By Walter Shapiro
from Politics Daily
BEDFORD, Virginia – Normally when a freshman congressman makes an appearance at a middle school to deliver innocuous remarks in honor of Veterans Day, the local police do not send out a protective cordon. But here in southern Virginia, 35-year-old Democrat Tom Perriello has been a target of conservative protesters for months -- and that was before he cast one of the deciding votes Saturday night in favor of health care reform.
Wednesday, though, the Bedford police over-reacted, since a driving rain and a patriotic holiday kept the demonstrators down to a handful. In fact, by the end of the ceremonies at Bedford Middle School, the anti-Perriello contingent had dwindled to just Chris Ashman (whose bedraggled sign read, "We Wanted Liberty and You Gave Us Tyranny") and his wife, Nicole ("Abortion Is Murder – And I Am Not Paying for It").
Later, during this veterans-themed day in this military-minded district, Perriello sat fiddling with his BlackBerry in a borrowed office at the local National Guard Armory and tried to explain his high-wire brand of politics. "If you're risk averse, politics shouldn't be the field for you," said the Yale-trained lawyer, who had assisted in war crimes tribunals in Sierra Leone before he defeated a six-term Republican incumbent by 727 votes in 2008. "I think this is a weird job where you have to care enough about public service to put up with a fair amount of misery, and still not care about this particular job so much that you're afraid of losing it."
Alone among freshman House Democrats from districts that John McCain carried in 2008, Perriello has voted for the president's stimulus package, the cap-and-trade climate change bill and now health care reform. That is Perriello's hat trick -- three white-knuckle votes in a Republican-leaning district that GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell just carried with 61 percent of the vote.
"You have members who take a finger-to-the-wind approach," said Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat in charge of re-electing his House colleagues as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "That's not Tom Perriello. But Tom also understands the political realities." It is that last pragmatic quality -- along with his voting record -- that has endeared Perriello to the Democratic House leadership. For this bright and intense freshman (who gets by on four or five hours sleep counting catnaps) is trying to test the theory that breakneck campaigning and nonstop town meetings can sell the Democratic policy agenda in this unlikely district.
"People in this district are busting their backs to find a job or two to support their families," said Perriello, who grew up the son of a pediatrician in the affluent area of the district dominated by the University of Virginia. "They want someone who has the honor of representing them in Congress to be working at least that hard for them. I think that the one thing that people in this district agree on is that I work harder than anyone they know in public life."
National Republicans have targeted Perriello, and the leading contender for the 2010 GOP nomination is state Sen. Robert Hurt. But Hurt flunked an important conservative litmus test in 2004 by voting for a $1.4 billion state tax increase to balance the budget. Still, even a divisive Republican primary may not be enough to save Perriello. As Glen Bolger, who was McDonnell's pollster in the recent gubernatorial race, put it, "When you constantly give the middle finger to your voters, as Perriello has, it's very hard to get re-elected in Southside Virginia."
The compact, brown-haired Perriello, who in a dark suit and a white shirt comes across as older than his years, constantly wrestles with the impulse to be more candid and more quotable than might be politically advisable. Several times during our 35 minute interview, Perriello started down a provocative road and then pulled himself up short.
In the midst of a discussion of the health care fight, Perriello suddenly declared, "As bad as the Democrats are at communicating -- and I've never been part of any organization in my life that is as bad as communicating as the Democratic Party." A moment later, the freshman legislator explained the source of his ire at the party that had nurtured him: "We've been able to take two issues that 70 percent of Americans support -- energy independence and health care reform -- and turn them into short-term political liabilities, even though I think they'll be long-term political assets."
In my most non-threatening tone, I asked Perriello who deserved the blame -- the White House, the congressional leadership or the Democrats' leading campaign consultants? "I would certainly point a finger at the consultant community," Perriello replied, but then the congressman's internal gyroscope belatedly kicked in and he cautiously added, "It's a longer conversation, and I don't want to go off half-cocked about it."
Despite his high-profile votes with the Democratic leadership, Perriello sometimes sounds like he is single-handedly trying to forge a new ideology for thirty-something politicians. "We're a generation of transformational pragmatists," he said, using an expression unlikely to fit on bumper stickers. "We really don't like how things are, things like how America is losing its competitive advantage. But we're very pragmatic about how we want to fix it, which is market based. If you look at the health care bill, it's not single payer. The same with energy independence, it was not a new command-and-control system."
Watching this intriguing first term congressman for a day in small-town southern Virginia, I vacillated between two wildly conflicting theories. Tom Perriello is either the most self-confident naïf in Congress or else this young man in a hurry is one of the cleverest under-40 politicians in the Democratic Party. And as daunting as this congressional district is for a Democrat, Perriello might be something more than just a flashy meteor darting across the sky before exploding after two years.
