Selling Bagels to Selling Himself

On a snowy night at B&D Deli in Brookline, the waiter takes an elderly couple's request for two Rubins. The order would not prompt a lengthy response from most servers, but for Dan "The Bagel Man" Kontoff, a perfect excuse for politicking has fallen into his lap.

He begins a conversation about Jerry Rubin, a political radical and one of the Chicago Seven who went to trial for trying to incite a riot following anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After all, Kontoff has no time to waste. He's vying for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and the election is fewer than two months away.

"I'm not a politician," Kontoff says. "My goal is to make a political difference. The weird thing is I'd have a desk job. I've never had a desk job."

The 44-year-old Kontoff moves around the deli with the energy of someone half his age, jumping around from table to table, delivering sandwiches, wiping counters, making small talk, all the while breaking every couple of minutes to answer questions about his political ambitions.

Dressed in plain pants and a B&D-logo shirt, Kontoff lets his personality shine through by adorning himself with a large white, red and blue beaded Native American-style necklace and two earrings, one of half of a fork and the other of half of a spoon, both of which dangle from his left ear.

"I run the poor people's campaign," Kontoff says, referring to his run at a City Council seat in 2003 on a budget of $200, compared to the thousands he said the elected Councilor Jerry McDermott raised. "A lot of people who run for office don't have to work, but I have to work to pay my bills."

Kontoff says "we did very well" in the 2003 City Council race, although according to the Allston-Brighton TAB, Councilor McDermott won close to 82 percent of the vote.

He adds that the Green-Rainbow Party, the party he hopes to run under, is "not about money" and that "we have to take the money out of politics" and use it for better things - such as feeding the hungry.

This is Kontoff's third run at local political office - he ran twice for the Boston City Council, but has never won. He says he's optimistic about his chances this time, and says the notoriety he earned through seven years of pedaling bagels from a pushcart decorated with literature promoting liberal politics in the Boston Common will help his chances.

"I'm going the celebrity route," Kontoff says. "My bagel cart made me famous around Boston. I spread political activism through my pushcart."

Kontoff, who grew up in Newton and now lives in Brighton, is currently running unenrolled, but he says he hopes the Green-Rainbow Party will endorse him before the election. And if elected, he will switch his enrollment to the party.

"I'm no more qualified than anyone else, but I have a lot of connections with people already in the State House," Kontoff says. "I'm running to make a difference. We need to get rid of the corruption and make this country a democracy again. Right now it's not."

Kontoff says he's not an intellectual, and although he's certainly not ignorant, he would not call himself book-smart. Kontoff says this is a good quality because he does not want to "be above people" and make them feel he is talking down to them. He did attend Northeastern University for a year as an English major, but dropped out because he did not think it was worth the cost.

Kontoff's first taste of activism was at an anti-Vietnam rally that his mother took him to when he was eight years old. From then on, his political engagement took off, and he hasn't stopped speaking-out since.

He has volunteered with several community service organizations, such as Food Not Bombs and the Cambridge Furniture Bank, but says he is not active in those groups now because he had conflicts with members of the groups' leadership. But Macy Delong, Executive Director of Solutions at Work, the nonprofit association that runs the Furniture Bank, said that Kontoff, who drove the pick-up truck, left for reasons other than personal conflicts.

"He left because his enthusiasm overflowed too much with his donors and thought his energy would be better focused elsewhere," Delong said.

Kontoff has been involved in protesting everything from nuclear weapons to the Boston University bio-defense lab to last year's DNC in Boston. Far from being ashamed at having done jail-time, a proud Kontoff explains that he has been arrested several times during protests, and not only does he not mind being jailed but it was his goal.

On one such protest in 1987, Kontoff and other like-minded individuals drove to Cape Canaveral, Fla. with a life-sized pâpier maché missile on the roof to protest nuclear missile testing. Once there, the group parked the truck in a way that blocked traffic and ended up spending nine days in jail after being arrested protesting on the following day.

"Our goal was to get arrested and get the media on the issue," Kontoff says.

Kontoff says he is completely against the war in Iraq. After his shift at the deli while eating at another restaurant, he leans over to a nearby table where a group of college students are waiting for their food and says, "What are Americans doing in Iraq? Do you think we should be there?"

He seems disappointed when they grumble answers of "No" and "I don't know," and don't indulge him in the lengthy discussion of foreign policy and imperialism he's always yearning for.

Kontoff says his area of expertise is national politics and foreign policy, so he's trying to study-up on Massachusetts government for the race. He says because his knowledge is "more national," his goal is to be a member of the U.S. Congress someday, but he says even now being recognized in the community by unfamiliar faces is a little disconcerting.

"It's a little weird when I'm on the street and people are like 'Hey, Dan the Bagel Man'," Kontoff says. "If I become really famous, I'll lose a lot, but I'm not here for myself, I'm here for the people. If you want to be in government, you have to give up privacy and be there for the people 24 hours a day."

Kontoff jokingly says his morals are all wrong for America because he does not abuse women and is neither homophobic nor sexist, but he seems confused when asked if he thinks he is a role model.

"I try to be a role model, but I have a lot of faults. We all can do better," Kontoff says but in the next breath changes his mind. "Wait, no. I'm a terrible role model. I drink. I flirt with women. I smoke pot."

Kontoff supports legalizing marijuana, but says the issue is not too important to him and prefers to focus on bigger issues such as ending world hunger, war and other forms of violence. Kontoff also says health care should be a right, not a privilege, and knows first-hand the struggles some have affording health insurance. He says he applied for health care from the state to get his teeth worked on because he could not afford it himself, but made too much money to qualify.

"That's why I'm running for State Rep. - to get my teeth fixed," he jokes.

Kontoff says if he loses the election on April 12, he will not give up on his goal to become an elected official.

"If I lose, I'll just get ready for the next campaign," Kontoff says. "You won't win by quitting."