Bonnie Watson Coleman – U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District

Mark Freda: Bonnie, thank you for being here with us today.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Great to be here with you, Mayor.

Mark Freda: Before we talk about your political life, Bonnie, I’m wondering if we just talk a little bit about you. It’d be nice to know, where’d you grow up?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: From the fifth grade on, I’ve lived in Ewing Township. And in fact, the house that I live in now was part of my backyard when I was a kid. We built the house back here, so I’m still very close to home. But before that, I was born in Camden. I lived there until first grade, and then I lived in Morristown, New Jersey, in Burlington County, until I came up to Ewing. My family moved to Ewing.

Mark Freda: Well, that’s great that you’re so close to where you grew up there. That’s great. Did you have people or events that had major impacts on you while you were growing up?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Of course. Everybody has television heroes, but I’ll tell you, I think my parents had the most profound impact on me. They were uniquely generous people. We always had somebody living in our house for a while who wasn’t a blood relative but needed a place to stay. Dinner hour was always very important. I don’t care what my daddy was doing, my mother was like, “Every body’s home for dinner.” And if you brought someone home, you didn’t have to ask in advance. And that’s where I think my brothers and I, we learned how to live more purposeful lives and what our responsibility was to other people.

So, I think that the heroes in my life are definitely my parents. And then I had a grandfather that I called Pop-Pop, and I never heard a cross word come out of his mouth. He was just the most decent human being. So, my heroes were in my family.

Mark Freda: That’s great, right? To have such great influences within the family. So Bonnie, when did you first start thinking about maybe running for political office, and how did that come about?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Never. I was in the executive branch for 28 years. My dad was an elected office holder, as you know. He always wanted one of us to succeed him, and my three brothers and I said, “Nah, we’re not doing that.” My father took ill and he lived with me until the end. And then Shirley Turner, who was then sitting in his seat, decided to run for the Senate, Mark, and that was just my way of keeping my daddy alive. He had died, I was devastated, but I knew that if I were working in his space, if that were possible, then I would be fulfilling something that he said he wanted us to do, and it would bring me closer.

And I got to tell you a very strange story. The first time I got up and spoke on the floor of the Assembly, nervous as all get-out, I stood up, and before I could say my first word, I could see my daddy’s image right next to me, speaking, slightly in front of me, and that was just a magical moment. So I never really thought about being an elected official. In fact, I thought I never would, could, or should. But his death motivated me to want to keep his legacy alive. And that’s how I got into it.

Mark Freda: Yeah. That’s really an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. That’s tremendous. I know that you served for 17 years in the New Jersey General Assembly. How was your first time running a campaign to get elected?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: For me, the hardest thing was asking people to support me financially. I don’t think at that time when I was coming up, that women were really socialized into asking on behalf of themselves. We were always working on behalf of something else or someone else. So the hardest part for me was to sell me to people. I would send letters asking, I’d have to make the phone calls and all that kind of stuff. And then I’d have to do the public speaking. Public speaking wasn’t something that I was new to because I had done a lot of it in the executive branch, but speaking differently around issues from a different perspective, and having to stand up even politically and, in some ways, from a partisan perspective, all that was really new to me. Even though I had observed it in my dad, who I thought did it as a statesman, remarkably, fairly, and effectively. But putting yourself out there, singularly, and asking people to believe in you, that really was quite a feat for me.

Mark Freda: Yeah, I know in my campaigns, asking people for money, that’s just not my thing, and I always find that hard to do.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: And my staff is always disappointed in me that I didn’t do enough call time. I’m like, “I’m sorry, I just…” you know.

Mark Freda: Yeah. I do have to say that I remember many times being down at the Trenton War Memorial and supporting at the Democratic conventions, supporting you, and before you, supporting your dad. And always happy to have done so.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Thank you. I appreciate it. You know, speaking of those conventions we had, that was just a whole new experience as well. And I pray before I do anything. I ask God, please speak through me, make sure that what I’m saying is accurate, hopefully that it’s encouraging and compelling to people who are hearing it, and then I let it go. I just try to speak from my heart and my head.

Mark Freda: Yeah. I find that speaking from my heart and my head, as you just said, is the best way to speak. If I try to read something, it’s too hard. Let me just speak naturally, right?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Yeah, yeah.

Mark Freda: Okay. So just jumping back to your time in the General Assembly, is there a high point for you from having served there?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: A couple. A funny one was that when I first got elected, I was assigned to the Appropriations Committee, the budget and Appropriations Committee, and I thought that was hilarious because my father used to say that I would count on my fingers, add and subtract. And so I tell people, well, I may not be good at adding and subtracting, but I can tell you where your money should be spent. So that was a highlight being on Appropriations, and kind of moved up in that space. I became the chairman of the party, have no idea why Jim McGreevey even saw me, and then I became the majority leader, and all that was a great opportunity because I could impact the agenda that we were voting on.

