Our Sixth District congressman, Ben Cline, likes to tout how his values were “shaped growing up here in the Shenandoah Valley.”
The Valley being a place where whether you’re a fromhere or comehere is important, where does Mr. Cline land on that scale?
Definitely a comehere.
Cline was born in Stillwater, Okla., in 1972 – his parents, Philip and Julie, were in Stillwater while Philip was finishing up his master’s and Ph.D. work at Oklahoma State.
Philip, a native of Oklahoma City, got his BA at Washington and Lee in 1967, and returned to his alma mater in 1975, and became a respected professor of management and economics at W&L, before passing away too early, at the young age of 64, in 2010.
Ben did, indeed, grow up in the Valley, as the son of comeheres, himself a comehere – and it’s nice that he points out that he went to local public schools, but it wasn’t exactly hardscrabble, being the privileged son of a professor at a high-dollar private school.
Cline himself went the high-dollar private-school route for college, enrolling at Bates College, a private liberal-arts college in Lewiston, Maine, where his tuition and room and board would have run him around $95,000 during his time there, between 1990 and 1994, the year that Cline got his undergrad degree.
I’m also a 1994 college graduate – my four years at the University of Virginia, as an in-state student, tuition plus room and board, ran me around $30,000.
I wonder if Ben had to work part-time jobs around his classes, and two jobs during the summer, during his time at Bates?
Asking for a friend.
After Bates, Cline went straight into a job on Capitol Hill, working on the staff of Bob Goodlatte, who represented the Sixth District in Congress from 1993-2019.
Goodlatte, incidentally, like Cline, was a comehere – born in Holyoke, Mass., grew up in Springfield, Mass., and, like Cline, Goodlatte was an alum of Bates (!).
Goodlatte, like Philip Cline, Ben’s father, ended up in the Valley because of Washington and Lee – Goodlatte went to law school there, then took a job on Capitol Hill on the staff of Sixth District Congressman Caldwell Butler after graduation.
Let me digress for a sec: are you seeing what I’m seeing here?
It’s practically nepotism – Goodlatte worked for the Sixth District congressman, eventually got elected himself, then passed the job on to another guy who worked for him for eight years and just so happened to go to the same college up north that he did.
Cline only left Goodlatte’s direct employ in 2002 to run in a special election for the seat in the Virginia House of Delegates representing Rockbridge County, which he held until he was certified as the winner in the 2018 election to replace Goodlatte.
Now, think about this – Cline, since graduating college in 1994, has never not been on a government payroll, first as a congressional staffer, then as a state legislator, and for spells during his time as a state legislator, he double-dipped as a local prosecutor in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, and for the last eight years, he’s been making the good money as a member of Congress.
Ben Cline has never not paid his bills without having a government check to deposit in the ol’ bank account.
As he talks up his conservative values, how much he hates government, because government is wasteful and inefficient.
I’ll submit here, as a fromhere – Valley native, family tree of Grahams dates back to a Chris Graham who settled in Augusta County in the 1730s – that, after 32 years working in the government, getting paid good money over that time, maybe we should expect the person who represents us in Congress could have done even one thing to make government work better.
I mean, he claims to have our values, right?
Something had to have seeped in from his formative years, when, even though he never wanted for anything, his classmates had to work afterschool jobs, and the ones who wanted to go to college had to scrape money together from summer jobs, loans, financial aid, scholarships – and then after their school days, be it high school, trade school, college, they went out and got jobs that, while not as good as working on Capitol Hill or putting on a suit to negotiate plea deals for jaywalkers, put food on the table and kept the lights on.
Most of us don’t have much – certainly not the life of privilege that Ben Cline has had – but we put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
The Valley values that I got from working my way up from nothing tell me that, at some point, if you’re not good at a particular job, you don’t keep taking the boss’s money to do a bad job.
Maybe they don’t teach that up there at Bates College in Maine.
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Chris Graham
