Posted on 12/06/2008 8:35:20 PM PST by Maelstorm
Unofficial results showed Republican attorney Anh "Joseph" Cao denying Jefferson a 10th term.
Republicans made an aggressive push to get rid of the 61-year-old incumbent, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, laundering money and misusing his congressional office.
Cao won a predominantly black and heavily Democratic district that covers most of New Orleans. He will become the first Vietnamese-American in Congress.
He came to the U.S. as a child after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He went on to earn degrees in philosophy, physics and law.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Only in America.
It also helped that the post-Katrina demographics are radically different.
Excellent! Congratulations Congressman Cao!
But the learned folk in DC tell us that Republicans are done.
Seriously, this is encouraging, because its in Jindal’s back yard. And I love the idea that the future of the party and the conservative movement is in two young conservative republican governors.
Go Palin/Jindal 2012!
New Orleans voted for change we believe in!
The American Spectator profiled newly elected Joseph Cao thusly :
http://www.spectator.org/archives/2008/11/20/should-congress-have-a-cao/
(EXCERPT )
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 an uncle. As the story continues today, Cao is the Republican nominee for Congress from Louisiana’s Second Congressional District (mostly New Orleans), running against William “Cold Cash” Jefferson — also known as “Dollar Bill” — who for years has been fighting multiple-count bribery-related indictments after federal agents in 2005 caught nefarious activities on tape and then found $90,000 from the taped transaction hidden in his refrigerator freezer.
Because the congressional primaries were delayed by Hurricane Gustav, the general election was pushed back to Saturday, December 6.
But before you read about the congressional campaign, you’ll want to know about what happened between Saigon and today.
What happened first was that Cao’s father, a South Vietnamese military officer, was sent to a Viet Cong “re-education camp” for six years. That’s why his children had to escape Vietnam without him. As a certain recent presidential candidate could tell you, a Viet Cong camp is not a place where one is treated well.
Anyway, Cao settled in Indiana for four ears, 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.
Meanwhile, he and his father, who was eventually released to the United States in 1991 and eventually wheelchair-bound, both greatly admired a U.S. senator named John McCain, whose service to both their native country and their adopted country had been so valiant — and so similar, in so many ways, to that of Cao’s father. He supported McCain strongly in his race for president in 2000 — and again in 2007-2008, when he was one of McCain’s earliest Louisiana backers and eventually a national convention delegate pledged to the senator.
But along the way, there came two little hurricanes. Or maybe not so little. Katrina in 2005 left eight feet of water in Cao’s house (in an area mostly home to commercial fishermen, a few miles east of where most of his fellow Vietnamese expats lived), and effectively wiped out the Vietnamese community. “We lost everything,” he said, simply.
Local businessman Fenn French, a Republican stalwart whose family has been in New Orleans (and Mardi Gras “royalty”) for generations, takes up the story. New Orleans East, he rightly notes, is one of the most unprotected parts of the whole metro area. It was utterly destroyed. “But,” he says in enthusiastic admiration, “the Vietnamese community was the very first to stand up its neighborhood again, and they did it without government assistance.”
Cao — short, slight, soft-spoken, and described by French as “one of these good-hearted, salt-of-the-Earth guys” — was a leader in that effort. After brief sojourns in Baton Rouge, in a nearby town called Westwego, and then in a rental home back in New Orleans East, Cao’s own family rebuilt as well.
SNIP SNIP
For the last two and a half weeks of the campaign, Cao has about $70,000 cash on hand, with Republican Party committees committed to pitching in (independently) the maximum allowed $84,000. And that was before any late money came in from fundraisers thrown by pillars of the New Orleans community both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, along with a Dec. 4 major fundraiser featuring newly minted New Orleanian Mary Matalin, the famous Republican political consultant. It’s enough money for a reasonable TV ad buy and lots of radio ads. And the campaign is hoping for some late endorsements, too.
If Cao wins, he would be the first Vietnamese-American ever elected to Congress — from, it should be noted, the neighboring district to the one that first sent to Congress a man of Indian descent, Bobby Jindal. And as long as the U.S. Congress should exist on this Earth, Cao might remain the only Congressman who is a Vietnamese refugee-turned physics major-turned Jesuit-turned philosophy professor, lawyer, and dual-hurricane survivor.
And yes, history sometimes does choose odd pathways, and unlikely heroes.
