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Comment on this article The Virginia Experiment When the Danville Tea Party Patriots from southern Virginia joined hundreds of other activists on Capitol Hill last November 5 to protest health care reform, their congressman, Tom Perriello ’96, ’01JD, met with 30 of them in his office. Other Virginia politicians sent staffers to hear the Danville Tea Party’s grievances. Some high-profile Republicans, like John McCain, had no time for them. Perriello’s staff was the friendliest, Danville Tea Party chair Nigel Coleman said later. Perriello isn’t a Tea Party ally. He’s a target. Perriello, a Democrat, had bested entrenched Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in Virginia’s deeply conservative Fifth District by 727 votes in 2008—the narrowest of all congressional victories that year. Most of the people who are now Tea Party members didn’t vote for him. Still, Perriello talked with Tea Partiers almost every day last August, when he held 21 town hall meetings in a bid to explain his thinking about health care reform and understand constituents’ concerns. He spent much of every five-hour meeting being berated. On that November afternoon, standing behind his desk in an office crammed with people, Perriello chose once more to listen. “How many people have to shout at you and how many people have to say, ‘Please don’t do this’ before you listen?” asked an older woman in rectangular sunglasses and sweatshirt with a Revolutionary War patriot on it. Perriello began, “As you can imagine, I have lots of people saying the opposite and lots in the middle—” The shouting drowned him out. “Go ahead,” he said. “I can just listen.” Then he tried again: “I’ve said all along that I’m a no”—on the health care reform bill—“trying to get to yes. I try to be really up-front with folks about where I am on things.” The activists buzzed loudly, and he relented again and just listened. One young woman asked, “Do you believe it will benefit Virginia?” Before Perriello could answer, another woman said, “It doesn’t matter.” Perriello explained briefly that though the bill was flawed, he had moved from no to undecided. He approved of the $300 billion cut from earlier versions of the House bill and of the increases in compensation to rural hospitals, which serve many in the Fifth District. Mostly, Perriello, nodding and listening, let the crowd vent. For many of the visitors, his nodding signaled agreement. Coleman and others left feeling that they had convinced Perriello to vote against the reform bill. Two days later, on November 7, watching the voting from home, they were heartened that Perriello still asked questions and that he was among the last to vote. But he voted yes. The Danville Tea Party activists got angry. Most had taken time off work and driven 12 hours round-trip to Washington to plead with Perriello, and yet he’d voted his own way. It was a “point of no return,” Coleman said later. And the Danville Tea Party decided to burn their congressman in effigy. Perriello, who grew up in the Fifth, isn’t the only congressman to rile constituents this heated political season. But when he decided to run for office, he brought a brand of politics so unusual that it has made the Fifth District the site of an interesting electoral experiment. As a whole, the Fifth District is “about five points more Republican than the national average,” says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Most Democrats who represent districts as conservative as the Fifth identify as “Blue Dogs” to bolster their reelection chances. Glenn Nye, a freshman from the Second District, is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition and voted against health care reform. Perriello, a local journalist has said, acts like he doesn’t care whether he’s reelected. It would be truer to say he isn’t about to change in order to be reelected. He ran on a strategy of “conviction politics”—the notion that if voters knew where he stood and he worked hard for them, they would elect him even if they didn’t agree with him on everything. Margaret Thatcher and the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone have been called conviction politicians. “We have a cookie-cutter politics, and there aren’t many outliers, so there aren’t many examples to follow,” Perriello says. “Conventionally, people look at only the binary: you win or lose an election. But you can make a positive impact on people’s lives through another kind of politics. You can leave politics with your head held high if you’ve done the best you could.” He quickly adds: “That may sound Pollyannaish.” During his tenure, Perriello, 35, hasn’t veered substantially from his 2008 campaign agenda. He argued forcefully for health care reform, calling the American health care system a “travesty” in one debate. He voted for the House cap-and-trade bill on climate, partly because he believes it will bring jobs to communities in his district that had double-digit unemployment even before this recession. He voted for the stimulus plan. Against a backdrop of rising conservative rage and a Democratic party in retreat, Perriello himself is now the outlier. “He is different from other politicians, and to me, that is part of his strength, and it’s also a weakness,” says a prominent businessman from Perriello’s district, who asked not to be identified because he doesn’t want to be seen as taking sides in the upcoming election. “It’s a strength because we