Tom Perriello knew when he cast his vote for the Affordable Care Act in 2010 that it may very well cost him his job as a freshman congressman.
He did it anyway.
Because it was the right thing to do.
Imagine that.
“I think when we think about what we do right and what we don’t do right, what people remember is when we stand up for people,” said Perriello, who is back in the political game, running for the Democratic Party nomination in, well, either the Fifth District or Sixth District, depending.
Perriello joined me for my “Street Knowledge” podcast on Thursday for what was more a conversation than an interview.
We talked about the redistricting issue – I hope, for all of us, that he’s running for the nomination in the Sixth District, against another solid candidate, Beth Macy, a bestselling author and journalist who lives in Roanoke, on the south end of the district, because if we have a Perriello-Macy race, that means the winner in the August primary is the favorite going into November against MAGA lightweight Ben Cline.
We also talked about the priorities for the next Congress, and the next president.
I’m focusing this writeup on something that is near and dear to my political heart, and seems to be one that is important to Perriello.
It has bothered me since my first months in journalism in the mid-1990s that the Democrats that I support view our part of the state as what has come to be termed on the national scale “flyover country.”
Richmond and DC Dems don’t seem to care much about folks out our way; I say this, and the Dem elites shun me, which, fine, do your worst.
I asked Perriello, a native of Albemarle County, whose work post-Congress has literally taken him all over the world, and he moved back home and has settled here for good, meaning, he’s one of us, his thoughts on that.
“Sometimes the Democrats have had a bit of a blind spot and thought, you know, rural equals white, rural equals conservative, rural equals agriculture. Agriculture is certainly going to remain relevant, and I think that’s an opportunity as well, but we understand the richness of these communities in terms of the diversity of our economy, the diversity of the folks who live around here, the rich history of that,” Perriello said.
Bingo! Here in Augusta County, for instance, agriculture is 2.9 percent of our job base, per U.S. Census data.
Our leading job sectors: manufacturing (15.4 percent), healthcare (13.9 percent), retail (12.6 percent).
Outsiders write us off as being a bunch of dumb hayseeds; I remember Perriello, whose single term in Congress had him representing the eastern spine of the Blue Ridge, from Albemarle County down to Danville, on the North Carolina border, going to bat for folks in another forgotten area, down in Danville, that didn’t earn him a ton of sexy headlines, but did get the job done for folks down that way.
“We put a lot of energy into getting $27 million to modernize the Robertson Bridge, and that was something that 15 years later, helped them get a casino in Danville that’s put that city in the black,” Perriello said, conceding that he didn’t run for Congress because he was excited about building bridges that could help a mid-sized city land a casino, but, that’s a big part of the job.
“I ran for Congress because I was excited to help communities like Danville get that second chance after they’d been hit by NAFTA and globalization,” Perriello said, bringing up an issue that still resonates, negatively, in our part of the state.
For me in Waynesboro – first, some personal history: my father worked for 25 years at General Electric and Genicom, and lost his job in the mid-1990s as U.S. companies were in the midst of shifting manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China, a trend made easier by NAFTA, which was shepherded through by Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats.
Waynesboro, in the good years here, had 5,000 manufacturing jobs at General Electric and another 10,000 at the local DuPont plant; those jobs are long-gone, and we’ve not replaced them, in terms, at least, of having jobs that pay comparably.
That story is repeated in town after town, city after city, county after county in Appalachia – our part of Virginia, into West Virginia, Kentucky, the lower Midwest.
Local leaders throughout that wide region have struggled for decades to try to find new opportunities for their constituents, and to pay for public services with tax bases that took the hits from losing both the employers and the jobs with good pay and benefits.
“I think people do feel like they’ve been left behind and forgotten,” Perriello said.
Republicans have exploited voters in the areas that NAFTA left behind not by actually proposing solutions to the main problem at hand – we really could use an infusion of good-paying jobs, please and thank you – but by playing the old post–Reconstruction political game of divide and conquer, using race and cultural issues to lure White working-class voters to their side, without ever doing anything to make our lives better.
This, folks, is my eternal frustration – that people here keep electing and re-electing Republican do-nothings, because Democrats have just given up on us.
I like that Tom Perriello, as a young congressman in his mid-thirties, stood up for us for the entirety of the two years that we gave him.
“When you think about where we lost some of the support for the Democratic Party among, say, the FDR coalition, you know, there was one great moment where LBJ stood up for voting rights and civil rights, and that lost a certain number of people, that was doing the right thing,” said Perriello, who, as I wrote above, like LBJ in the 1960s, did the right thing, even when he knew it was going to cost him his job.
“I think that, you know, those in the party who have, in and out of the party, who have been fighting for communities to make it, that does land over time,” Perriello said. “I think right now, we have to realize, about not just folks who may have been in the MAGA crowd, we have to remember that about people in our own coalition.
“If you are, you know, in Harrisonburg, and you are scared about your kids going to school because they might get picked up by ICE, and we’re not standing up to that, we shouldn’t expect those communities to care, to engage politically. If folks can’t afford, you know, to have healthcare, and we’re not standing up to the insurance companies to get healthcare, don’t expect folks to stand up.
“I think that it’s showing up year after year, and showing that you delivered, and showing that you were willing to stand up to powerful interests, that I think we start to, you know, get some credibility there,” Perriello said.
Video: Tom Perriello on ‘Street Knowledge’
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Chris Graham
