West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, Army paratrooper, anesthesiologist – congressman?
Rick Morales has held the first four of those titles at various points during his long and impressive career, and he’s now hoping to add the fifth. A Princeton resident, Morales is launching his campaign today for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district, where incumbent Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) is retiring.
More than a dozen other Democrats are also competing for the same seat, which spans four diverse and strongly Democratic counties in Central Jersey. Morales, though, is wasting no time in spelling out why he believes he’s the best person for the job.
“They can say they’re going to do this, they can say they’re going to do that. What have they done?” he said of his many Democratic opponents. “What have they done, in or out of Congress, that they’re proud of, that has made their communities or their country better? I’ve done it over and over again as a paratrooper, as a West Point graduate, as a doctor, as a hospital leader.”
The son of a Puerto Rican factory worker, Morales grew up on Long Island and attended the U.S. Military Academy, where he was elected brigade commander. After graduating, Morales was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship – he says that, as far as the records reflect, he was the first-ever Hispanic American Rhodes Scholar – and served 11 years in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper and military doctor.
Upon leaving the military, Morales worked for decades as an anesthesiologist, practicing medicine in various cities around the country. Now 71, Morales moved to Princeton in 2019, though he said he’s had connections to Central Jersey since his sons attended Princeton University years earlier.
In Morales’s telling, the nation is currently at a pivotal – and extraordinarily dangerous – moment. President Donald Trump, he said, is threatening the foundations of American democracy, and the country needs members of Congress with “the courage, the heart, and the soul” to take him on.
“I jumped out of airplanes 15 times; one time, the parachute didn’t even open until the very last moment,” Morales said. “I didn’t do that to live to this point and see it all destroyed by a renegade president. We should call it what it is – everybody dances around the issue. The issue is that we’re losing our democracy and we need to stop the descent.”
That’s a compelling message for the 12th district’s fiercely anti-Trump Democratic primary voters, albeit not one that’s necessarily unique to Morales; every Democrat in the race, to one degree or another, is likely to run against the policies currently coming out of the White House. (Watson Coleman, now in her final year representing the district, is herself a vocal Trump critic, once calling the president a “lying, stupid, amoral son-of-a-bitch.”)
Many of the candidates running for the district – among them Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (D-Trenton), Somerset County Commissioner Shanel Robinson (D-Franklin), East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, and Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp – have long careers in local and state elected office around the district. Many others are like Morales and are joining the race as political outsiders; one of them, Adam Hamawy, even shares Morales’s profile as a doctor and Army veteran.
In such a crowded field, Morales does have one demographic detail working in his favor: he’s the only Hispanic candidate currently running for a district where more than 20% of the population is Hispanic. As a longtime physician who’s held jobs around the country, Morales may also have more national relationships (and fundraising connections) than many of his foes.
As for what he’d work to accomplish in Congress, Morales said he’s spoken with Watson Coleman and both agree that there’s a massive need for a fix to the nation’s health care problems, which he argued as a doctor he’s well-suited to deliver. But Morales is also holding himself to a strict limitation on how long he’ll stick around in Congress, saying he plans to depart after four or perhaps six years in Washington.
“I think part of the reason that Congress is corrupted is because people are there too long, and they become dependent on too many special interests,” he said. “I’m not going to serve more than two or three terms. I think two will be enough – in two terms, if my views and my efforts are unsuccessful, I don’t think we’re even going to have a democracy any more.”
With four-and-a-half months to go until the June 2 primary, Morales will have a lot of work ahead to get his message out to the voters of the 12th district. He already seems to have a clear idea of what that message will be.
“All the other candidates in my district, they’re looking for job security,” he said. “They’re looking for credentials. They’re looking for prestige. I’m not looking for any of those things. What I’m looking for is to restore the country that I love – the country that I was willing to die for.”
