Return to Cranberry home page

Local lawyer runs for Congress

Robert Pidcock unusual candidate in 1st Ditrict race

by KITTY HURST

In the Democratic race for the 1st Congressional District of New Mexico, Robert Pidcock is the obvious black sheep.

Pidcock has never held public office, which makes him unique since he’s up against three career politicians: Martin Heinrich, Michelle Lujan Gishram and Rebecca Vigil-Giron.

Another political rookie running, Jessica Wolfe, has not showed at any debate forums so far.  

Pidcock worked to put himself through college and served in the military –two other attributes that he said seperate from the other hopefuls.

Pidcock said he is running because of the lack of unusual candidates he sees campaigning for public office. 

“It's time people who work for a living get involved in politics,” he said.

Pidcock, 51, has been an attorney in Albuquerque for the past 18 years. He grew up on a farm in Ohio, graduated from a vocational high school and joined the army for three years.

After working four years in the semi-conductor industry, he put himself through college in Texas, working at night as a mechanic, security guard, janitor and laborer. He graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in government and a minor in economics, then he attended law school at the University of New Mexico.

“I've worked for minimum wage,” Pidcock said. “I know what it’s like to see your family struggle. I grew up on a little farm, and we didn't have much.”

Pidcock falls back on his real-world experiences to bring him closer to voters and stay in-tune with important issues.

“If people can look in your eyes and see their experiences looking back at them, that’s something they can relate to,” Pidcock said. 

A political rookie, Pidcock admitted his naivete before running.
He said he didn’t realize that running for political office is all about asking.

To Pidcock, campaigning means asking for things from the people he wants to help –asking for signatures on eligibility petitions, asking for money to campaign, asking for votes to get elected and asking people to volunteer their time. Unlike the other candidates, Pidcock has no paid staff, only volunteers to help him campaign.

“This process requires you to start asking people for things immediately,” Pidcock said, adding the fact lightheartedly to his list of reasons why not to run for Congress.  

But ideally politicians should be helping people, giving to them, not receiving favors from them, Pidcock said. He said he measures success in his life by how many people he can help.

Campaigning for office has started earlier and earlier, Pidcock said, giving new candidates an uneven playing field. Career politicians dominate the races, making it tougher for working class citizens to run, he said.

“For somebody to write me a check it has to be completely based on my message. They have to be moved enough and motivated enough by what I tell them,” Pidcock said. “That’s a tough sell when you’re trying to equal $500,000 or $600,000 someone else has raised.”

Campaigning in what he’s dubbed a “perpetual election” has a negative affect on job performance –the time when politicians are supposed to give back to the people.

“I wish that everybody’s only way of raising money was based on their message, but unfortunately, that’s just not reality when you’re running for political office,” Pidcock said.

Raising money has nothing to do with a candidate’s message, or how qualified they are, Pidcock said. But it is what he must turn almost all of his time to right now.

“The problem is somebody who is just doing it for the game can raise a lot of money, put themselves on television, and look like a combination of Gandhi and Einstein,” Pidcock said. “The problem is the voters have to sort that out.”

Pidcock said the media, especially television, be required to give a certain amount of free airtime to political candidates. Under his proposal, candidates could not purchase more than their allotted time, creating a more fair and balanced election. 

When asked whether lack of funding or lack of name recognition was a larger obstacle for him, Pidcock said they were one and the same.

“The media grabs a hold of the money issue and decides somebody’s a frontrunner, just because the money,” Pidcock said. “Then it just feeds on itself. They’ve been anointed the frontrunner therefore they are the frontrunner. The name recognition is the money, the money is the name recognition.”

And Pidcock still grapples with both in this race.

His first obstacle overcome was getting the 607 signatures needed for to be eligible to run. Pidcock said it was a burdensome process that took a tremendous amount of time and pulled him away from what he wishes the process were about: helping people. In the end, Pidcock and his volunteers collected 1,400 signatures.

“The process is very foreign to people who've worked for a living, it's very common place to the career politicians I'm running against. They're used to doing this, they know how, they have people to do it for them,” Pidcock said.

He admits that as a shy person, collecting signatures was a personal challenge. After realizing that knocking on doors wasn’t reaching enough people, he began campaigning in front of stores. Pidcock said getting thrown out of parking lots at grocery stores was not what he had pictured when he decided to run.

Even through the frustration, Pidcock said he tries to see the process in a positive light.

“I have personally talked to several thousand voters,” Pidcock said. “It's been an advantage to have done that."

Pidcock describes the day he went to Santa Fe himself to turn in the signatures as a tremendous relief.

“I felt like the world had been lifted from my shoulders,” Pidcock said. “Then immediately I realized that asking for money had to start.”

And that is a process he said, that unfortunately never stops.

 

Written March 13, 2008

Go to Top