Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. We have a fascinating guest with us today, a long-time political reporter and Adam Clymer has called him “the most courageous man in Washington, DC.” Political blogger Arianna Huffington calls him “one of the five hottest freshman Congressmen,” whatever that means. (laughter) The people of Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District call him Mr. Congressman.

At age 35, Tom Perriello is one of the youngest and newest members of Congress. He’s also a person of faith, whose vision for justice and peace making have led him into the war zones of Sierra Leone and Kosovo and Darfur and Afghanistan and other places too. We’re to learn about Tom Perriello’s work and faith and how he puts them together. Putting them together on the Hill can’t be the easiest thing in the world to do. So Tom, it’s great to have you with us today.

Congressman Perriello: Thank you for having me.

Lloyd: All these people out here are probably sitting in their virtue in having gotten themselves here this morning. I want you to know what it took for Tom Perriello to get here. Tell them quickly your story from yesterday.

Perriello: Oh, I was driving up [Route] 29 yesterday in my truck. I’m going to make a plug for my truck in this story, and someone pulled out in front and I had to swerve and they swerved again and I ended up doing a 360 in the truck going down into about a twelve-foot ditch. The truck turned around, was headed into the other side of the highway and hit a road sign, stopped, walked away from it, turned the truck back on, it was a Ford Ranger, drove right back up the hill and drove on down the highway. So I don’t know how much to thank God or thank the Ford Corporation, but both were certainly keeping an eye out for me yesterday.

Lloyd: So you can’t match that story I’ll bet for getting here this morning. Well, we’re so glad you made it. Well, [let’s talk about] you’ve been on Capital Hill as a Congressman for a year now. Has it been what you expected it would be?

Perriello: Well, I came in with exceedingly low expectations. [audience laughter] I sort of backed into politics. I come from a generation that emerged in the Eighties with a deep sense from our grandparents in the Greatest Generation, with a desire to serve community and to serve country but a certain skepticism about government being the way to do that.

So we volunteered in unprecedented numbers. If you look at the volunteerism rates of my generation, it was when AmeriCorps emerged, Teach for America took off, service was the cool thing to do, and that was because we wanted to make a difference but we didn’t want to deal with all the baloney that goes on with politics.

But after ten or fifteen years of doing that sort of community service, you keep hitting sort of a ceiling where eventually you’re coming to Washington or going to Richmond to try to convince policy makers of ideas. You see people wanting to take things to scale. So many friends of mine who started out in Teach for America then decided to get involved in maybe in a Charter School, then looking at education policy, then thinking about running for office, so there’s been this way where the community service generation has almost graduated into being the public service generation.

But I don’t think we do so with wide eyes about how great and easy it’s going to be. We do it out of a frustration we’ve had with some of its limitations. So coming in this last year was certainly more hopeful than many moments, and I think there was a sense that the country was ready for a different kind of politics and a different kind of attitude. And I think it was very disappointing to see… I certainly got to know a lot of the Republicans on the other side of the aisle, early in orientation, and three weeks later, couldn’t get a phone call returned and the dialogue broke down very, very quickly. And I think that was disappointing. I think America deserved better than that.

But at the same time, I like the fact that we are trying to take on these generational challenges that I’ve spent my lifetime watching both parties run away from. I’ve heard my whole life about energy independence, and yet, nothing done. So I do think there’s at least there’s a core of folks who are saying, “Let’s focus on doing what is right, not what’s easy. Let’s start with what’s actually what’s going to fix the problem, not what’s going to play well in the next election cycle.” So I think there are seeds of hope in that, but certainly a lot of frustrations.

Lloyd: Well you did hit quite a list of issues all in one year, as did President Obama, dealing with the recession, the challenge of health care, Iraq and Afghanistan, the pressing concerns of dealing with climate change, a whole array of things and it seems as if very little has been accomplished.

