End to a Distinguished Public Career

It is fashionable these days to criticize the United States Congress and all those elected to serve the citizenry in every congressional district across this land. There is a rising populist protest in the country and the anger is directed not only at the institution of Congress but at just about every incumbent representative who today claims to do the people’s business from the distant back corridors of Capitol Hill.

It is an odd moment in American political history. Elected members of the United States House of Representatives and the Senate are resigning their posts on Capitol Hill in ever growing numbers. Most are simply not standing for re-election, many of them leaving because they are weary of trying to grapple with a political system crippled by the poison of partisan politics and stained by the influence of special interest money. Not since the beginning of polling has the American electorate held the House and Senate in such low esteem.

Now the spread of elected officials retiring from congress has reached the shores of the Vineyard, and threatens once again to shape the conduct of Island political affairs in the nation’s capital, to influence issues of supreme importance to the people of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. These two Island communities form one boundary and a special center within the U.S. Tenth Congressional District that stretches from the Islands to Cape Cod and along the South Shore into the city limits of Quincy.

For the past fourteen years Congressman William D. (Bill) Delahunt has represented our tenth congressional district with distinction, a word of praise seldom heard in these times of castigating politicians for political failures and an inability to move broken government toward effective policy decisions and resolution of urgent problems.

Mr. Delahunt will be missed as our representative. He has been a friend to the Vineyard throughout his nearly decade and a half in office and a good and responsive legislator not only for the Islands but for the tenth congressional district at large. From his sensitivity to environmental protection to the strengthening of the United States Coast Guard, Representative Delahunt has made significant contributions to the quality of Vineyard life. The entire congressional district has been well represented for a long time. Mr. Delahunt understood the unique nature of Island problems in need of special treatment.

We are lucky in this congressional district, lucky that we have not been stuck in the same political muck that has so damaged the quality of representation in so many other parts of the nation. That is thanks to Mr. Delahunt, a former district attorney, and his fourteen years of responsive legislative service to the voters of our district. And he upheld another proud tradition around here, one that belongs to the distinguished congressional career of Rep. Gerry E. Studds, a major political force in Washington and our representative for a generation, for twelve terms and twenty-four years.

There are few congressional districts in this country that can lay claim to a strong and uninterrupted record of legislative accomplishment during the last four decades. Politicians running for office in the future in our tenth congressional district would do well to follow the high standards set during the past forty years — first by Mr. Studds and then by his successor, Mr. Delahunt.

The retirement of Mr. Delahunt was influenced no doubt by the death of his friend and mentor, the late Sen. Edward M. (Teddy) Kennedy, also a great friend of the Vineyard and among the finest legislators ever elected to the United States Senate. Mr. Delahunt had considered retiring earlier but Senator Kennedy persuaded him to stay on in Congress at least through the start of the new Obama administration.

Finally, Representative Delahunt deserves praise for the political tone he established in announcing his withdrawal from Congress and from forty years of public service in Massachusetts. He did not choose to leave Washington, as so many of his congressional colleagues have done, with cynicism and a broadside attack on paralysis in government. Instead, he chose a higher road, a path that offered some hope and belief in the American people and the political system that serves the citizenry.

Rejecting the cynicism of Washington, listen to the words of Bill Delahunt at a recent Boston press conference held to announce his political retirement and return to his home state as a private citizen for the first time since his election to congress in 1996:

“The cynicism is not the DNA of the American people. It is not a permanent condition. We are an innately optimistic people who have consistently risen to the challenge of the moment.

“We cannot allow cynicism to infect the body politic, and we cannot surrender to it because it too will pass.”

The citizens of the United States Tenth Congressional District owe Rep. William D. Delahunt their appreciation and thanks for a job well done.