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Believing in Strong American Values TJH Speaks with Doug Tuman BY NATE DAVIS
Doug, you’re running for Congress. Tell us about your experience in politics. I’m running to represent the 4th Congressional District. I never ran for public office before; this is my first time running. I’m a professional engineer, an attorney, and I’m the Commissioner of Engineering for the Town of Hempstead. Is that a full-time job? Yes. I’ve been working in civil service my entire life so I know what it means to work for the people. I’ve been doing that since I gradated with an engineering degree. Then I went to law school at night to become a patent attorney. I was filing patents at night and decided to stick with the engineering by day, and I worked my way up and became Commis-
sioner of Engineering. What does that job entail? I’m basically in charge of the infrastructure for the entire Town of Hempstead, which is the largest township in America. It’s vast, and unfortunately most of it was built at the same time so it’s all crumbling at the same time. We are actually working on a road-raising in Inwood right now, which is a fairly large project. I’m very result-driven as well. That’s been the theme in my department. Any opportunity I have to push projects forward, I do. We certainly need to cut down on regulation and bureaucracy. Tell us about how your campaign is going. The race has been going
well. It’s very much a grassroots effort. I’m doing a lot of campaigning in Democratic areas. And I’m running on the Republican line. I’m very much a Republican at the core. I have fiscal conservative values and strong values in support of what I believe is being the foundations of this country – upholding our liberties. I’m spreading that message and trying to bring people onboard to unify them around that message of what I believe it means to be American and what I believe are American values. I don’t pitch myself as Doug Tuman, the Republican. I pitch myself as Doug Tuman, the neighbor that’s running for Congress that believes in these strong American values – not necessarily Republican values – and I’m finding that a lot
of people seem to agree. The pitch is that I see the role of government is to provide a platform for a free and open society to flourish. Where do you live? I live in West Hempstead. There is a large Orthodox Jewish community in West Hempstead. I haven’t lived in West Hempstead for too long, but I am getting to know the community; I’m very aware of the Orthodox community there and getting to know them as neighbors. You may have noticed that for a lot of your ne ighb ors in We st Hempstead, one of the issues that they grapple with is the high tuition fees for private schools.
Yes, I’m very sympathetic to that. I’m pro-school choice. What is your prediction for Election Day? I saw an unofficial poll on Twitter – somebody who has 40,000 Twitter followers that does these polls as a self-proclaimed pollster – a month ago and he was showing us that we were just three or four points behind, so I’m pretty confident. I certainly think we could flip the seat red. And like I said, not so much because of Democrat versus Republican, but because people, especially in Nassau County, for the most part are middle of the road. They’re not extreme in their views. I think that’s what they elected Kathleen Rice for. But even she has started to lean left. The extreme