Now, that seems to be a pattern that’s gone on for some time. Have you had a sense of disenchantment? It sounds like you weren’t too enchanted to begin with, but any sense of disenchantment with this, or do you think there are some possibilities going forward?

Perriello: Well, you know… being Catholic, I think the guilt of not having done enough is sort of a permanent state of mind. But I think in this case, there’s a little bit of pride in the sense that if you look at what the People’s House has done, it’s really been a transformational agenda. You know, in the original Constitution, the House of Representatives was the only body directly elected by the people, and it was always the body closest to democratic representation. The Senate was then elected by state legislators, and obviously the Electoral College was more than a formality then.

So if you look at, I think, the ability to step in, not just so on the things we’ve heard so much about, like energy and health care, but right out of the gate on the kinds of issues in housing reform and banking reform that will get things going again.

You know, I represent a part of Virginia that not only includes Charlottesville, Virginia, where things are still going relatively well, but areas south of the James River that have been devastated. We have 22, 24 percent unemployment in Martinsville, close to that in Danville, the rural counties around them, 17, 18 percent. And, you know, yes, there were mistakes made in the last administration and it’s important to be honest about those but these problems go way back before that.

The jobs really disappeared in the nineties, accelerated by NAFTA but really driven by global competitiveness, removing our manufacturing base. If we don’t have jobs in this country between six dollars an hour and six figures, it’s just not going to work out. We have to take seriously the dignity of work, and I think we need to step up with a sense of urgency, almost a war time mentality on the jobs crisis, to be addressing it in the way I think people are feeling it right now.

Lloyd: Let’s finish putting together some pieces of your story and then I want to come back to some of these policy issues. Your road starts in Charlottesville and was there for quite some time, but along the way it’s led you to Africa, Asia, southeastern Europe. So tell us a little bit about what has propelled you along the way, and how being propelled along that way ultimately propelled you into running for Congress.

Perriello: Well, the question for me was always, how can I do the most to reduce human suffering? How can you do the most to promote human flourishing? And that partly came from the values of my parents, certainly came from… I grew up in a Catholic church that was very focused on the deeds over words approach, that there was a great deal out there, including a global perspective.

And I think also, having grown up in the shadow of Jefferson and in the South, there was a sense of both this tremendous human potential, but also this idea of our flaws, of saying, “Okay, it wasn’t so long ago people thought it was okay to own other human beings. What will people look back a hundred years from now and say, ‘How could they let that happen? How could they have been sitting there and let 30,000 human beings die every day of hunger and preventable disease?’” You know, what are those issues that people will look back and be aghast that we are not addressing in terms of justice in our society.

So I started out working a lot on environmental issues, trying to combine jobs and environmental protection, sort of before it was cool, but what I really kept coming back to was the intensity of human suffering in conflict zones, particularly children, women, but really across the board, the kind of tearing apart of the soul of a nation and for all of us to know that this thing is out there.

And it was one thing for us to go back and read King Leopold’s Ghost and realize they didn’t have the internet, they didn’t have TV. We don’t have that excuse. We know the suffering is going on and I ended up in Sierra Leone at the tail of the blood diamonds war because here was a situation that was considered the worst on earth, life expectancy of 34 years old, amputation, disembowelment on a regular basis. And our country had actually managed to even make it worse through some policies of the Clinton administration, and I felt like, as a person of faith, as an American, that’s just not okay to let that be.

Lloyd: Was this after law school for you, when you were out working?

Perriello: It actually began during summers in law school, and then came back and helped start a human rights clinic at the university in Sierra Leone during my third year in law school. And while I was there launching it, that was when these people—these incredibly courageous men and women, mostly women, who had stood up to the military juntas and the RUF rebels and everyone else—kept saying, “Just come here.

“Just come here. You’ve got to drop whatever you are doing next year, you have to move here, it’s our best chance at peace. We’re going to have the peace negotiations closing up the first elections, launching of a truth commission and war crimes tribunal.

