This man is no island

At home in the Northern Mariana Islands, Del. Gregorio Sablan (I) wakes up at 4 o’clock in the morning and walks.

“I love to walk,” he says. “Back home I do that every day. I leave home and walk, and go walk for hours.”

In Washington, Sablan, the first non-voting House delegate representing the 15 Pacific islands situated between Hawaii and the Philippines, still gets up early, but not to hit the road. He stays in his Columbia Heights apartment during the pre-dawn hours to make calls to his district, which is 15 hours ahead of local time.

Sablan didn’t entirely abandon his long walks after moving to the capital in January. He just takes them when the sun is out. He discovered Harry’s, a no-frills restaurant housed in the crumbling Hotel Harrington, on a meander through downtown.

“I saw they have burgers, and I like burgers, and I was hungry,” he says.

During a recent lunch rush, servers hustle through the dining room balancing sandwich plates covered in mountains of potato chips, and the swinging kitchen door reveals a stack of trays holding small plastic cups filled with coleslaw. Sablan explains to a reporter that he’d like to dine on the sidewalk patio not to feel the sun but because “I have a bad habit.”

Shortly after sitting down, he takes out a cigarette and holds it in his hand without lighting it.

To the first man tasked with representing a roughly 90,000-person U.S. commonwealth at the height of a worldwide economic crisis, an obvious opening question — How’s it going so far? — elicits a long pause.

“We’ve been a commonwealth for 33 years, and we became citizens in 1986,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

One may think, then, that the burden Sablan feels to play legislative catch-up for the Northern Mariana Islands would lead him to smoke more.

Not true.

“I do it in the best of times and the worst of times,” he says after offering, “It’s the only vice I have.”

Again, not true, he later proves.

Sablan loves hamburgers but says he’s trying to cut back — he orders one medium-rare without cheese, a side salad instead of fries and black coffee for lunch — and also has a thing for doughnuts. His wife does not approve.

“Here I can eat what I want,” he says. “My wife doesn’t like me eating doughnuts. I love doughnuts.”

Sablan’s family continues to live on the islands, and he makes the nearly 8,000-mile, $3,000 trip home only during Congress’s longer recesses.

So what does he do unmonitored in Washington? He goes to Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill for coffee and a couple of doughnuts.

“They’re open at 5 in the morning!” he says.

Sablan likely needs the sugar rush; he says he has been working nearly seven days a week to get face-time with his new colleagues and lay the groundwork to enact the islands’ legislative priorities. Education is one of his top issues, and he calls House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) “a very important person to us.”

“Our kids need so much to keep pace with the rest of the world,” he says. “We have very little else.”

But before he can pursue anything constructive, Sablan has found himself doing a lot of damage control on the Northern Mariana Islands’ reputation.

“We have the unfortunate situation of being taken for a ride by Jack Abramoff,” he says, referring to the commonwealth’s having retained the convicted ex-lobbyist for representation in a minimum-wage battle and other previous legislative matters. An illegal trip to the islands was a flashpoint in the Abramoff scandal, and Sablan says many members of Congress have brought up that relationship in initial conversations with him.

“I tell people that I have never met Mr. Abramoff, that 99 percent of my people have never met Mr. Abramoff,” he says.

Sablan isn’t wholly unfamiliar with Washington. He came here in the late 1980s to work for Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). He left after a year and a half and said to himself that when he returned to Washington, it would be as his homeland’s first congressional representative.

His entry into politics wasn’t nearly as purposeful. Sablan says he first ran for office at 21 because “it was there.” His uncle and grandfather had been politicians, but Sablan had gotten used to carving out his own path. He left home at age 11 to attend school on another island and at 13 got on a ship alone to Micronesia.

So even if it was by chance, Sablan found his professional home in politics. He lost that initial race — for a spot in the islands’ legislature — but eventually became a two-term lawmaker for the commonwealth. He also advised two governors, ran the commonwealth’s election commission and headed its Democratic Party organization. (Sablan caucuses with House Democrats but says he ran for the delegate seat as an Independent because the Democratic Party “back home is not organized.”)

“I’ve always had this core belief in public service,” he says. “Even before I became a citizen, I volunteered in the Army.”

Unlike some other politicians who make it to Washington, Sablan has yet to adopt a lifestyle befitting the powerful. He takes the Metro to work and grabs takeout at Five Guys or Panda Express in Columbia Heights on his way home. (“Those people know me already,” he says of the employees at the Chinese take-out. “I walk in and they know what I’m ordering” — usually the rice and mandarin chicken.)

He also speaks of his new professional home as if he’s not yet a member of Congress but rather an outsider in awe.

“This is the legislature of the most powerful nation in the world, and it’s awesome,” he says.

Sablan says he hasn’t been able to walk in Washington as much as he used to in the Northern Mariana Islands — “I’ve gained weight since I got here,” he laments — but he sees a more demanding regimen ahead.

“The challenges for the Northern Mariana Islands are huge,” he says. “You can’t do 33 years of work in 10 weeks, but I’ll be danged if I don’t try.”