and her race to the Governor’s Mansion
by Sabina Clarke
Katie McGinty all energy and enthusiasm walked briskly towards me and introduced herself at her campaign headquarters in center city Philadelphia. Dressed in an emerald green suit and pumps, she looked every inch the candidate – relaxed and sure of herself while projecting the ability to put anyone instantly at ease.
McGinty is running in the May 20th gubernatorial primary hoping to be the Democrat on the ballot challenging Republican Governor Tom Corbett on this her first run for political office.
McGinty’s resume and national connections are impressive. She has worked in high places but is so down to earth it is almost disarming. In 1993, she was just 29 and in the White House as a senior advisor to former President Bill Clinton, serving as his deputy assistant and chair of the White House Counsel on Environmental Quality.
She spent a year in India as senior visiting fellow at the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi. Sensing that developing countries were emerging as economic and geopolitical powerhouses, Katie and her husband Karl Hausker lived and worked in India for a year. There she forged new ties between U.S. and Indian clean energy companies as well as helping to craft an environmental cooperation pact between the U.S. and India.
In 2000, she was an adviser to former Vice President Al Gore during his presidential campaign and senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee. She worked on the reauthorization of the landmark Clean Air Act and was senior staff person for Gore in charge of all the preparations for the Rio Earth Summit, the largest gathering of heads of state ever held on environmental issues.
In the corporate world, she worked for Natsource LLC, a Wall Street firm that was investing in clean energy — a new initiative where they were tracking private equity towards environmentally sound technology. Then in 2003, former Governor Ed Rendell beckoned and nominated her to become the first woman to lead the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. “Natsource was a great company with great colleagues but Ed Rendell is a very persuasive gentleman and so I came back home.”
In her five year stint as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, McGinty put Pennsylvania on the map—both nationally and internationally by creating jobs and attracting clean energy companies, “I see environmental challenges as economic opportunities in disguise. Some people want you to believe it is either jobs or the environment — and that’s not true. With just a little creativity and inventiveness, you can make good things happen for the environment and for jobs. For 25 years, I’ve tried to do just that. When I decided to go after renewable energy, it was not just in the abstract, just for clean air and clean water as important as that is, but also to put Pennsylvanians to work. As a result, we wound up with the biggest manufacturing base in the renewable energy industry in the United States of America. Thousands of jobs, a billion dollars of investment and these are manufacturing jobs — good family sustaining jobs.”
And before entering the political arena, since 2008 she had been a director of NRG, a Fortune 500 clean air energy company until she resigned from the company in November 2013.
The breadth and depth of McGinty’s experience at the capitol in Washington, D.C., and in the corporate world is varied and impressive. I wondered what prompted her to run for political office but after hearing her compelling personal story and her enormous drive and propensity for problem solving, it seems an obvious choice.
The 9th of 10 children of John Patrick McGinty, a Philadelphia police officer and Alma Berry McGinty, a restaurant hostess, McGinty grew up in a three-bedroom house on Summerdale Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia. She attended Resurrection of Our Lord grade school and St. Hubert’s High School where she played varsity basketball and graduated as the class valedictorian.
Often, she borrowed her Dad’s sound silencers that he used as a policeman on the firing range just to block out the “cacophony in a wonderfully fun and wonderfully loud household” and retreat for hours working away in her own silent world.
After St. Hubert’s, she won scholarships to St. Joseph’s University and to Columbia University Law School and clerked for a federal judge. She holds Doctorate degrees from Clarion State University, Dickinson and Muhlenberg colleges. And she was named “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
McGinty and her husband Karl Hausker started their family in India when fate intervened. For two-and-a-half years prior to going to live in India, Katie McGinty had this recurrent dream, “I had been dreaming that my husband Karl and I were holding two pink bundles that were certainly not Irish or Scandinavian.
It was shortly after Mother Teresa had passed away. I was desperate to go to Mother Teresa’s convent because I didn’t know if we would get back to Calcutta in our year living in India. We were living in New Delhi so the driver drove us to something that looked like a big brick factory and I asked the driver if this was it and he shook his head yes but we were very skeptical.
