Michael Pipe may not be The Boss like his music idol, but he's finally one of the leaders.

Pipe, a 26-year-old Bucks County native and Bruce Springsteen fan, became a Centre County commissioner last year after previously running for Congress. A former restaurant manager and Penn State graduate, he spoke about holding office after his second political campaign.

Why did you run for commissioner?

This goes back to the congressional campaign. It was partly because I thought that I wasn’t tainted by the system quite yet. And I say quite yet because, typically, when good people get into office, something triggers them and they start to walk down the path of easy elections, reaching out to special interests. I wanted to say, “You know what? I still look at myself as an honest guy. So let me throw my hat into the ring and see what happens.”

Now, during the congressional campaign, we knew that it was an uphill battle. It was very unlikely that I would win, and so we looked for small victories that we could have during the campaign. ... Then, with the commissioner campaign, I actually said, “I can win this. I can win the primary, and I can win the general election.” But there was a difference between the two apples. The congressional campaign, it was more about exploring what a campaign would be like. The commissioner campaign was like: “How can we actually win a campaign?” ... Realizing that government has some great things to offer its citizens, I felt that here in the county we could be doing a better job of reaching out to people. So I felt that if I could get in here, I could offer a fresh perspective.

Why go for a congressional seat for your first campaign?

Well, I had just graduated in the winter of 2009 and I was at home with my family and it just popped into my head:Why not run for Congress? It was a midterm election year; it wasn’t an odd year when you might have municipal elections. That was the office that was open, and I figured:Why not? Nobody else was running for it, and so we knew it wasn’t going to be a tough primary campaign, where we’d spend a lot of money. But I felt that young people need to get involved in the process. I was probably destined not to win, but there would be at least somebody out there that people could look at me and say, “I can support this guy.”

When you won, what was your reaction?

One of the things that we didn’t want to happen was, and there’s a scene in the movie “The Candidate,” with Robert Redford, when he wins and says, “Now what?” . ... You don’t want to have that reaction of what now. I was pretty clear-eyed about the challenges here in the county, so [it was] just focusing, just spending time talking to people who had been commissioners before. But to go back to the emotions, I was very excited about the victory. It was a lot of hard work, and of course, with [former commissioner chairman] Jon Eich not winning, I would have loved to have worked with Jon. But I realize the fact that voters wanted to take the county in a different direction, and they wanted a board to get things done and work together. So I took that to heart, and I reached out to [commissioners] Chris [Exarchos] and Steve [Dershem] and congratulated them and talked about what are we going to be doing for the next four years. I wanted to jump right in.

How do you see your role as the political minority on the board?

This is an experiment, in a way, in terms of how I’m approaching this. But I was tempted early on to come in here and say, “OK, they’re the Republicans, I’m the Democrat. Any position they take, I’m going to take the opposite view.” That’s how it happens in Washington, and that’s how it happens in Harrisburg and throughout the country in other state capitals. And I said, “You know what, the fresh perspective, what does that actually mean? Does it mean I’m just going to be knocking everything they say?” And I took it to heart and said it’s not going be about that. It’s really going to be about:What’s the best decision, what’s the right thing for the citizens? Looking through problems in those lens, it’s surprising to see how many times we’re going to agree. ... But there already have been things that we’ve talked about, going forward, especially with Marcellus Shale [natural gas drilling].We’re going to have a very defined debate about that.With the 911 [new communication system] project, we’re on board with the consultant we want to go with, but I think there will be discussions about the cost/benefit analysis of how much we’re going to spend versus how much of the county is this system going to cover.

How would you like to be remembered as a commissioner?

Well, the one thing I’ve done, and I’ll be doing it throughout the four years, or however long I serve as commissioner, I’m spending a day in another county employee’s shoes.What I did on Tuesday was I went to the transportation department and rode around with a driver named Eric for about four hours, just to sort of see what it’s like to be someone in the transportation department. There about 900 employees in the county, so I don’t know if I’m going to get to all 900 of them. ... But I’d like to be remembered at the end of the day: He didn’t just sit down at the budget and it was just numbers, and he didn’t just care about the bottom line. He actually cared about the lives he was affecting.

Commissioners ... typically, it’s folks who spend their lives in business, then they serve as commissioners. I’m sort of starting in on the front end of the spectrum, where I helped manage a restaurant for about two years. But in terms of having a 30-year experience, I don’t have that. So I’m really focused on the human impact of how we direct our money.We have an $80 million budget; a lot of that is specifically placed in certain departments.We don’t have a lot of flexibility with it, but some of the money we have we can direct it to certain projects.We can make sure the fuel bank in Centre County has fuel that they can give to folks who might not be able to pay for their energy costs.We might be able to direct some money to a program that helps people get a home loan ... make sure the food bank has enough resources. ... That’s how I would like to be remembered. He helped people.

What’s one thing your friends know about you that others might not?

... One of my passions is music. I can’t play an instrument or sing or anything like that. But I’m a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. If I go to a concert, if I hear him on the radio, I just get taken over by Bruce fever. It’s something that comes over me. So I don’t play any Bruce at the office, I don’t play any in the car, because I would be rocking out.