need more people like that in Congress—someone who works hard, focuses on the issues, listens—the kind of thinking person you would like to have in there. It’s a weakness in that he’s not willing to do the political things needed to get reelected.” Perriello’s critics see arrogance in a congressman who gives his own convictions greater weight than the wishes of his constituents. Although the members of the Danville Tea Party ultimately decided not to burn him in effigy, it was a tactical decision. They’re still angry—even more so now that the health care bill has passed—and so are many other conservatives. Says Tucker Watkins, head of the Fifth District GOP: “His conscience is very different from the views of people in this district.” Perriello’s calculation seems to be that if he’s highly accessible and brings jobs and other improvements, voters will reelect him. Even many of Perriello’s critics give him grudging respect for sticking to his principles. But given how ideologically polarized the country is, they—and some political analysts—consider his stance a grand act of political suicide. “This is don’t-try-this-at-home politics,” says Isaac Wood, House race editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “It worked for Tom Perriello once, but he hadn’t cast the votes yet. Once he casts the votes, we’ll see if this can work again. What’s going to make this a story for the ages or not is what will happen in 2010. If he wins, he really has shown a new way that conviction politics is possible. If he loses, he’s just another congressman who voted against the wishes of his district and paid the price.” Perriello’s district covers about 9,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of New Jersey in a jagged triangle that runs from Charlottesville in the north down to a stretch along the North Carolina border known as Southside. More densely populated areas like Charlottesville are politically moderate. Rural Southside is poorer and more conservative. With its tobacco farms, furniture factories, and textile mills, Southside was once Virginia’s economic engine. But those businesses have withered over the decades as manufacturing jobs, in particular, shifted overseas. In Danville, where Dan River Mills once made fabric, sheets, and towels, unemployment was considerably higher than the national average even before the recession. Nearby Martinsville is a requisite campaign stop for candidates promising economic renewal, including Barack Obama. In January, the unemployment rate in Martinsville was 22 percent, more than double the national rate. It would be easy to say (and many do) that Tom Perriello rode into office on Obama’s coattails. But although Obama’s candidacy brought out large numbers of young people and blacks in the Fifth, he lost the district to John McCain. Perriello isn’t beholden to the president or the Democratic machine for his victory. That gives him the room to act independently of, and speak bluntly about, both political parties. A compact former wrestler who operates on caffeine, Baby Ruth bars, and not much sleep, Perriello feels as frustrated as many of his most conservative constituents. Like them, he turned to activism out of abiding anger at politicians who appear self-serving and ineffective. Like them, he’s deeply troubled by the dearth of economic opportunity in the Fifth and the wealth of despair. He and the Tea Party share a sense of urgency and a certain fervor. Perriello, says his friend Sharanjeet Parmar, is the kind of guy who’d go up to a colleague having a smoke and tell him, “For that pack of cigarettes, you can buy malaria medicine for a family.” She adds, “He’s on all the time.” Where Perriello and his conservative constituents diverge is over the root of the problems. “The Tea Party believes capitalism is under threat and that government is taking over the private sector,” Perriello told the editorial board of the Lynchburg News & Advance. “I think that the largest elements of the private sector have taken over the government and they’re interested in protecting the status quo.” Perriello has become more pointed in his criticism of Republicans and Democrats alike. He told the New Yorker he was considering writing an op-ed calling for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s resignation. He says he found the congressional Republicans’ resistance, in early 2009, to nearly all Democratic efforts to avoid a depression “unpatriotic and immoral.” He recently told the online magazine Grist that he is “sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk.” Perriello voted for the stimulus plan, health care reform, and the cap-and-trade bill. He voted against the second tranche of the bank bailout, the Obama budget, and a handful of other Democratic initiatives. He supports unions, which angers conservatives, and he voted for the 2009 Stupak anti-abortion amendment to the House health care bill, which angered liberals. Almost every weekend, Perriello travels the Fifth in his white Ford truck, talking to constituents and politicians. An Eagle Scout, he is invariably polite to constituents. He spends a lot of time making his case. It isn’t always what people want to hear. On one unseasonably warm winter morning, Perriello drove his pickup, its fuel gauge warning light on all the way, to the Blackwater Valley dairy farm in the southwest flank of the district. He had gotten emergency federal funds released in late 2009 to local farmers hit by the downturn, and the meeting with about 25 of them was something of a photo op. But the farmers were worried, and the talk turned fast to legislation. Virginia’s economy is still heavily reliant on timber and agriculture, Perriello often points out, and he’d like to figure out what people can grow and do to prosper. His vision for the Fifth District has fallow land sprouting grasses for biofuel; new, green industries arriving; and livestock manure being turned into fuel for electricity. He explains his vote for the House cap-and-trade bill as a way to make these things happen, but Republicans have run many ads in the district painting the bill as a crippling tax on the middle class. This particular morning, some farmers criticized his vote, certain the bill would drive up already-high utility bills. