Listen to the latest episode of Former Member, where I talk to former members of Congress—Democrats and Republicans—to get their perspectives on what it was like to serve, and how things are different today vs. when they were around.
Yesterday, I spoke with Sam Coppersmith, a one-term Democratic Congressman from Arizona who served from 1993 to 1995.
He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994 in a Republican wave year and lost. Since then, he has stayed connected to politics, has chaired the Democratic Party in Arizona, and—just to keep the rest of us humble—runs triathlons.
Details below.
Topics from my conversation with Sam Coppersmith
Want a transcript of this conversation? Click the “Transcript” tab towards the top of this page.1
0:00 – 2:05: Sam’s background and time in Congress.
2:06 – 5:54: How the NFL got him elected to the House of Representatives.
5:55 – 13:12: The Republican Revolution of ’94, and how the axiom that “all politics is local” is dead.
13:13 – 20:14: Can you get anything done in just one term? (Or, Sam Coppersmith briefly roasting me.)
20:15 – 23:12: The absurdity (and political opportunity) of tax subsidies for professional sports teams.2
23:13 – 27:50: Members of Congress who are actually doing a good job.
27:51 – 33:32: The challenge of developing personal relationships in Congress when you’re running in a competitive district. (Flying back and forth to campaign makes it hard to get to know people!)
33:33 – 37:20: Political realignment from the ’90s to the present.
37:21 – 44:32: Democracy, its future, and innovation in government.3 (And, how we vote on too much stuff in the U.S.)
44:33 – 48:04: What do you miss about Congress? And wrap-up.
Note: A few people have told me that these emails are sometimes going into spam folders. If you a) mark the email as “not spam” and b) save bensamuels@substack.com to your contacts, that should address the issue.
Apparently the transcript option doesn’t exist on the Substack mobile app. But on a mobile web browser or on your desktop, there should be a transcript option.
Just a few hours after I spoke with Sam, a stadium funding bill passed the Missouri House. (It’s currently stalled in the Missouri Senate.)
As I have written about multiple times before, this is an extremely bad use of taxpayer money—especially when you consider what Missouri isn’t funding in its latest budget.
I was referring to San Francisco’s Proposition I, a 2014 ballot measure. It isn’t exactly what I remembered, but it’s just about as absurd, and my broader point stands. (Namely, that it’s an extremely technical question that elected officials should be addressing, and not the voters via ballot measure.)