After we got out of the car and found out that he had not taken us to Mother Teresa’s convent but to Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Hyderabad instead that is where I saw the exact little babies I had been dreaming of. The driver made a mistake but for me it was my dream come true.
So, eight months later, we adopted the twins Tara and Alana Hausker, now 15 and I have been very blessed since; a year after that we had our biological child Alma Olivia Hausker, ‘Allie’ who is now 12.”
SC How do you feel about where you are now?
KMG In my life, the American dream has been alive and well. Going from the 9th of 10 kids and the first to go to a four-year college right from high school to at 29 years-old being a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton — that is all about a Mom and Dad who worked hard and were able to provide a good middle class life for us kids. It was about good education
SC Why do you think you have achieved so much?
KMG I think it is almost like reverse psychology. My Mom and Dad always told us to work hard and to do the best we could but more than that, they wanted us to be the best person we could be and to love our family and to love our faith. So for me, the pressure was off. My mother was never impressed with labels; the emphasis was on always trying my best and feeling fulfilled in what I was doing.
I remember when I had a challenge in the White House and she said, ‘Well, dear you are not married to it. If you are not enjoying it, then do something else.’ She was never about labels — just as long as I was trying my best at what I did and felt good doing it, whether it was in the corner nursery school or in the White House didn’t matter to her.
The greatest gift that your parents can give you is unconditional love and a house that you know for sure is always there and open and welcoming. That’s what my parents provided for me—there was never a sense of expectation. There was never any pressure, just that support. When you have that kind of foundation, you have the courage to thrive.
SC Have your brothers and sisters been involved in the campaign?
KMG All my brothers and sisters have been playing a hand. When it came to the petition process where you have to get thousands of signatures to appear on the ballot, my brothers and sisters wore out a lot of shoe leather. They joined me on the campaign trail for a little moral support and just to have some fun and to pitch in and they are doing everything from stuffing envelopes to hosting parties to spreading the word.
I’ve involved my brothers and sisters from the very beginning because you know, campaigns are very public events and families have to live in the spotlight. I wanted to make sure that they all felt good about that as well as dealing with the challenges and feeling the thrill of being able to serve. And one by one, they put their hands up and said, ‘We believe in you’. I’ve included them and relied on them and they have contributed in a huge way.
SC How does your Catholic faith factor in your life?
KMG My faith has been central to my life. In our family growing up, it was all about your faith, your family and your country. My faith is certainly different from my parents who were 100 percent unquestioning. For me, you can’t be educated by the Jesuits and be unquestioning. I know my heart feels empty if I could not go to church to reflect and have that quiet time there. That is an important grounding time or centering time for me.
Yet, my decisions in public life are always going to be about how does this impact-working people –is it helpful or hurtful.
SC What do you think of Pope Francis?
KMG I am very happy about the Pope speaking out on economic inequality in our society. One of the reasons our economy isn’t growing is because the purchasing power of the average person has completely eroded.
SC What was it like being in the Clinton White House?
KMG I remember in the early days of the Clinton White House that it became very cool to be Irish because President Clinton put such a priority on being Irish not just a plate of shamrocks once a year but focusing top tier strategic interests and top tier economic foreign policy interests; the real muscle in the White House went in the direction of being Irish. I felt very elevated in that White House. President Clinton was very inclusive.
Regarding the issues, McGinty is the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate to call for a severance tax on energy companies with the entire revenue dedicated to restoring Tom Corbett’s $1 billion cut to education grades K-12 and the only candidate to propose that restaurant workers get the same increase in the minimum wage as all other workers. And she is dedicated to protecting the environment and restoring the middle class.
In 2012, her parents John Patrick McGinty and Alma McGinty, both first generation Irish, died just two months apart. Alma was 91; Patrick was 94. Last June, all 26 of their children and their grandchildren went to Ireland to celebrate their lives.