People in fact did come to know Dave Brat and that’s why he’s the former rather than sitting representative for Virginia’s seventh congressional district. His meteoric ascent and equally spectacular flameout can be read as a prefiguration of Trumpian politics, an instance of a local political dynamic with national implications.
Some context is useful. From 2003 – when The Better Half and I moved into our house – until 2017, we voted in Virginia’s third congressional district and our congressman was Bobby Scott. We met him in 2010 at a house party held down the street in support of his reelection. He was glum. He had taken the “hard vote” – Barack Obama’s characterization – to pass the Affordable Care Act and knew that the Democrats’ majority was endangered. He survived, but Democratic control didn’t in a political slaughter of the innocents, a purge of Democrats who’d done the right thing. Some commentators equated it with the 1994 midterm election when Democrats who had backed Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase were decimated. Court-ordered redistricting in 2016 to correct racially motivated gerrymandering placed us in the fourth congressional district. Donald McEachin became our congressman. We’ve been well satisfied with our representation.
More to the point, our district borders on Virginia’s seventh congressional district. In 2000, just before our arrival in Richmond, Eric Cantor replaced the seat’s retiring twenty-year Republican incumbent. In short, he grabbed a safe GOP seat. A stroll westward from our house soon crosses the boundary between the fourth and seventh districts. Proximity to Mr. Cantor’s Republican bastion led to a peculiar phenomenon in my neighborhood, wannabe Cantor voters, people with Cantor yard signs despite inability to pull the lever for him. One can always dream I suppose. It’s not difficult to imagine what sort of people these are.
Mr. Cantor was reelected repeatedly by comfortable margins. The Democrats fielded opponents, mostly sacrificial victims. An intriguing effort to unseat him came in 2002. Ben Jones, formerly “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard and onetime US congressman from Georgia (1989-93), threw his hat into the ring. The theory likely was that a “yellow dog” Democrat had the best odds of chasing Mr. Cantor. It didn’t work; however, the margins narrowed a bit in Mr. Cantor’s later races.
In 2014, Mr. Cantor faced a primary opponent, Dave Brat, an economics professor at Randolph Macon College, a liberal arts school in Ashland, Virginia. Mr. Cantor must have sensed that Mr. Brat spelled trouble for him. An anecdote illustrates this. My Beloved and I live not far from the Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral, sponsor of a twice-yearly Greek festival. We usually attend it, mostly for the food. Mr. Cantor had released a pack of tee-shirted, well-scrubbed young minions, a Cantor teen brigade, to circulate through the crowd and encourage people to vote for him in the primary. I think they were giving away Cantor tchotchkes (no interest here, except for fashioning effigies). Mr. Cantor, needing to exert himself, was pressing the flesh in an unlikely locale. The majority of the festival’s attendees probably lived outside his district and he was blocks from Carytown, Richmond’s answer to Greenwich Village, the antithesis of a GOP stronghold.
Mr. Cantor’s concerns were not unfounded. Mr. Brat accomplished what no Democratic general election opponent had. Upon his defeat, Mr. Cantor resigned before the expiry of his term and made himself available to the Right Wing Lobbying Industrial Complex, ever the statesman.
How did Mr. Brat do it? He centered his campaign on immigration, channeled the Tea Party scorn for government bailouts and taxation, wrapped himself in the flag, and waved the scriptures around. He demonstrated that there was a vein of political angst to be mined. His Crassness exploited some of these same themes in 2015-16. When Melania’s Enduring Curse was installed in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Mr. Brat found his tribe and displayed a Trumpian taste for conspiracy-theory lunacy and dissembling. He lost his seat in 2018 to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. That his post-congressional gig is the Deanship of the School of Business at Liberty University should surprise no one. How better can Mammon and the Deity be served simultaneously?
In January 2018, before Mr. Brat’s loss to Ms. Spanberger, The Richmond Times-Dispatch published an op-ed by him in which he extolled his adherence to principle. It was too much to stomach. A response was sent to the paper. I was correspondent of the day again. Hip, Hip, Hurray. An attack isn’t ad hominem if it’s true.
Dave Brat, “Put Principles over Politics and Personality,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 28 January 2018, E5 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/rep-dave-brat-put-principles-over-politics-and-personality/article_3d415539-7961-5784-8c5a-82f4f79015f7.html).
“Brat Should Hold Off on Self-Congratulation,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 February 2018, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-feb-12-2018-brat-should-hold-off-on-self-congratulations/article_07f9a4d2-6ac7-5075-bdc1-959a64892110.html).
The letter submitted to The Richmond Times-Dispatch exceeded the word limit and the paper dropped its penultimate paragraph. Here’s what was in the original:
“Brat’s commitment to rule of law will perhaps be tested by the ‘memo’ being brandished by Representative Devin Nunes, the indifferently recused chair of the House Intelligence Committee. This committee has authorized the document’s release while suppressing a minority response. The committee, furthermore, ignores pleas from the Justice Department to vet Nunes’ handiwork, reportedly a farrago of distortions and half-truths, for classified materials. Why does the GOP engage in serial conspiracy-mongering rather than facilitating the Special Counsel’s work? Absent straw, Mueller will make no bricks.”