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to prove you wrong,” Perriello said, pushing his hands deep in his chino pockets and nudging the soft earth with his toe, a gesture at once diffident and stubborn. “Done right, this is a huge new opportunity and revenue stream for farmers.” Van Flora, 51, spoke up in the stiffening wind. “How is cap-and-trade going to help me as a dairy farmer milking 80 cows? How is it going to help me when my electricity bill is already going up?” Flora had started his farm from scratch. He took out $60,000 last year just to keep it afloat, and he fears it will be sold or closed down because of financial pressures. His voice began to tremble. “I have a 20-year-old son who’s always said that all he ever wanted to do is farm. But after last year, he doesn’t want to go into farming anymore.” To survive, farms need to change, Perriello answered. The first manure digesters for producing fuel are in place in the district, and land could be used for biofuel crops or wind power. His goal is for farmers to produce enough power that they’ll have no electricity bills at all. “I still think agriculture is going to get screwed by cap-and-trade,” said another farmer in a black fedora. “Agriculture is getting screwed right now,” Perriello told him. “Continuing to do what we’re doing is a losing strategy.” The Fifth District, many locals believe, was drawn as a Republican stronghold. The Wall Street Journal has listed Perriello among the incumbents Republicans consider most vulnerable in 2010. “He is one of the hardest-working freshmen, if not the most hardworking,” says Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. “But I’m highly skeptical that Tom Perriello can win a two-way race in 2010, unless the GOP candidate implodes.” Wasserman adds: “I should note that I’ve always been skeptical of his chances. When I first met him, he was an unpolished candidate who was trying to raise seed money. Ultimately, he ran a near-flawless campaign.” Wasserman wasn’t the only doubter when Perriello started. In late 2007, many Democrats in the Fifth tried to dissuade him from running. Goode was a six-term incumbent who had beaten his most successful previous Democratic rival by 19 percentage points, and all his other opponents had had the kind of business and military credentials that pundits thought would win over conservative voters. Perriello, who’d never run for elected office, had gone straight from law school to human rights work in Africa, Kosovo, and Afghanistan and later set up progressive political groups in the United States. Some Democratic consultants told Perriello he would need to pillory Goode in order to win, and he did air some negative ads. But he also ran a relentless ground game that got his message out to voters early, letting him define himself before Goode defined him. He made volunteering time to social causes a requirement for himself and campaign workers, a move both shrewd and sincere. As late as August 2008, Perriello trailed Goode by 30 points in the polls. But a series of strong debate performances pushed him higher, and he won endorsements from influential local papers, including some that had backed Goode in the past. Then, in mid-October, a local newspaper revealed that a gay coming-of-age film thanked Goode and his wife in the credits and that his press secretary had a role in the movie. Goode’s lead narrowed further. The day after the election, it was unclear who had won. Not until December 17, after a district-wide recount, was Perriello confirmed as the Fifth’s new congressman. Perriello says that he used to dismiss politics as a dirty business that did not produce results, but by 2007 had realized that it would be his best shot at changing policies for the benefit of regular people. “Too often, the Democrats offer neocon-lite, or a certain kind of realism that says, ‘We can’t do that much.’ And our times demanded more,” Perriello said, during a long drive through the dark countryside of his district one evening in early 2009. “I felt there was a false spectrum of right, left, and center in our country. I don’t think voters are centrists but independents. They’re not looking for right and left but right and wrong. I felt that the reason progressives weren’t arguing that was because they had lost their soul metaphorically. It was all about getting through the next election cycle and not about what is fundamentally wrong in our country.” Thomas Stuart Price Perriello was brought up in Ivy, Virginia, a small town outside Charlottesville. His father, Vito, the son of Italian immigrants who’d settled in West Virginia, was a well-known local pediatrician. His mother, Linda, a financial analyst, grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Ohio. The youngest of four children, Tom was raised in a house atop a hill in Ivy. His family is close-knit, and many of his family members got involved in his congressional race. (His mother handed out homemade chocolate chip cookies at campaign stops.) His father, to whom Perriello was very close, died of a stroke two months after Perriello was sworn in. He’s buried at the base of their backyard, under a tree, with a bench nearby. The family always thought politics would be part of Tom’s future, says his brother Bo. To this day, their mother still does not use paper towels because Tom went on an environmental kick when he was eight. His interest in the environment deepened when he became an Eagle Scout. At Yale, he majored in humanities with a focus in environmental studies. Over time, Perriello grew interested in human rights. Between his first and second year at the Law School, he went on an exchange program in Argentina run by Professor Owen Fiss, for whom he worked as a research assistant; the country was then dealing with the human rights abuses committed under military rule from 1976 to 1983. Fiss remembers him as irrepressible—someone who didn’t take no for an answer. After graduation, Perriello went to Sierra Leone to run a legal clinic at Fourah Bay College and teach classes. Mostly, he worked with civilians to figure out how to address past human rights abuses once international tribunals were set up. The civil war, a campaign marked by widespread mutilation, mass rape, and recruitment of child soldiers, was just dying down, and he also worked with a group investigating the needs and attitudes of ex-combatants. In 2002, Perriello went to work for the UN-mandated Special Court for Sierra Leone, eventually becoming special adviser to the prosecutor, David Crane. He developed an outreach program that took him and Crane to the remotest parts of the country, where they met with locals to tell them about the special courts. According to Perriello’s friend Parmar, a former Special Court lawyer, the outreach effort was instrumental in helping lawyers to find local people who would cooperate with the court as it prosecuted civil war leaders—most notably Charles Taylor of Liberia, who allegedly backed the rebels in Sierra Leone. Taylor was indicted in March 2003, eventually arrested in 2006, and is now being tried in The Hague for crimes against humanity. “You saw there the first example of a dictator being forced from power using international law backed by credible force,” Perriello says now. “The issue was legitimacy. It happened in 2003 versus what happened in Iraq with Saddam. If we had had legitimacy, then we could have gotten the region to take greater ownership of the situation.” In late 2003 he returned to the United States, looking to challenge the country’s foreign and domestic policy. The only people pushing back then against the status quo, Perriello says, were those in what he calls the progressive faith community. Faith is clearly one of the forces that drives him. “I grew up in a great Catholic community that spoke to so many different parts of my being,” Perriello said. “There’s a great intellectual part to it. A commitment to justice. I would feel complete and challenged at the same time. There was an idealism that the world could be better than it is.” That year, he worked with other young Catholics to form Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a group of laypeople focused on the church’s social justice tradition. He also helped in the creation of Faithful America, which gave progressive religious groups a platform to address issues like the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. (Faithful America is now part of Faith in Public Life.) He cofounded Res Publica, an “incubator for social entrepreneurship.” In the 2006 congressional elections, Perriello says, he saw the first signs of a new political culture in Democrat Jim Webb’s successful Virginia campaign for Senate. “The media tried to define Webb as a centrist politician, but he was a conviction politician. So he could be strident,” Perriello says. “He focused on grassroots and netroots. He was principled about donations and he put problem solving ahead of bipartisanship.” Now that he’s been in office for more than a year, Perriello’s frustrations with politics-as-usual haven’t abated. In March, he complained to the New Yorker that the Obama administration wasted a chance to make rapid, meaningful change. “We hear from the middle that we’ve lost, that ‘You guys are trying to do too much,’” he said in a more recent interview. “I actually think we’re not doing enough. The president needs a narrative to connect all the dots of health care, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He still has the space to do this.” Dan River Mills’s empty red brick factories stretch for acres in the Schoolfield part of Danville. The town that still has a neighborhood called “Millionaire’s Row” is now studded with dollar stores, check-cashing outfits, pawn shops, and white-washed store fronts. Nigel Coleman, the Tea Party chair, lives in a modest cottage in a working-class neighborhood across from the old mills. Trim and younger-looking than his 31 years, Coleman met me at his door dressed in a striped blue dress shirt. His house, which he shares with his brother, smelled of fresh cigarette smoke, and the History Channel played in a corner of the empty living room. Coleman