The Washington Post reports on the newfound stardom of Joseph Cao, the GOP's newest congressman. Cao (pronounced "gow") scored a stunning 3-point victory over scandal-plagued William Jefferson on Saturday in Louisana's 2nd congressional district, the most Democratic district in the country. The Post notes that although Cao received very little attention--and even less money--from the GOP prior to his election, Minority Leader John Boehner issued a memo over the weekend declaring: "The future is Cao."
The GOP's gushing response to Cao's victory might reveal just how badly the party needed a win after November's drubbing, but Cao's amazing biography is surely doing more to fuel Cao-mania than GOP desperation. The American Specatator's Quin Hillyer profiled Cao a few weeks before the election:
Sit down and make yourself comfortable, because this is one of those stories you just won't want to miss. It's the kind of story for which this poor pen might not do justice. And it's the kind of story of which the world of politics needs more examples.
It's a story that effectively starts three days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, when eight-year-old Joseph Cao escaped South Vietnam with a brother and sister and eventually made his way to the United States, where he settled with his uncle. ... [He lived] in Indiana for four years, then resettled in Houston for high school, then earned a B.S. in physics in 1990 from Baylor University. Baylor is a Baptist university. But upon graduation, Cao joined the Jesuit order. For six years he remained a Jesuit -- novice, scholastic, regent -- while earning a graduate degree in philosophy from Fordham University, several times doing social (anti-poverty) work abroad (including in his native Vietnam) and then teaching philosophy at Loyola University of New Orleans.
But he was never ordained a priest. He had become interested in politics, and "religion and politics don't mix," he told me. Cao continued teaching philosophy at Loyola while attending Loyola's law school. (From physics to religion to philosophy to law -- quite the intellectual journey.) Along the line he married, and eventually fathered two children. He found that New Orleans East had a vibrant Vietnamese expatriate community boasting a nursery run by Vietnamese nuns and an active church. He set up a shingle as general-practice attorney. He was appointed in 2001 to the National Advisory Council for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He became a board member of a charter school, and a board member for a community development corporation that runs a medical clinic, a retirement center, and an urban farm.
Cao, who taught ethics at Loyola, told the New York Times that he'll be able to hold on to his seat in a heavily Democratic district because "I truly espouse Aristotle's definition of virtue: To walk in the middle line."
The Times also reported that "the central insight he appreciates from his philosophical masters, the Russian and French apostles of existentialism, is the rule for living that 'life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it.'" If this report from one local paper is any indication, Cao's appreciation of the absurd is holding up quite well following his victory:
"I'm hoping to get onto the Appropriations Committee and Ways and Means, " said Cao, listing two of the most powerful committees in Congress and unlikely perches for the most junior member of the minority party. He added that he would like to be on the committee to elect the first Vietnamese-American president. "That's a joke, " he explained, helpfully. ...
Cao was asked whether he was disappointed about anyone he hadn't heard from. Angelina Jolie, he said. And the pope.
