American Underdog

chapter one

VICTORY, OR AT LEAST A START

My political candidacy was never merely an antiestablishment rebellion, though it was that, too.

My unexpected victory in the 2014 Republican primary for US Representative for Virginia's Seventh District shocked the press and the political establishment. I defeated then–House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who had been talked about as a possible successor to Ohio's John Boehner as Speaker of the House. We now know that Boehner has acknowledged that Cantor was in line to be Speaker.¹ As the press made clear after the victory, no one in US history had ever defeated a sitting majority leader.² In truth, if I had completely thought through all the implications of this victory, I might have had more than second thoughts, but it all worked out, and there is something to the saying "Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof."

The Associated Press called the victory "stunning."³ The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza tweeted, "This Cantor loss is seismically large. Can't remember when I have been so surprised."⁴ "Holy crap," said BuzzFeed and many others.⁵ The Hill reported that "being Cantored" became a term used on Capitol Hill by members and staffers fearful of primary defeats by more conservative candidates.⁶

The Need for a Political Change

A few months earlier, when I was deciding whether to run, I had been reading books that included Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner and David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, both reminders that old, predictable patterns in politics and economics don't always hold. In my stump speeches, I told people that in many ways Gladwell's book illustrated that true power is not always what it appears to be. Some people who appear to have tremendous strength in one area have weaknesses in other areas. In politics, I believe that true power derives from the people, and if you really believe that, other typical power sources such as campaign funding and negative advertising may not mean as much. At least, that was my bet. For most of the campaign, I put a sign on the door of my study that read, "The things which are impossible with men are possible with God" (Luke 18:27). Boy, did I see that play out on almost a daily basis. Everyone said I was crazy, it couldn't be done, and there was no possible way on earth I could win.

The comedian Stephen Colbert poked fun at my giving thanks to God for my victory, saying sarcastically, "Yes, Brat's victory was a miracle from God."⁷ As usual, the media like to read arrogance into expressions of faith, but they're really statements of humility and frank amazement.

People attempted to dissect my statement and give an account of how the miracle could have happened. You can tell some convincing stories, but in the end it was still a miracle. No one quite understood where it came from. In this book I'll try to explain what led up to it all, but it's not a story that starts a few months before the primary election day. It starts more than two thousand years earlier.

In the afternoons, after half a day of working on the campaign, I would usually take a short break to reflect. I would look up into the sky and say something like a little prayer: "This burden's way too big for me to handle. I need some help. Lighten my load." Over the weeks that ensued, the strength I needed seemed to come in a variety of forms while the political forces arrayed against me showed their moral weaknesses. I always remembered God telling others to stand back and watch the mighty arm of God. And then friends from across the district told me they were praying. Many, many prayed. I had never known that this spiritual force existed in such a powerful way. But it was not just ethereal. It took shape in the politics of Virginia.

For instance, I benefited from growing awareness among Virginia voters about an underhanded technical procedure called "slating" that allowed the state political machine to stop conservative voters from choosing their own district and regional party leaders across Virginia.⁸ We were told that in one instance of slating about 900 people showed up in Virginia Beach to a meeting they considered to be part of the democratic process only, but the party higher-ups sent about 870 folks home. It's a technical rule meant to allow Republicans to send interloper Democrats packing, but no one ever imagined that Republicans would send fellow Republicans home.⁹ This type of machine politics is one of the main reasons I ran. Powerful elites want to ensure control of business and government contracts, and the surest way to do that is to get their own yes-men into the inner circles of government.

