Scott Holcomb in the Georgia House.
Click here for a slide show of pictures about Scott Holcomb.
No one would accuse Scott Holcomb of being an underachiever.
He served 12 years in the military, six of those as a U.S. Army JAG Corps lawyer—including deployments to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. He joined Sutherland Asbill & Brennan after leaving the military, and during that time ran (unsuccessfully) for secretary of state. In 2007, he became the general counsel for J.P. Turner & Co., and in 2010, at age 38, he became a first-term Georgia state representative. Holcomb was re-elected in November.
As if practice and public office were not enough to keep him busy, he also is enrolled in the University of Georgia's executive MBA program and in his free time, trains for marathons and a triathlon.
Holcomb rarely slows down and he says that's how he likes it. He carved out a few minutes to talk about what drew him to politics and why he keeps a full plate.
After reading your biography on your Website, it looks like you have a lot of interests. Would you say that is true?
Yeah, no doubt. In fact, I think being an attorney is probably down at the bottom of my interests. There are a lot of other things that interest me a lot more, but the great thing about being an attorney is it allows me to pursue all the other things that I really love and enjoy doing.
What got you interested in politics?
A lot of it has to do with my military service. Having spent so much time overseas in some pretty challenging circumstances forced me to think about the world in government and civil society in a way that I think a lot of people haven't had the chance to reflect. I really loved being in the military, but I also very much enjoyed being deployed. It's the most meaningful work I've done in my life and I've done a lot of stuff.
I got married in the summer of 2001, and my wife and I basically didn't see each other for the first two years of our marriage so she kindly suggested I find a new line of work. And I was ready to get out because it was clear neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was going to be cleared up. I went from there to Sutherland.
I was selected to be a Marshall fellow in 2004 and traveled to Europe in 2005.
I was in Denmark and they had us meet with five Marshall fellows who were all under the age of 35 and were members of their national parliament. It kind of blew me away because here in the United States to be in your national government at 35 or younger is really unusual.