Go Palin/Jindal 2012!
Now THAT’S change I can believe in!!
Maybe some Democrats are beginning to have some pride.
Voters had to flush the toilet for the DNC....why cannot the DNC be potty trained to have flushed this crooked politician yrs ago....
From Packwood to Foley, with few exceptions, the GOP flushes their crooked members.
YES, this is the kind of change I can believe in!!!!
According to lots of people on the Obama Birth Certificate Threads, Bobby Jindal is not constitutionally qualified to be President.
The good thing is the chaff is mostly gone from our party. The GOP is primed for rebuilding strong. Especially now that the Democrats are have the whole enchilada and are planning to go on a spending spree with an already overdrawn account. The GOP has an opportunity to smack the Democrats as reckless and irresponsible. Isn’t it time for Washington to stop trying to spend its way out of problems?
Good bye ya stinkin' old skunk.
Too bad that the voters in Pennsylvania didn’t do the same for that malignant ANTI-marine slug Murtha.
Actually, Dalip Saund, a Sikh from California, was elected in the 50s and was the first person of Indian heritage (and birth, I believe) elected to congress.
Yes it is. He may have 90,000 votes in his freezer though!
Hooray!
And did it in a big way: Cao 53% to Jefferson's 43%.
I've been to Murtha's district. Too many folks with Alzheimer's collecting UMW pensions.
He might turn out to be a one-termer like ex-Rep. Michael Flanaan of Illinois (Chicago), who ousted Rostenkowski, but if that turns out to be the case, at least he managed to get rid of a very corrupt Member of Congress.
Eh, not so much. Final results came in, and Cao’s lead narrowed to just 50%-47%.
In the Donofrio Case currently before the SCOTUS, the question is not where Obama was born but rather that Obama’s father was not an American citizen.
So, which is it?
Are both Obama and Jindal qualified or are they both unqualified?
The Louisiana voters. Doing the jobs Pelosi and her ‘RATS don’t want to do.
“This is great news!”
Yes it is. I was really beginning to lose faith.
Astonishing.
Don’t give up hope. Each time we wear away at him. If Murtha hadn’t gotten a big boost in funding at the end we may have taken him down.
Here is what the Constitution says in regards to qualifications to be president :
Clause 5: Qualifications for office
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (September 2008)
See also: natural-born citizen and President of the United States
By the time of their inauguration, the President and Vice President must be:
* natural born citizens (or citizens at the time of the Constitution’s adoption)
* at least thirty-five years old
* inhabitants for at least fourteen years of the United States.
Obama’s father’s citizenship is likewise IRRELEVANT to his qualification for President. The main issue is WAS OBAMA A NATURAL BORN AMERICAN ? If so, then it is a non-issue.
Ah c**p. I still like the win, though.
Some thoroughly unexpected light at the end of the tunnel......
I wonder if this will speed up Jefferson’s criminal case. Hope so.
I gotta tell you...with the results in Georgia, Minnesota, and Louisiana....the sting of November 4th is wearing off day by day it seems.
A Catholic Vietnamese immigrant. Way cool! Congrats to him.
So then you believe the Donofrio Case has no merit.
More proof that God exists!
Neither of Jindal’s parents were citizens at the time of his birth.
Jindal was born in the US so is a citizen. But if both his parents immigrated here, became citizens, and were citizens at the time of Jindal’s birth, then he would be a “natural born” citizen and qualify to hold the offoce of President.
Congrats to New Orleans. I drove my grandmother to vote against Dollar Bill Jeffuhson today :D Turnout was very light.
William “Freezer” Jefferson gets iced. It took the voters of Louisiana to do work Democrat majority should have done in the last 2 years.
Again, they were not citizens at the time of his birth.
I have not heard of this...any details? I’ve been all over the Zero BC threads and missed any discussion that Jindal is not eligible. I hope that is not true.
Here’s hoping that Congressman Cao thanks the Democrat House leadership in making it possible for him to serve his constituents, because if their political ancestors in the 93rd Congress hadn’t have stabbed South Vietnam in the back by cutting off all assistance in October ‘74, he wouldn’t be there today.
What are the qualifications for VP?
What if he was VP and became President?
Even Donofrio does not question that fact that Obama was born in Hawaii. His case is based on the citizenship of his father.
So, if Donofrio is right, neither Obama or Jindal can be President.
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