Despite the outrage over slating in Virginia Beach, the machine pressed on, eventually landing in Henrico County. Angry at the political process and how it was manipulated, the grass roots came out in full force, their patriotic fervor energizing the entire region to show up and block the plans to slate candidates in my own county. Due to those citizens' hard work, slating did not occur in my county, Eric Cantor's home county, even though the machine had succeeded in using the tactic elsewhere around the state.¹⁰

A few weeks before my win on June 10, there was a Seventh District committee meeting to determine the chairman for the district. The grass roots ran its candidate against Eric Cantor's point man. The room was packed with hundreds of people, which rarely occurs. It showed the fever pitch of the passion for restoring good government in our area. Yet although I was running for office, this was also the meeting in which I was told I was not allowed to speak and the meeting organizers would not give our side a copy of the rules, which they manipulated at every step. Shortly after the meeting began, they invited the Senate candidates to speak but then quickly moved on to the next item on the agenda. Toward the end of the meeting, someone finally tracked down a copy of the rules stating that each candidate was permitted to speak for five minutes.¹¹

During Eric Cantor's speech, the crowd booed, which was a bit embarrassing for our side. The national press left out the entire context of the statewide manipulation of rules and the attempt to steal elections from the American people, not just from me.¹² Booing may not be polite, but in my view it was done only in response to those major grievances. In fact, the booing was loudest when Cantor repeated his negative claims, such as calling me a "liberal professor." Ironically, though the press was critical of the booing directed at Cantor, it somehow failed to notice that the very negative five-million-dollar ad campaign¹³ he directed against me featured a cartoon of a crowd booing me.

The establishment gets away with all sorts of things outsiders do not.

The Political Elite

This is just one of the instances in our story when the usual right/left lines matter less than the division between the establishment and the rest of us.

If you study the budget process in the US Congress, you will find that the left and the right are not represented much in any final deal. Instead, the true action is in the middle. That is where you will find the money. The leadership on both sides arrange for the old Christmas budget surprise. It hijacks the budget out of committee and throws in all the toys it wants, and a $4 trillion budget emerges that blows the caps, increases the deficit by half a trillion dollars, and supports every special interest known to man. The votes lately have been very bipartisan. The press never makes this clear because that story is not so dramatic. It is just true.

The political establishment in both parties has also failed to address voters' worries about illegal immigration, the refugee crisis, and the open southern border. The linkage between these issues and national security/terrorism is by far the number one issue in the presidential election this year as well. The candidates who are listening to "We the People" are winning in the polls. I listened two years back, and immigration was already resonating then. The working person is not happy with the lower wages and constant pressure created by elites' importing more cheap labor from abroad. That wasn't the sole reason for my victory, but the immigration issue is emblematic of the divide between establishment and populace. I think most folks are with me in my position against illegal immigration. Conservative media personalities, including Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and regional radio hosts, weighed in to support me in part because of that issue. The Chamber of Commerce and some of the corporate heavyweights want cheap labor, but they don't want to pay the full cost of inviting millions of newcomers into our country. It's pretty simple: if you have a person who immigrates and makes $20,000 a year and pays very little in taxes but has two kids in the public schools, the cost to the taxpayer is $26,000. Business gets cheap labor, and the rest of us get that $26,000 bill.

Try running that by the voters someday and see how they react. Teaching people about this issue resonated with residents in the Seventh District of Virginia and resulted in a new political awareness that eventually became one of the leading political issues in the presidential campaigns of 2016. There are good reasons voters in both parties felt they needed to turn to "outsider" candidates: the insiders weren't listening.

After I won my election and news stories came out about it, we learned there were a lot of other candidates who had tried to run on similar ideas but had not been met with the same success. The force stopping them was one of the main reasons I ran for office: the major corruption at all levels of government. Major political machines keep people from getting involved even in their county breakfast meetings. You may want to run for school board, but if you're not the right well-connected person, you are told you can't run. Then if you decide to run for state delegate or state senate or higher office, it is hard to get equipped. It becomes even more of a miracle story selecting these folks than getting me elected, though they may be highly qualified, patriotic Americans.

At this point, I want to thank all the folks in the grass roots of Virginia who aided our great win. Many, many wonderful people have spent years sacrificing for such a win. Some gave up wealth, time, and family; others ran for office themselves but did not get the win. But they all laid the foundation for change in Virginia, and many of our ideas are now spreading across the nation at the highest levels. This book is dedicated to the volunteers who worked for me but really worked for the greatest political experiment on earth, the United States of America. Without them, my own piece would count for little. In fact, I had run earlier and smacked into a brick wall.