And I said, you know, “What can I do? I’m white, I’m American, and I don’t know the place.”

I remember Zainab Bangura saying, “Well, you’re white and American, and frankly if you’re standing next to me, I’m less likely to get shot.”

And I thought that was a fairly compelling argument. So I sort of drummed up a fellowship from scratch and moved over there and taught at the university, but was mainly involved in supporting civil society groups in that transition process. Because what often happens in these situations is the only people at the table are the various armed groups, but the armed groups, in this case, didn’t represent the people of Sierra Leone. That was the standoff, and it was about trying that change that power imbalance that helped shift things in the right direction.

Lloyd: What happened? Did you manage to make some progress on that?

Perriello: It was an amazing experience. Particularly, for you know, a guy at a very young age to be witness to this, a country that everyone had given up on, within a year, had really been able to stabilize, the peace agreement had been reached the elections had been held.

But there was also sort of a catch at the end, which is that’s exactly the point at which the international community stops paying attention. We had our elections: check. Disarmament: check.

Never mind the fact that the seven people that started the war are still in power in various ways, just waiting for us to move on to the next conflict of the month and not pay attention.

Taylor was still the dictator in Liberia, next door, who had been the mastermind of all this, so I was going to leave but then ended up deciding to stay on with the War Crimes Tribunal there because it was the only thing with the power to take out these six or seven guys who were just waiting to restart the war.

So I came in as a special advisor to the prosecutor in that, and one by one we were basically removing these guys. And the most exciting and dramatic finish was that I was involved in the showdown that helped force Charles Taylor from power. And what was amazing about it was that it was about the same time we were taking out Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but here we were able to force this dictator from power, who frankly had stronger links to Al Qaeda than Saddam Hussein did, because he had harbored folks and some other things.

And here was a guy we removed from power without firing a single bullet because there was an understanding that legitimacy was the weapon, you had the LURD rebels moving on Monrovia, you had an overthrow horizon threat force from the international community, you had legitimacy and buy-in and from the West African allies. Even the president of Ghana who played a crucial role in the negotiations.

And what we did was, one by one, remove all of Taylor’s other options. So he either had to go back to the bush to restart the civil war, or he had to leave power.

And he left power, and he now sits in a jail far, far away from the very people that he terrorized for decades.

So for me, as a person wondering, “Okay it’s one thing to rally want to change the world, but can you really do it? Can you reduce human suffering? ” and often as the great saying goes, “The only thing required for evil to persist is for good people to do nothing.”

Here I think good people stepped up. And West Africa now may not be paradise, but you have the first female head of state, in all of Africa, in Liberia, making a real shot of it. You had a more reformist party win in Sierra Leone, and there is a sense of at least a window of hope.

Lloyd: That’s quite a story, but you didn’t stay with that line of work. You came back and picked up some other things.

Perriello: Well, you know, what I took away from that was often in conflict zones… I had friends who had gone on to do say hedge fund work which was high risk, high return investing. And I saw myself as doing the equivalent for social justice work.

But in these higher risk areas you could make a bigger impact. You would fail a number of times, but it’s at least worth trying because in many conflict zones we have great people in the military looking at that side, great folks in the humanitarian side, trying to get people food and water, but very few people looking at the political strategy that underlies the conflict.

So part of the value I’d been able to provide was by being there and living locally, being with Sierra Leonians, and not having a security detail and just going out. I was able over time to gather enough information to be able to provide some good strategic advice on this. So in Darfur and other places where I went, it was usually trying to see whether there was an opportunity people hadn’t identified yet, to understand this relationship between political and military strategy. That’s part of what I was doing in Afghanistan as well.

So that was a big part of what I was doing, was saying, “Are there things where other people have decided, ‘Hey, there’s just no chance’—but maybe, maybe if we get in there a little deeper we actually can find that opportunity.”

Lloyd: And you found some in some of those places?

