One night last week in a cozy auditorium at Mercer County Community College, the geeks were running behind.
Soon enough the hall would fill with a couple hundred supporters of U.S. Rep. Rush D. Holt, 64, the physicist-turned-politician who has represented New Jersey’s 12th district, centered on Princeton, for the past 15 years. They would all be there, as Mr. Holt’s aides put it, to “geek out” over the role of good evidence in policy making.
Mr. Holt is bidding for the Democratic nod in the special election for the state’s U.S. Senate seat—primaries will be held on August 13—and he has not had an easy time of it. It is a crowded field. Polls show Cory Booker, the Newark mayor and social-media phenom, far ahead; Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, has practically endorsed him already. Looking for a way to stand out, last week Mr. Holt turned, as he has often done, to science.
The idea was to conduct a town-hall-style meeting with a twist: A former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Mr. Holt would ask his friends in science to serve as panelists for a live Webcast, a “Geek Out.” Some would sit with him at Mercer, while others, including Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate and former energy secretary, would join remotely. It was a logistically complicated, expensive production, requiring slick, pinstriped media contractors from Washington. No campaign at this level had done anything similar before, said Thomas Seay, the communications director, as he waited for Mr. Holt to arrive.
Staff, volunteers, and audiovisual techs looked alternatively busy and bored. Coffee followed coffee. A camera crane bestrode the hall. Mysterious thumb drives passed back and forth. “We can’t hide that he’s a geek,” said Mr. Seay. “We figured we might as well embrace it.”
Mr. Holt strolled in for the rehearsal, a tall, angular man with tightly trimmed silver hair, his staff fluttering like a cloud of electrons. Four tan chairs had been set up on stage, flanked by flat-screen televisions. The plan was for him to serve as moderator as his fellow panelists discussed their research and answered pre-submitted questions about health care and government surveillance. His staff had scheduled time for only five questions. Mr. Holt told them that didn’t seem nearly enough.
“What we’re trying to do is establish that I approach questions thoughtfully,” said Mr. Holt. “That I look for evidence. That I consult experts in order to get that evidence. And, I have this broad sweep of liberal, progressive issues. I’m not sure five quite does it.”
He was also worried about his panelists—a neuroscientist, a biologist, a psychologist, and a climate researcher, among others. Take Bonnie L. Bassler, the chair of molecular biology at Princeton University. She studies how microbes “talk” to one another. “Now the communication of microbes is really neat—it really is cool—but so what?” Mr. Holt said. “What does that have to do with illness of kids in the inner city?”
His staff murmured noncommittally. Mr. Holt gave them a hard look. He was anticipating problems, planning contingencies. When you’ve studied plasma physics; when you’ve won Jeopardy five times, and beaten the IBM computer Watson at the game, you don’t suffer fools gladly.
“Does Bonnie know I’m going to ask her about health care?” Mr. Holt said. “That’s what I’m asking. Is Bonnie here?”
“She’s right here!” an aide yelled halfway up the auditorium.
Mr. Holt shielded his eyes from the floodlights. “Oh, hi Bonnie!”
“Hey!”
“Do you have some comments you want to make about health care?”
“So they told me that I would just talk about my research.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of, that we haven’t really clued the panelists in. Would you like to say something about health care?”
“Not something that’s going to help you win an election.” There was nervous laughter from the other panelists. “I just have my opinion, Rush.”
A Foot in Each World
Science and politics have been a part of Rush Holt’s life since childhood. His father, also named Rush D. Holt, served one term in the Senate, one of the youngest legislators ever elected to the chamber, winning a West Virginian seat at the age of 29. (He had to wait six months to be sworn into office.) He died of cancer in 1955, when Mr. Holt was a boy.
His mother, Helen, taught science at a community college. (She would go on to work as Secretary of State in West Virginia, and she recently celebrated her 100th birthday with a campaign mailing for her son.) Mr. Holt would go to her classroom after school, he recalled in an interview in his office earlier this year.
“I would go back to the chemical storeroom behind her lecture room and start playing with bottles of things,” he said. “I bet there’s still droplets of mercury embedded in the cracks of that building.”
Mr. Holt studied plasma physics for his doctorate, but, while undeniably bright, he never had a career as a distinguished researcher, as one might infer from the bumper stickers adopted by his supporters: “My Congressman IS a rocket scientist!” (Mr. Holt is careful to note he’s a teacher by background, a scientist by orientation.) Politics, and the public, were never far from his mind. He taught at Swarthmore College, and, like many science Ph.D.'s, moved several times to Washington to serve as a wonk, first as a congressional fellow and then as an arms-control expert at the State Department. Even during his time at the plasma lab, his portfolio was dominated by external affairs and education.
All along Mr. Holt’s haphazard career path, people predicted he would run for office. In 1996 he finally did, spurred, he says, by Newt Gingrich’s attacks on science. Mr. Holt lost that race, but won in 1998.
