A Long Shot So Long, the Tea Party Took a Pass
A Long Shot So Long, the Tea Party Took a Pass
David Brat Waged Solo Fight Against Eric Cantor
By DAVID S. JOACHIM JUNE 11, 2014
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Dave Brat addressed supporters after defeating House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in the Virginia Republican primary on Tuesday.CreditP. Kevin Morley/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — David Brat, the man who derailed Representative Eric Cantor’s congressional career and aspirations to become speaker of the House, faced such long odds in his challenge to the No. 2 House Republican that he failed to win the backing of any of the major Tea Party groups that inspired his candidacy.
“I met with all of them,” Mr. Brat said in a February interview with
The New York Times. “But it’s tough. Everybody just wants to see the polls, how much money you’ve raised. But they do not know what’s going on on the ground.”
His relative anonymity outside Henrico, the swing-voting Virginia county that encompasses the suburbs north of Richmond, probably contributed to the difficulty Mr. Brat had in rounding up conservative support despite meeting with powerful groups and donors to try to persuade them that he was worth the investment.
Despite running a decidedly anti-establishment campaign in which he criticized government bailouts and budget deals and frequently invoked God and the Constitution, Mr. Brat was unable to secure the endorsement of Tea Party groups with national networks, a sign of how under the radar his candidacy was. With FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots all staying out of the race, Mr. Brat raised just over $200,000.
Mr. Brat’s positions are sure to get more attention as he heads into the general election against the Democratic nominee, Jack Trammell, who, like Mr. Brat, is a professor at Randolph-Macon College, a small liberal arts school in Ashland, Va.
For example, in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday morning Mr. Brat was questioned about his position on the federal minimum wage.
“I’m a free-market guy,” he told the interviewer, Chuck Todd. “Our labor markets right now are already distorted from too many regulations.”
But when Mr. Todd asked pointedly whether that meant he opposed a minimum wage, he hesitated. “Um, um, um, I don’t have a well-crafted response on that one.”
An academic with degrees in economics and divinity, Mr. Brat, 49, teaches economics and ethics at Randolph-Macon College. Before he began making rumblings about challenging Mr. Cantor as early as 2011, his political activity was confined to local races.
Even before then, Mr. Brat, who is chairman of Randolph-Macon’s economics and business departments, offered hints in interviews and academic research of how his academic work intersected with his politics.
In an interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2010, he said that free markets were the answer to many of the world’s social ills.
“Economic growth is important,” he said. “Without economic growth, the entire world was trapped at incomes of $500 per year until about 1800. Today, the average American worker is closer to $50,000.”
In the same interview, he said, “The latest in economic research shows that ethical ideas may matter just as much as traditional economic variables in generating long-run economic growth.”
Mr. Brat, who has a Ph.D in economics from American University in Washington and a master’s degree in divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary, has also published research with titles like “Adam Smith’s God and the End of Economics” and “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations of Ayn Rand.”
He and his wife, Laura, have two children, ages 15 and 11, according to his campaign biography.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/us...r.html?hp&_r=0
