Addressing West Virginia University’s Young Democrats in the Mountainlair, Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., asked the students, “How did I get here?”
After receiving blank stares, Rockefeller answered his own question about how he came to be a United States senator in West Virginia and what can be done to communicate to today’s young Americans.
Rockefeller explained that he studied both Japanese and Chinese history and language at Harvard and Yale. Joining  the Peace Corps, Rockefeller worked in the Philippines and Indonesia and traveled to Asia several times. He said that at the time he had no interest whatsoever in politics.
Rockefeller said that his best friend from the Corps, originally from Charleston, said to him “Jay, I’m really happy that you know so much about Asia, but you don’t know anything about your own country, and that is totally unacceptable.”
This prompted Rockefeller to join VISTA, or Volunteers In Service To America. VISTA led him to a little town in West Virginia known as Emmons, an ex-mining town which had a population of only 256. All the families in Emmons save one were on welfare.
“I knew I could make a difference,” Rockefeller said. “It was just terribly important to me and I never wanted to do anything else.”
From there he began a life of politics in West Virginia, first losing the gubernatorial race by the largest landslide ever, and then winning by the largest landslide ever.
“I want you to know me a little bit, and I want to know you,” Rockefeller said. “One of the huge frustrations of anybody in public life these days and particularly at the national level I think, is we know that young people for the most part aren’t that interested in what we are doing, and that hurts a little bit.”
He added that young people are tending to be less Democratic and more Republican.
“How do I reach you?” he said. “I’m not in public life for the fun of it, I’m in it because I really believe in stuff that I do.
“What I do today in the senate, basically comes from the emotions and the anger and ... the sustained outrage of what I saw for two years in Emmons, W.Va.,” Rockefeller said. “Those people, whether they know it or not, gave me my life.”