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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
Some thoroughly unexpected light at the end of the tunnel......
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.
More proof that God exists!