Some of the highlights for me were working on the fair housing laws and working also on second chance initiatives. I did hearings all around the state with formerly incarcerated individuals. I went to the prisons and had it with incarcerated individuals. I had their families, I had a former US Attorney General who was doing research in the area come and testify, and out of that experience came a battery of legislation, some of which Governor Corzine signed on his way out. But the legislation was always about the fact that the majority of people who are incarcerated, they’re coming home. So our goal should be to make them taxpayers, not forever having to to live off of tax that others raise. So I was always into getting some skills, getting job placement, getting some decent housing, make sure that they had the kind of health insurance cards and social security cards and identification, things of that nature.

That was a real highlight to me because it opened my eyes to what people were experiencing. Also, The New York Times hailed it as something really big and unique in the country, while I was thinking we’re just scratching the surface because there was so much to do. And as you know now, there’s still iterations of second chance legislation that we need to be seriously considering on the state level and on the federal level. But those are two sort of legislative highlights that stay with me.

Mark Freda: Those are—and those are great highlights. So what prompted or what led you to say, “Alright, I’m ready to make the leap to the next level, to run for Congress?” I mean, that’s tremendous.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: So that’s as funny as my getting into elected office in the first place. I actually woke up one morning and opened up my Facebook account to see what was happening of the day, and it said, “Run, Bonnie, Run.” And I’m like, “Run what?” you know. So I saw all my friends were commenting, so I called one of them. I said, “What’s this about?” Apparently, Rush had just announced the afternoon before that he wasn’t running again. So they decided I was going to be their candidate. And it took a lot of convincing because I knew that that was a life change.

So I talked to my husband, Bill, one of the greatest gifts God gave me, and I said, “If I should do this and if I should win, would you give up your projects and…” because he was basically retired but doing consulting projects, “…and come with me?” So he did, which made my time in Washington much more pleasant for me. So it was never a thought that I was going to run for Congress. It happened, people encouraged me, had family conversations about it, conversations with some people I respected politically, and they said, “No, no, this makes sense. Do this, you could win this.” Ran in a primary against friends, and that in and of itself was interesting because I was like, we’re friends before, we’re going to be friends after, this is not going to be anything nasty. It was a good experience. Zwicker and I became friends during that campaign, and even when we were at forums and they were just asking us individual questions, we would kind of sit next to each other and be joking back and forth. So it was a good experience for me. Never one that I had planned for, though.

Mark Freda: Yeah, no, I guess it’s great for anybody that runs for elected office to kind of hear it first from the people to say, “You should be running,” right? I mean, that is just great. So, you know, you served in Congress since 2015, I believe. How is that transition going from the state level to the federal level?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Well, I think having some legislative experience was very helpful, but Congress has got more rules than it’s got days or letters in the alphabet. And so getting used to how things happened down there, and how you just don’t introduce legislation, get it assigned to a committee, then have it come to the floor, there’s just so many more steps. So I learn stuff almost every day when I’m down there working. I did know that relationships are important, so I tried to develop and maintain some decent relationships on both sides. Sadden to say I don’t have many on the Republican side anymore because things have changed so much. When I first went down there, I think we interacted more in a bipartisan way on legislative and policy issues, and I miss that because now I think it’s strictly along partisan lines.

And, you know, I’m on Appropriations now. I was on Homeland Security, I was on Oversight first with Cummings and Homeland Security, and then when I got the chance to be on Appropriations because New Jersey didn’t have an appropriator and I wanted to fill that position, Mr. Cummings gave me this really great compliment to tell me that he really was sorry to see me leave Oversight. But Congress is such an important body to our democracy, and to see it not functioning in the power and authority that it is given in the Constitution is very hurtful.

Mark Freda: Yeah. Yeah, well, obviously being an elected official at the local level is a lot different than what you do. But as I listen to people in my town, in Princeton, people are just very discouraged that so much is along party lines, and—and I won’t get too political, but when it appears that party comes before country for some people, that’s a problem.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: It is. And you know the biggest concern I have is that some of our most loyal voters are so turned off, they’re just not motivated because they don’t think it makes a difference, but it does. Everybody’s vote makes a difference. And the younger generation benefited from some of the things that we all did to make it fairer, and greater opportunity, and more democratic, and so they’ve lived, I think, a life that doesn’t understand physically the struggle, emotionally the struggle. And they have to realize that we want to avoid some of that struggle from before, and in order to do that, you, young person, have to be educated and involved and definitely voting. And that’s a challenge for today.

Mark Freda: Yeah, I would agree. And people do need to realize voting is such a tremendous right to have and a responsibility and you just got to do it.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: And I don’t think people realize, Mayor, that every decision that is made from where you can live, to whether or not you’re going to be able to afford the housing, to whether or not you can have clean water, clean air, jobs, etcetera, everything that is important to us has had a vote, has had a political genesis. And we don’t seem to understand the connection between the freedom and opportunities we have and the things we take for granted, and how you get to that point.