Perriello: We did, but there are successes and failures.

Lloyd: Like Darfur has not been solved as yet.

Perriello: No, you know, in Darfur, we did actually come back having I think a path towards a revitalized set of peace negotiations. We spent quite a bit of time with the SLA rebels, this was my partner and I and the JEM rebels as well. and it was a pretty obvious understanding that they had a strong military base on the ground and actually tremendous civilian support, but there no political arm.

There was no political leadership to sit down at the negotiations. Unfortunately what happened was, when the peace talks happened, the last administration decided on the first day, more or less, to back the Khartoum regime’s proposal and spend their whole time berating the rebels for not accepting it when they said, “This is an unconscionable deal. It’s everything the government wants that conducted the genocide.” They were only able to get one rebel to sign on, who was then run out of the village because it was such a bad deal. And so you have to get all of the pieces together and I think we got close on that and unfortunately I think the way they ran those peace talks really set that back, and we see the persistent conflict.

But these are tough things. I mean, you don’t show up, just like with me coming to Congress a year ago, and expect that you’re going to solve every problem but you know that if you don’t even get in the game you’re not going to score on that. So that, along with some of the faith work I did back in the U.S., was all sort of a part of this effort to say where opportunities stood to make positive impact.

Lloyd: Say a little bit more about that faith work, also about the ways you’ve been formed by your Catholic faith and Catholic social teaching. That seems to have been a real driver in how you shaped your life.

Perriello: It has been a huge driver. I think this sense, I joked about the guilt earlier, but also a very positive sense of really a global theology that I think, because it’s been a global church for so long, I think ideas of our sense of compassion ending in a border, or ending at the limit of an ethic group or a faith group, was a very powerful message to me.

This idea of the common good—and I think part of why I started doing more faith-based work when I would be back in the United States between these—was I sensed what was wrong in our country went much deeper than any political party or any one president and wasn’t going to be fixed by any one political party or one President.

That we had become in many ways a culture of instant gratification: “I want it for me right now and you know we may point the finger at teenagers or at hip-hop culture, but that’s really a reflection of what we’ve seen on Wall Street as well, and frankly what we’ve seen in this city. You know the antidote to that is a culture of the common good, and that’s something that certainly comes out of Catholic teaching for me, this idea that, like it or not, we are in this together. Like it or not, we have to get back to an idea of some deferred gratification.

If you look at again the parts of my district to the south that have been in recession long before recession was cool, they understand that this is not a magic wand approach to it. We have to rebuild America’s competitive advantage, and that’s a long project. That is saying, we can’t just assume if we bail out the financial sector it’s going to trickle down to everyone else. We actually need a strategy for out competing again, for working in middle class jobs. So part of my faith-based work was a sense that really, throughout all these different strands you could see, there really is sort of a cultural decay underneath it. And to some extent, I think the conservative faith groups have gotten it right, that it’s about the culture but I think in many times their diagnosis has stopped at the surface level—too much sex—and not below of what is it that’s driving that decay of values. So I think that’s a really important conversation for us to continue to have and that was some of the work I that I did.

Lloyd: Which propelled you onto the campaign trail. Was it hard work running for Congress?

Perriello: It was. It is an exhausting undertaking. It is an exhilarating one. My district is nine thousand square miles. It’s the size of the state of New Jersey. So you have… and it’s an area that kind of has a little bit of everything you see. We have old factory towns, we have agricultural areas, we have high-growth, high-tech areas, we have suburbs, exurbs. So you have a tremendous range of opinions It was a race nobody thought I could win.

I was 34 percentage points behind in August. Everyone told me I had to run by tearing the other guy apart, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to run on a positive agenda, and these sorts of things.

So to do it well is extremely tough. I joked with someone the other day, I think being in Congress is one of the easiest jobs to do poorly and one of the toughest jobs to do well; and I think campaigning is probably very similar to that.