comes across as measured and frank. He laughs with embarrassment over the threat to burn Perriello in effigy, pointing out that liberals had burned former president George W. Bush ’68 in effigy—and that he was taking a page from the protest tactics of the Revolutionary War. Coleman thinks Perriello won because he’s charismatic and “people wanted change at home, not just at the presidential level,” he said. Though local analysts and reporters say Perriello didn’t make himself out to be a conservative, Coleman said many voters saw him as a local version of Blue Dog Democrat Heath Shuler of North Carolina—perhaps because of Perriello’s independence and position on abortion, or perhaps out of that desperate desire for change. Coleman says the deal breaker for many voters was Perriello’s support of cap-and-trade. Coleman works a night shift at the Goodyear plant, one of Danville’s largest employers and a big energy user, and he worries that under cap-and-trade, the company will have to buy credits to offset its emissions. Goodyear won’t pass on the costs to consumers, he says. Instead, it might lay off workers in places like Danville. He doubts cap-and-trade will bring green jobs to replace any that might be lost. “Will those jobs materialize? When?” he says. “If it doesn’t pan out, politicians could lose their seats. But you lose your livelihood.” Coleman says he’s excited by the conservatism of the Republican primary candidates and he thinks he finally can vote for whom he wants, rather than the lesser of two evils. “We see ourselves as on the people’s side, fighting the establishment,” he says. “I’m going to vote my conscience. We want to shake up Washington.” It isn’t lost on Coleman that he and Perriello share some traits. “I kind of like that he runs like he doesn’t care about reelection,” he says. “At least he is who he is. He’ll vote his conscience. He’d make a good Tea Partier. If he wasn’t so liberal.” Perriello’s opponents appear to sense opportunity in the controversial positions he has staked out and the political shifts they’ve seen in other races. The new Republican governor of Virginia won the Fifth District by a huge margin in November. The passage of health care reform could continue to stir up conservative anger. The economy, which many analysts contend will be the most important factor in the race, remains terribly weak in the region. Still, there’s a chance for Perriello to win in November. Although he eschews money from corporate PACs and federal lobbyists, he had $1.4 million in his war chest in April, most from individuals and businesses. A recent poll showed him neck-and-neck with the potential Republican contenders, and things might swing his way if people feel some benefit from projects he has championed. Perriello can also point to improvements he’s helped bring to the Fifth. He secured federal stimulus money to avert widespread layoffs of teachers and police throughout the district and helped bring $10 million in stimulus grants to develop four biomass energy projects. His most visible victory may be the $28.9 million in stimulus funds to replace a Danville bridge that is a notorious bottleneck, and construction is set to begin in late spring. So far, conservative opinion in the Fifth is split among seven different candidates. State and national Republican leaders are backing Robert Hurt, a state senator. But several years ago, Hurt voted for a modest sales-tax increase proposed by then-governor Mark Warner, and Tea Party sympathizers cannot forgive him. They also resent the fact that the GOP leadership has apparently anointed Hurt before the primary—and they like the stances of the other contenders, a mix of local politicians and businesspeople, who are calling for slashing taxes and getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. The wild card in the race is Virgil Goode. Though he said last year he wouldn’t run again, the possibility is hardly out of the question. If Goode or another deep-dyed conservative runs as an independent in November, the resulting three-way race could split the Republican vote and send Perriello back to Washington. Tea Party members, so far, have said that they will vote their conscience rather than back a candidate they don’t like. The passage of the health care bill and of another law improving the student loan system, Perriello says, have made him hopeful again after the gloom he felt in January. At the same time, another wave of anger came at him from unhappy constituents. Right after the health care vote, a local Tea Party blogger published what he said was Perriello’s Charlottesville address and urged conservatives to “drop by” the house and tell Perriello of their displeasure face-to-face. The address was actually that of Perriello’s brother Bo, who returned home one day to find that his back porch was filled with the smell of gas. Someone had cut the propane line to the outdoor grill. Bo has four children under the age of nine, and many conservatives, including the state’s attorney general, have decried the posting of the address. (The blogger has since taken it down.) Perriello declines to say if he thought the blog post or the Tea Party was behind the vandalism. The FBI is investigating the incident. “This is the most miserable job I’ve ever loved—that’s one of the laugh lines I use,” he said over the phone in Washington the day after the incident, laughing tiredly himself. He stops laughing. “I didn’t ever imagine it would be a parade of roses.”