Mark Freda: Yeah, well, I think, like you said, if people haven’t lived through it or aren’t faced with it, it kind of fades from view until they’re forced back into that situation. Bonnie, one thing that’s always amazed me is how active you are as a congresswoman. I’m sorry, how active you are as a congresswoman, right? You’re at all kinds of events throughout your district. I mean, you got to be way ahead of most people when it comes to that. But, how do you just find the time to be out there in so many communities going to so many events?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Well, I think it was important because people needed to know me, they needed to know what they could count on from me, and they needed to experience me. And so my staff was very prolific at eating up my schedule and making sure that I was some place every day. I generally ask for at least Sunday, let me just go to church and chill out. But I’ve got so many active towns and such diversity in the 12th Congressional District that you needed to go to these different towns to see what’s on their minds. Some people were concerned about the flooding situation whenever we have a bad storm, and whether or not we’re going to be able to save them and get the Army Corps of Engineers in to make the right decisions as it relates to either raising or purchasing their homes. Some people had issues with regard to Social Security or just a job. Some folks had issues that you would find in the urban areas of my district, but then I had suburban as well. And particularly Princeton, I mean Princeton wants to hold you accountable for everything, thank God, you know. But you could always count on Princeton as well. So I used to tell people, I’ve got one of the most diverse districts in the country, both from an economic perspective and from an ethnic and racial perspective, and issues from A to Z, and we also have no problems with expressing our opinions in this district.

Mark Freda: Which is a double-edged sword, but I mean, if you’re out there meeting people, you definitely have a finger on the pulse, you know what’s going on.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Yeah, yeah, you know, particularly in your town.

Mark Freda: Any favorite pieces of legislation that you’ve worked on, Bonnie?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: In Congress, yes. The pieces I worked on in housing and a second chance in the state legislature we spoke to. In Congress, there certainly are a couple of pieces. One thing I did was I would open up my Facebook in the morning and I would see that young, and especially young Black kids, were either committing suicide, attempting it, or thinking about it. I said to my staff one day, “I don’t understand this phenomenon, but I don’t think that we can solve anything, but we certainly can look into it.” So the Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus created an emergency task force, and she gave me the assignment to run that task force. And we worked with a group of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists. Held hearings, a number of hearings where we had young people, old people, celebrity people come in and talk about mental health. It’s not something we were really talking about on the hill.

But after those series of hearings, we did a report sounding the alarm, and then we also created a piece of legislation which is very comprehensive for making sure we had providers of diversity, diversity of services in communities, and research that had been ignored. Met with the NIH director, and out of that came a battery of legislation that has not passed in Congress. Pieces of it have been put into other pieces of legislation, which is something that happens in Congress. You look at a bill and you go, “Hm, I seem to recall that,” and there it is, your piece that’s been subsumed by a chairman, which is fine because the issue is at the end of the day that it be, but as a result of that, I think that the whole issue of mental health has been elevated, discussed, and supported and funded on the hill like not before. So that’s an important piece.

My legislative background in Congress sort of spans the subject matter from the environment, whether or not it’s shade bills and pollution bills and things of that nature, or I’m still working on second chance amendments and legislation and things of that nature. But I think that the thread that connects all of the pieces that I did has to do with government doing its best for those in greatest need. So I always saw myself as the person that needed to speak up on behalf of people who were vulnerable, people whose issues were not being addressed, whether it’s Black women, that whole intersection of Black and female was something that has been left out in policy, so I co-founded the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls. The whole issue what we were dealing with immigration, and the disrespect that immigrants are experiencing in this country, even though they’ve not committed any crime and they’ve contributed to the greatness of our economy, I’ve worked in that area as well.

Making sure that government operates within the law is not something I ever thought that I had to be worried about, but I am worried about it and have been worried about it in at least the second term of the current president. Making sure that I provide the kind of service, protection where I can, and resources for people who are being harassed because they’re immigrants and things of that nature, very important to me, Mark. And then I think the other thing is that I stand up when it comes to peace or war, wherever it is. So some of that has manifested in joining other legislation, some of it has manifested in my own legislation, some of it has come up in letters to the executive branch. And another area that I’ve brought from state government into this is this whole issue of the cost for car insurance and the reasons that these various amounts are determined have very little to do with their driving record. They’re more related to who you are, what’s your title, what’s your position, and what’s your economic well-being. Well, that’s racist and sexist and everything else. So those are kind of the areas in which I’ve worked.

Mark Freda: Yeah, and it’s a very wide variety and very meaningful areas. I mean, you didn’t pick any easy ones, that’s for sure.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Well, it’s all about justice, you know. Making sure that government is doing everything it’s supposed to do for those who need government to work.

