that world.
I definitely think that green jobs is such a huge industry that’s just going to take off even more, especially when we make more effort to curb climate change. I was driving in from Philadelphia yesterday and saw many solar panels on the way here.
It’s amazing that we’re spreading clean energy opportunities all over the country and the state. It’s a no-brainer: fields receiving huge amounts of sunlight should have solar panels. We just need to give people jobs to make this possible.
It also helps us with foreign policy. Having renewable energy allows us to not be tied to fossil fuels, which we often get from other countries. Looking at the international political world, being able to not have to be reliant on others for our own energy gives us a lot more independence and strength. The amount of oil consumption that we’ve had from other countries has fallen under Obama because we’ve done so much work with domestic renewable energy production here at home.
Can you tell me a little bit more about why you’re a delegate?
I was an Obama supporter in 2008 but I’ve always been a fan of Hillary’s. I think this time I felt that I wanted to be a delegate because I really believe that this is an important time. I think the history of having a first female President is just so huge. The rest of the civilized world has been there way before we have, and in America we’re used to being leaders in those areas. I mean, we have 20 U.S. senators that are female, which is a record high. But that’s still dramatically low. Until that number is 50, we’re not there yet. The same is true in the House. We’ve got a lot of work to do there.
I was the board chair for Planned Parenthood. I just ended my term June 30th. We have a lot of work to do with women’s health and access to women’s health care. We have lots of issues that are going on with public health, and Hillary understands these issues that affect people personally. They might not be sexy issues, they might be hidden in the details, but she really gets that and understands how these issues affect people’s lives. Instead of just trying to put another notch in her belt of success, it’s really about how she can effect change to help people. That means a lot to me.
She’s definitely thinking on a national level, and also within states. Right now in Pennsylvania, there’s a bill that went through the House and is just making it through the Senate that’s obstructing women’s ability to access abortion care and health care. I know she has taken a stance on that state legislative bill and has spoken out against it. There are national issues, but in the states we have to combat the same issues.
We have a lot of issues in the state of Pennsylvania. We have a legislature that just is saying no. We have a great governor in Tom Wolf who wants to put forth a really progressive agenda founded in his business sense. The old adage that Democrats were bad with money or that we were tax-and-spend or all that sort of thing is hogwash. I mean, what we want to do is get the best return on investment for our tax dollars to help the greatest number of people. And that’s really important.
As an accountant, that’s something that I always argue. And of course, no one wants government waste. That’s why we have people like Eugene DePasquale out there making sure we’re finding those issues and working on them. But we’ve really got to find ways to use our tax dollars to help the most people. That’s so important. With Hillary, one of the things I’ve seen is, as a vice chair of my county Democratic party, candidates come and go in this constant campaign infrastructure. It’s great that Hillary is running a truly coordinated effort and working to elect Democrats up and down the ticket in a very coordinated way.
That really excites me because in Pennsylvania the number of Democrats in the Senate and the House is very low. We’ve got to change that. If we don’t have more Democrats elected at the local level, we’re not going to be able to implement Governor Wolf’s agenda. We can’t effectuate it without people in the House and the Senate understanding that it’s really what Pennsylvanians want and are willing to vote for.
When I think about people who are trying to change politics, some of the most vocal people I’ve heard from are millennials. What do you think millennials can do to make politics what they want it to be?
I think we’re doing it. There were a lot of debates about progressive policy issues in the primary. I got involved very early on and I realized that I had these views and that the only way to effectuate that change was to elect people that share my values. We can complain all we want, but if we don’t get people elected that share our values — or at least 99 percent of them — we’re not going to be able to make the changes that we care about.
I think that’s the important thing, being a longtime advocate in the LGBT community and working for gay rights. Here in Pennsylvania, we still don’t have nondiscrimination legislation. I mean, we’ve been fighting for that since I was in college ten years ago. We were pushing and fighting for those issues. It’s kind of sad to see the things that 75 percent of Pennsylvanians agree with still haven’t been able to get done. Hopefully we’ll see that change with electing different people. A lot of people may think politics and elections are dirty and there’s some people that feel like, “oh, it’s better to be an agitator on the outside.” I would implore them: if you really want change, you’ve got to become a part of the system. And it doesn’t mean that you’ve sold out or changed your values. It just means that you’re going to work within the system that exists because that’s the only way we can make it better.
I know we say every time, “this election is the most important election we’ll ever see in our lives,” but with this one, we have the potential for multiple Supreme Court vacancies. Congress is obstructing our president from being able to put someone in the Supreme Court that’s highly qualified. Their job is to inform and consent and he’s put forward someone who’s a high-quality, sound nominee and we can’t get an up-or-down vote on it. Which is why we need people like Katie McGinty to get rid of people like Pat Toomey that just want to go along with the party line.
