Demakis Pursues Lifelong Passion for Public Service

Paul C. Demakis '75 says he knew he would be a politician long before he went to college.

Harvard, the Massachusetts state representative says, only helped him along his way, providing the tools to understand the political arena.

"I don't think there's anything that a school can do specifically to 'teach' you how to pursue elected public office," says Demakis, a former government concentrator who spent much of his College career at the Institute of Politics. "You have to have a lot of self-motivation to do something like run for elected office."

Demakis says he found his motivation early on. He credits his family for his interest in public service, though he suspects that politics is not the profession they would have chosen for him.

"I remember staying up late in 1960 to hear who won the presidential election," he recalls. "I grew up in a family where politics was a constant subject of discussion. However, active political involvement was somewhat disdained." Demakis says his father considered running for office as "sort of a step down."

The political discussions shaped his outlook, not the scorn for politicians, which he was largely able to ignore, he says.

"Obviously, it didn't affect me enough," he says with a laugh.

Demakis is now serving his third term as a Democrat in the Massachusetts State Legislature, an outcome that doesn't surprise one Eliot House roommate.

"Paul was very passionate about certain political issues. And he could be very persuasive," says H. Clark Mason '75-'76, who is also a Crimson editor and now a staff writer for the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, who lived with Demakis sophomore year.

At Harvard, Demakis worked on the Harvard Political Review and usually took one or two IOP seminars each semester. His work with the government department focused on local political issues.

One tutorial project took Demakis to Lynn, where he went door to door gauging political beliefs of city residents.

But even with his lifelong interest in the field, it took Demakis 20 years to make his entrance into the political arena. After his undergraduate years, he earned a degree from Harvard Law School and worked at two Boston law firms.

When he was appointed a hearing officer for the Massachusetts Appellate Tax Board, Demakis moved closer to the political scene. At the same time, he began to work actively in the community, chairing the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay as well as the Ward Five Democratic Committee.

But Demakis says he thought then that he would always remain a background player in Massachusetts politics.

"By the time I was a hearing officer [on the tax board], I assumed that I would probably never aim for an elected office," Demakis says.

Ironically, it was the vagaries of Massachusetts electoral politics that propelled Demakis to his first election.

In 1993, former governor William F. Weld '66 replaced Demakis with a Republican. And a year later, the incumbent state representative in his district, Mark Roosevelt '78, decided to run for governor, leaving his former position open for a Democrat.

Booted from the tax board, Demakis decided to finally put his name on the ballot.

"I did not want to look back 30 years from now and say this was something I had never tried," he says.

Demakis won the race--by a narrow margin of 137 votes--and has held the post ever since, increasing his margin of victory each reelection period. And he says he is grateful that he took as long as he did to aim for the office.

Too many people, Demakis advises, enter politics too quickly. He tells aspiring politicians to spend time establishing themselves in their communities long before even thinking about entering a race.

"Working with the Democratic committee and the neighborhood association helped me to acquire some of the skills I needed to be a good public official. And it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate that I had good leadership abilities," Demakis says.

District residents say Boston profited from Demakis' decision to finally run for office.

"Paul is a wonderfully dedicated state representative," says Martha M. Walz, the former chair of the Ward Five Democratic Committee who has known Demakis for the past 12 years. "He's very, very well suited for state representation."

Presently, Demakis is working to pass a bill to create 25-foot buffer zones around all Massachusetts abortion clinics, a bill he calls "the most significant legislative fight I have led."

The fight for the law began in 1995, after John Salvi III killed two workers at Boston area women's clinics in December 1994, days before Demakis took office. The State Senate has approved the bill twice, although it has stalled in the House.

Demakis is also working to halt a New York developer who is attempting to place a skyscraper in the Back Bay area of Boston.

Fred Mauet, who once worked as a lawyer with Demakis and is now the chair of the Back Bay Neighborhood Association, says battles like these are Demakis' forte.

"He really has a passion for protecting the quality of life of the urban environment," says Mauet, who is leading the fight against the Back Bay skyscraper. "Paul has just been extremely vigilant and puts his heart into the nitty-gritty issues as much as anyone I have ever seen in public life."

As for one of the most common nitty-gritty issues that Boston legislators face--fighting with universities over everything from campus expansion to minimum wages for workers--Demakis says he has largely steered clear of town/gown conflicts.

Indeed, he says his perception of Harvard has not changed considerably since he left college.

"I have a positive view of Harvard as an institution. Harvard and the other major colleges and universities in the area make very important contributions to the economy, to medicine, to culture," Demakis says.

Demakis ascribes conflicts between Harvard and the community to an occasional forgetfulness on the part of the University.

"It is very important for [Harvard] to remember that they do have neighbors and that the neighbors want a certain quality of life--unchecked growth and development can impinge upon that," Demakis says.

So far, a life of politics appears to agree with Demakis, and he says he has no plans to leave the field anytime soon. His term runs out this year, and Demakis will be running for reelection.

However Demakis fears to make any long-term predictions.

"I don't have a grand plan for the future. I think that this is the best way to set yourself up for a big failure," Demakis says. "Politics is filled with the unexpected."