Representative Bradley Byrne of Alabama encouraged students not to take presidential campaign rhetoric at face value in an interview with The Chronicle as part of a series profiling alumni in politics.
Byrne graduated from Duke in 1977 with a degree in public policy and was an active member of Associated Students of Duke University, the equivalent of Duke Student Government from 1967 to 1993. During his time as an ASDU executive, Byrne pushed for better financial aid and helped create the Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship, named after the University's first African American student body president.
During a lengthy legal and political career, Byrne has served on the Alabama State School Board, in the Alabama State Senate and as chancellor of Alabama’s community college system. After a special election in 2013, Byrne was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Republican, having been a Democrat until 1997.
Byrne noted that political campaigns are often selective with their facts, adding that both presidential candidates “put [out] their own opinion or gloss on the facts.”
“It’s incumbent upon people like students that are presently at Duke and people like me that graduated from Duke to […] make sure that we hold everybody who runs for political office accountable for their positions on those issues, ” Byrne said.
He explained that there is a disconnect between the issues both presidential campaigns have presented and the issues that he feels actually need to be addressed. Byrne suggested that students look at the nominees’ careers rather than the rhetoric of their campaigns when voting.
He noted that Obama has had a poor relationship with Congress, which is why Obama had little success in promoting his legislative agenda.
Regarding race relations in North Carolina, Byrne explained that the media's portrayal of the issues, especially in Charlotte, have distorted the situation, noting that African Americans do in fact support the police and know they are protected in their communities.
Duke prepared Byrne for a career in politics, he said, emphasizing that his undergraduate education taught him self-discipline.
“I certainly learned a lot about how to discipline myself to do the sort of work that needs to be done in order to be successful both in my legal career and my public career,” he said.
Learning to quickly dissect new material was also something Byrne picked up on during his time at Duke. Byrne noted that his experiences as a public policy major and ASDU executive taught him about the “substance of policy making.”
“There was more to policy making than just knowing the policy and knowing what you wanted to do,” he said. “You had to know how to actually get elected to office and then work the political system to make things happen.”
To students interested in pursuing a career in politics, Byrne recommended that they take advantage of their undergraduate experiences, no matter what they are studying.
“It really to me doesn’t matter what your major is, it’s whether you’ve developed those skills to discipline yourself, to work hard, to understand what your goal is and to be tenacious about obtaining that goal,” he said.
Byrne described his undergraduate degree and his four years at Duke as some of “the greatest gifts” in his lifetime.
“It has served me extremely well in my life, and I am and will always be grateful to Duke for the opportunity that the institution gave me,” he said.
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