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Quote Cuisine
"I love background," Wittmann says of his time in the McCain campaign. "Background is hilarious. A lot of journalists liked to call me on background because then they could have a Republican staffer saying heterodox things."
(By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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He's sitting in his office at the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist Democratic group that is the latest of his myriad employers. There are no pictures on the walls, but the bookshelf holds a plush toy of Wittmann's favorite dead politician, Teddy Roosevelt, wearing a campaign button for Wittmann's favorite live politician, John McCain.
"I was very precocious," he says. "I got involved in politics at a very early age -- when I was 10."
That was back in Waco, Tex., where his father was a shopkeeper and his mother a homemaker. Before he got out of grade school, he was stuffing envelopes for the campaigns of Texas Democratic heroes Ralph Yarborough and Lyndon Johnson. In high school in 1968, Wittmann worked for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, then drifted into radical politics.
"I fell in with a group of Trotskyites -- the Sparticist League," he says, smiling. "We were the revolutionary Marxist caucus of the Worker-Student Alliance."
Waco was not a hotbed of radicalism, so Wittmann had to travel to Austin to attend antiwar demonstrations. He didn't have a license, so his dad would drive him the 200 miles round trip.
After graduating from high school in 1971, he went to New York University, where he joined a leftist Jewish group called the Radical Zionist Alliance. In 1973, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he volunteered for the United Farm Workers union, picketing stores that sold non-union lettuce. In 1975, after earning a degree in elementary education, he worked for the Farm Workers full time.
"The job paid $5 a week, plus room and board," he says.
That lasted a year, then he returned to Ann Arbor, working as a messenger in the university hospital, where he was a union shop steward during a three-week strike.
In 1980, he moved to Washington with his wife, Karen, a clinical psychologist, and began working as a lobbyist for the National Treasury Employees Union. In 1984, he became a lobbyist for the National Association of Retired Federal Employees.
Meanwhile, the aging lefty was becoming a neoconservative. "I believed that liberalism had become too weak on foreign policy," he says, "and I felt the welfare system had to be reformed."
In 1986, he switched his registration and began working in two Maryland Republican campaigns -- Linda Chavez for the Senate and Connie Morella for Congress.
On Sept. 11, 1986 -- the day after Morella won the Republican primary -- Wittmann was quoted in The Washington Post: "We couldn't have a better candidate," he said.