I am a devoted reader of the Yale Alumni Magazine and have been for about twenty years. Rarely do I write in to the magazine, however. But a letter from Eric M. Jensen ’63 published in the July/August 2010 issue caught my attention. I could not disagree more with his view that the Yale Alumni Magazine is not the place in which to discuss the situation in our government. If, that is, the reporting is reasonably objective, tries to present as many facts on both sides of the argument as possible, and doesn’t take a position on either the right or the left. And I believe that the magazine succeeded in this regard. Heaven knows there is a lack of constructive and productive political dialogue in our country today. This is one reason why politics has become so ideological and, at the same time, has ceased to serve the public interest. I am also very concerned that my fellow alumnus appears desirous to shut down the dialogue altogether, particularly if it doesn’t match his point of view. Has anyone woken up lately to realize that our country is in deep trouble? As Jonathan Hertz ’74 mentioned in his letter, “In many ways, our Congress seems broken.” This is reflective of a broader situation in which the vast majority of Americans are disempowered, voiceless, and victimized by a system that cares little for them.
The “Accidental” Congressman I read with amusement about “accidental” Congressman Tom Perillo ’96, ’01JD. If Democrat Perillo is a Blue Dog, his votes for the misnamed stimulus bill and the overblown health care takeover were not what independents and moderates would expect from a conscientious fence-sitter. Moreover, the health care bill that 60 percent of the American people oppose isn’t even the solution promised. It will increase, not decrease, medical costs. Voting for this trillion dollar plan at a time when the nation is experiencing record deficits is like buying a new Lexus the day after you lose your job. After his defeat next November, Perillo would do well to visit the bankrupt country of Greece to view first hand the after-effects of reckless government spending.
Conviction Politics Many of the insiders and Tea Party members Neela Banerjee quotes in “The Virginia Experiment” seem to think that Tom Perriello’s progressive conviction politics is what could drown him—when in fact it’s one of the main things keeping him afloat. Indeed, Democrats should heed the example of Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee for Virginia governor in 2009. Deeds ran against hard right conservative conviction politician Bob McDonnell and lost precisely because of his lack of convictions. Deeds’ strategy was that of most mainstream Democrats: under Republican attack from the right he ran to the center, leaving his former progressive beliefs in the dust. He said he would consider withdrawing Virginia from participating in a public option for health care (progressives’ favored plan), before slightly backtracking. He flip-flopped on camera on his support for tax increases, earning an all-too-easy attack ad from Republicans. And perhaps most famously, he ran ads in conservative southern Virginia touting his newfound opposition to energy and climate legislation (the issue that Banerjee cites as perhaps Perriello’s greatest liability). The result? Progessives were turned off and unmotivated and didn’t come out to the polls, while the Republican base was energized by a hard-right Republican. Independents, even if they didn’t agree with McDonnell’s far right ideology, were turned off by Deeds’ perpetual prevarication. It was one of the worst Democratic performances in Virginia history. Deeds lost the state by huge margins, and was defeated in Perriello’s Fifth District by a whopping 22 percent. There but for his conviction politics goes Tom Perriello. It’s going to be a tough year for Democrats across the country, but the principal reason Perriello has a fighting chance is exactly because he unwaveringly pursues his beliefs. It’s an important lesson for a White House and Democratic strategists still too often afraid to embrace Perriello’s brand of courageous and winning politics. The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and the author of the book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party.
More Perriellos, Please The article on Tom Perriello ’96, ’01JD, was terrific, and this topic is of utmost importance. In many ways, our Congress seems broken. We are in dire need of more legislators with integrity and a conscience like Mr. Perriello, and hopefully the voting public will come to their senses. I am incredibly frustrated with my own congressman in Pennsylvania who is hyperpartisan, obstructionist, and stubborn. These are very common attributes in Congress that prevent our government from dealing with the overwhelming problems that our country faces.
Leaning Towards Socialism? The article “The Virginia Experiment” raises some very basic questions. While at Yale Law School, did Perriello ever read the Constitution? The document isn’t mentioned throughout the article. Yet Mr. Perriello was elected to the House of Representatives where he presumedly took an oath of office (or perhaps he chose the “affirmation” option) in which he agreed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He must have known that the healthcare reform bill contained highly questionable dictates vis-à-vis the Constitution. The same could probably be said for the cap and trade energy bill. Reading the article, I became convinced that Mr. Perriello believes in the “living constitution” approach and leans toward a socialist government that can poke its nose into everyone’s business. I have long believed that Yale turned left following World War II and has never looked back. Too bad. Yale had a noble tradition with such stalwarts as Jonathan Edwards. It makes me wonder if the Tea Party enthusiasts, with their strong interest in restoring the Constitution, exist on the Yale campus.
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