I ran for office four years prior to winning my seat, so I was not a complete novice. Unfortunately, that race, for the House of Delegates in Virginia, was manipulated in every way possible. I saw there was no way for me to go through the regular political process in my region and expect any kind of fair outcome. I noticed Washington setting the tone for machine politics and cronyism at the state and local levels, so the problem at the top had to be solved. I started thinking about challenging Eric Cantor because his team was orchestrating much of the political nonsense in my region.

The political process is manipulated to achieve certain ends for favored people, the special interests. Instead of focusing on the interests of the American people and the needs of his Seventh District constituents, I think Cantor had grown detached. My campaign highlighted those differences by focusing on the Republican Creed and noting that there is no problem with it; the problem is that the political machine and the political elites don't follow any part of it.

Everyone always liked good old Dave, as long as I was teaching their kids and sticking to economics and ethics. But when I actually started to run on a platform of free markets and holding others accountable in public, I quickly learned that everyone is in favor of free markets in general but not for his own business.

"Are you nuts, Dave? Do you know what would happen to our firm if we lost the special protections we have and the subsidies we get from the taxpayer?"

"Dave, you understand, don't you? I have to do what's right for my firm. In fact, that is the ethical thing to do. I have a fiduciary responsibility to fleece the taxpayer to protect my shareholder."

If this pattern becomes the rule instead of the corrupt exception, our country is gone. Really.

I had never been interested in political power for its own sake. I would have been very happy doing economics at the state level or helping federal candidates behind the scenes because I felt it was my duty to educate people about some of the problems we face. I ran for office only when I saw the corruption of the political machines and felt something had to be done about it.

My decision to run for office later in life was not only practical but tied to deeper political wisdom. Plato, in The Republic, advised that one should enter politics at the age of fifty, likely close to the average age of death in 400 BC. Reason should rule, and younger folks are oftentimes tempted by the passions and what Plato called the "appetites." He and Saint Augustine both felt that going into politics is a serious undertaking, which should take place after the appetites of wine, women, and song have faded. Augustine laid out the normal progression from concern with appearances to money to power to politics and ultimately, hopefully, to faith in God. Aristotle would similarly counsel that the practical wisdom and prudence required for proper politics must come partly from experience. It is by no means a realm for book smarts. A life well lived requires discipline, training, and virtue in pursuit of excellence. True happiness results only if this path is followed. The Catholic vision articulated by Saint Thomas Aquinas more than a thousand years later would add the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.

A Grassroots Response

God works in mysterious ways, but in most cases God works through people. I could not have won without the support of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people toiling across all nine counties of my district (Culpeper, Orange, Spotsylvania, Louisa, Goochland, Chesterfield, Hanover, Henrico, and New Kent) and the city of Richmond. Many people made signs. Others spread the word through their organizations and e-mail lists. Some called in other regions of the state to knock on doors. I had superheroes in each county who knocked on thousands of doors for me. Thousands. (I found most of this out after our big win.)

I'm also grateful that among those supporters were my wife, Laura, my son, Jonathan (who said the night of my victory that he always thought I'd win—thanks, son), and my daughter, Sophia. My wife deserves the most credit of all. It is one thing for folks to take cheap shots at me. Within a day they fade away. But to have someone take a cheap shot at your spouse is even worse. Naturally, Laura went out of her way to make sure I was portrayed in a fair way. When folks used foul language anywhere near my campaign, she stepped in and clarified that I do not condone hate or negative campaigning. I had always advised my staff that every word we put down on paper and every word from every consultant or writer or blogger should convey who I am: a seminary graduate with a PhD in economics and someone who tries to love everyone I meet. Any messaging should follow those rules.

Others who helped me, though, died long before I arrived on the scene. Our region of the state was home to American Revolution leaders Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, among others. I'd like to think that the supporters of my campaign were carrying on those revolutionaries' work.

If you want a down-to-earth view of the miracle that was that congressional campaign, look at the way the people of the Seventh District responded to the campaign. In many ways they were ahead of the rest of the country, the first wave of a rediscovery of our founding principles: the importance of the Constitution and equal treatment under the law for all people (not just the special people), as well as the necessity for fiscal restraint and the free-market system.