Mark Freda: Right, and I think one of the most important aspects of a really well-rounded, high-quality elected official as yourself is speaking up for those that normally would not have the ability to have somebody speaking up for them, right? That makes all the difference. Otherwise, why do it?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Yeah, I agree with you there.

Mark Freda: So, what has caused you to say, “Alright, it’s time, time to move on?” I mean, that’s a huge decision.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: I am 81. I just turned 81. Well, I think I’m cognitively capable, and physically capable, also think that there are other people younger than I who will pick up that mantle and kind of focus their work in the things that I valued as very important to me. I think it’s because it’s very important to the 12th Congressional District. This district knows what it wants. I just thought it was time. I would love to spend some time with family back here in Ewing. My husband has made a tremendous sacrifice in rolling me up and down the highway, and just being there for me. I’d like for us to have some us time. And I have a 13-year-old granddaughter that I absolutely adore and would love to be able to spend more time with her. So, I thought long and hard about this, and I was yes, no, yes, no.

And then I thought, I also don’t like what I see now. It’s very disheartening to be in Congress and have my colleagues on the other side of the aisle push forward legislation that I think is harmful to those who are most vulnerable, and we can bitch and moan and complain and groan about it on the other side, but we have to get back that majority. And so, you know, it’s time for somebody else to pick up that mantle, and it’s time for the 12th Congressional District to see who do you think will serve our interests the way that you think is important.

Mark Freda: Yeah. And definitely more than enough people have stepped up to say, “We’re interested.”

Bonnie Watson Coleman: I know. I know.

Mark Freda: So for anybody that’s thinking about running for a federal-level office, any advice, thoughts, anything you would say to them?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: I would say that even though you’re doing it at the highest level, the federal level, it’s still service. You’re a public servant. If you don’t have a calling to serve others, don’t do it. It’s not about the title or any kind of celebrity, it’s about the work that you need to do. So unless you’re willing to plug it out every day, deal with the disappointment as well as the victories that come, don’t come do this. It’s hard. It takes you away from your family. It costs you money. It’s just too much money in government. You got to raise money. If you’re on the house level, you’re doing it all the time because you’re running every 2 years. But if you want to serve people and you want to do it at that level, there’s nothing more gratifying than solving somebody’s issues, either legislatively or through your district office.

And I tell people all the time, my Washington office gets me ready to do committee meetings and vote and things of that nature, my New Jersey office, my DO, is the office that makes me a valid legislator for the people in my district. They’re the ones that get me re-elected because they’re solving Social Security problems, healthcare problems, immigration problems, just working with people through their everyday life problems. So, I would tell anybody that wants to do that, be prepared that your office in New Jersey has to be as vibrant and as competent as your office is in DC, and that you’re on call 24/7. So it could be Saturday night, it could be Sunday morning at 12 o’clock, you could get a call and your attention would be needed. That’s the life that you agree to if you agree to serve.

Mark Freda: Yeah, that’s great advice. And I will say that you have really had great people working for you. I’ve worked more with the people in the New Jersey office, but I’ve worked with people in both, and you have really been blessed with very good people.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: I try to hire people smarter than me. That’s what I do, and I’ve done a good job of that, yeah. And thank you for saying that. I try to tell them every time someone speaks to how happy they are with what our office has done. I try to communicate that with them because the work they do is very hard, and sometimes you can’t fix something that somebody needs, and that becomes disheartening. So when you do have the wins, you need to know that you’re appreciated. So thank you, I will share this with them.

Mark Freda: No, they should all be—they should all know that they’re appreciated, for sure. Alright, so you’re going to be retired. Any special plans, or are you just going to like sit in a chair to catch up on your sleep and rest for a little bit, or what are you going to do?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Well, I want to do that for a little while. I don’t know what else I want to do. Very concerned about public service and what it means to be a public servant. I don’t know how that would manifest in anything that I do. I’m going to be available if anybody needs some attention or some suggestion from me, I want to be helpful, but I don’t have any plans at all.

Mark Freda: That’s a good thing.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Yeah, yeah.

Mark Freda: Bonnie, anything else that—any other words of wisdom or anything you wanted to share with us before we wrap up?

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate that, and I appreciate working with you as the mayor of this important town in my district. I want people to know that I think that I was blessed by given the opportunity to serve in this space, and I’m grateful to God for the wins and for those things that didn’t happen the way I wanted them to happen but helped me to grow and to respect people. And whoever succeeds me, I need you to value people equally. I don’t care if they’re the very rich or the very poor, if they speak with an accent or have more color in their skin. We’re all the same, and God created us, and I want whoever follows me to recognize that.

Mark Freda: That is great. And I hope they do. I hope they do. Thank you, Bonnie. Really appreciate it. Thank you for all you’ve done.

Bonnie Watson Coleman: Thank you. Appreciate it.