There’s plenty of technical and scientific knowledge in Washington, but few experts or academics of any bent ever run for public office, says Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has followed Mr. Holt’s tenure.
While he has an undistinguished legislative record, that’s nothing new for a representative, especially one who has spent most of his tenure in the minority. He’s done the parochial work of serving his district well, which is why his support in the state is deep, but not broad, Mr. Baker says.
By this point, though, the House must be frustrating, he adds. Take, for example, the recent vote to shoot down spending on an unmanned NASA mission to capture an asteroid. Paying for NASA used to break down along geographical lines, with states like Texas and Alabama strongly supporting the program. The asteroid plan ran into a straight party-line vote, Republicans barring it.
There are only two physicists in the House—Mr. Holt and Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois—and while they’ve both played their experience “adroitly,” their paths seem ever more turbulent, Mr. Baker says. “The greater role science has played, particularly in climate change, the more hostile the response has been.”
Mr. Holt has railed against past decisions that have further reduced the legislative branch’s scientific base, including the decision, during the Newt Gingrich era, to close the Office of Technology Assessment, which provided in-house scientific advice to Congress for several decades. (Congress still has access to the National Academies, among other research offices, but that advice takes years to garner.) Mr. Holt has introduced several bills to revive OTA, to little effect.
“There were about a hundred scientists and engineers who were constantly involved in discussions on the Hill,” Mr. Holt said. “They were available on call to legislators and committees. It just elevated the level of debate on the Hill.”
It’s reasonable for Mr. Holt to expect he can do more in the Senate. He’ll be in the majority, for starters, and a single voice travels further in its clubby atmosphere. But his campaign is also a deeply personal mission. Mr. Baker suspects that the legacy of the senior Mr. Holt remains heavy in the candidate’s mind.
“It’s a kind of generational remediation,” he says.
‘Follow the Evidence’
A mixed crowd of students and academics with their children filled the auditorium while a futuristic soundtrack beeped and bopped. The rehearsal had grown tense, time counting down. Staff members fretted over whether to include a joke about Cory Booker. Was it actually funny? Did they have to acknowledge him?
Mr. Holt welcomed the crowd, a full house, and was joined onstage by Ms. Bassler; Phil Kellman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles; and Emily A. Carter, the director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. They sat quiet for a moment, waiting for the Web feed to kick in. In front of a crowd, Mr. Holt seemed less animatronic than in rehearsals, more fluid.
“I’m Rush Holt, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate,” he started. “But enough about Cory Booker.” The crowd laughed. “I have an idea,” he continued. “I think it would be good to have at least one scientist in the U.S. Senate. Don’t you?”
His opening would certainly win the hearts of many academics: “You the citizens are where I turn to start to make policy. Then, I turn to the experts to understand the evidence. And we should follow the evidence fearlessly where it leads.” (The possibility that evidence can lead to many different policy choices didn’t come up.) “In today’s politics,” he added, “we also must oppose the impassioned minority who deny reality.”
The evening was an odd mix of campaigning and lecture. Ms. Bassler found a way to talk health-care policy, saying that her work holds promise for medicine, but that translating that potential into medicine isn’t the job of the basic scientist. “That’s the job of politicians,” she said. “And we expect them to do that, so people’s lives can be improved in an affordable way.” Mr. Kellman meditated on how scientists grapple with uncertainty.
“There are not only ways to quantify uncertainty, but also how you deal with it, when you really don’t know what’s a proven course of action,” he said. “And that might not be what looks the freest and easiest right now.”
There were production snafus. The video feeds sputtered, limiting outside contributions and reducing the talk mostly to the four people on stage. A guest appearance by Mr. Chu kept being pushed back. He eventually presented a monologue, on climate change.
The upside of those technical difficulties was that Mr. Holt got more than five questions. One on election reform. One on student loans. Even one on alternating versus direct current. As the forum progressed, his guests assiduously stuck to their domains of knowledge, while the crowd’s questions led to policy and politics. This went on for two hours. By evening’s end, Mr. Holt was fielding questions not just from the crowd, but from his science panelists as well. It was an easier way for them to participate.
Mr. Holt understood their hesitation, he said afterward. Few scientists are comfortable spouting opinions, but give them time to investigate and they’ll steer you in an evidence-based way, though that course may still be blown different routes by ideology. And since Congress won’t revive OTA, the only way to get those skills into the legislature, he maintains, is for more scientists to win elections.
“Until that golden age when we have every well-educated, well-versed American able to deal comfortably with science, which we should have, we need more scientists in Congress,” Mr. Holt said.
The crowd gave Mr. Holt a standing ovation at the end, but of course: We were only 10 miles from Princeton. What about the rest of the state? Participation will surely be low in mid-August. Mr. Holt believes his supporters will return from the shore for his election, that turnout will defy what’s been seen in the polls.
Not that that will necessarily be enough against Cory Booker, Rutger’s Mr. Baker says.
Mr. Holt is “doing everything right,” he says. “The question is, is doing everything right enough?”