Lloyd: And you also were elected as a Democrat was being elected president, and to the Senate, I guess that was when Mark Warner was being elected, so you had some strong support carrying you. This is going to be a tougher go round this year, isn’t it?

Perriello: Well, it is. It’s going to be tough for a lot of reasons, but you know last year the president did not win my District, I actually got more votes than he did in the district. But certainly there were a lot of people energized, volunteers and voters and others, because of the excitement of last year.

You know, I like the idea of being judged by the merits of the job that I’ve done. I think that is a fair standard, for better or worse. Mid-terms are often a referendum on the president more than on the member of Congress, and that’s good news and bad news. I think the key for this year will certainly be the economy. That will certainly trump everything else.

But for me, you know, if I can know that I did everything I could possibly do to serve the people of the district, then we can let the chips fall where they may from there. If the worst thing happens to me is that I only get to serve for two years, that will be a pretty tremendous honor.

Lloyd: As a thoughtful, experienced, wise Christian and politician, you’re…

Perriello: Who are you talking about? (laughter)

Lloyd: Well, I am just taking a shot at this. You’re bound to experience conflicts. You’re bound to have political advisors who are looking at the polls and looking at what’s happening on the political scene and what’s happening in your district. How do you manage to navigate the necessary… Politicians aren’t necessarily much help unless they’re elected to office and yet to get elected to office, people have to at least finesse what they’re putting forward from their set of convictions. How do you think that through internally?

Perriello: I think there are a series of ethical frameworks that are coming up on a regular basis, so one is, “What do you do when you think seventy percent of a bill is good? Is it eighty percent, ninety percent? What is the threshold in terms of a moral evaluation even leaving politics aside of this. The ethical question of what it means to represent a district. To what extent have they voted for me, my conscience, my values, in sort of a republican sense in the traditional sense of republicanism, to vote how I would vote? Or, if I could have a computer and just let everyone, like on “American Idol,” vote as they wish on every issue—is that my job? Is it what would happen if I thought everyone was able to spend three or four weeks engaged in the issue? So there is that set of ethical questions.

To me the one you raise is sort of an easier one, because I think it is just too slippery of a slope. When you get into the logic of saying, “Well, I can’t do anything for people if I don’t come back here,” there’s really no end to that logic. I mean, I think there were some people who felt recently about some votes, “If I can’t come up here and vote something like energy independence, then what’s the point of being here?” …if I think that’s one of our top national security issues, one of our top national competitiveness issues, as well as the science and stewardship of God’s creation that goes along with that.

So the advisors are there, I don’t have many of them. We tried that; it didn’t work very well. But I think, to me, what people appreciate and what people haven’t seen enough of in politics, is conviction. I don’t think people in my district expect to agree with me on everything, but I think they do expect me to put a sense of right and wrong ahead of right and left. And if you do that, people will respect it.

People in my district don’t agree. I mean I have an incredibly split district on a lot of issues, so you don’t expect that there are politically simple things to do. But I think if people respect the job you’re doing, that goes a long way and you know that’s hopefully what people will be able to say about me is, “Hey, I have never seen anyone work this hard. This guy seems to really do everything he can to make the best decision he can. You know I’ve seen him produce results.”

I think some of the policy stuff becomes secondary to that question. Voters sometimes get mocked for judging people by who you want to grab a beer with, or who shares your values, but I actually think it’s really a good judge, since you don’t know what issues are going to come up.

Lloyd: Are you sensing in your district this level of high anxiety spilling over into anger that seems to be so pervasive in the country these days?

Perriello: Since a lot of it—you know in August I did 21 Town Hall meetings, and they averaged about five and a half hours in length, because I insisted on not cutting anyone off. So we did over a hundred hours, which is some sort of record so I think already then you saw a tremendous amount of fear and anger, and also thoughtfulness. I think one thing I’ve certainly learned from my work in conflict zones is one of the worst aggravating factors is when people feel like they are not being listened to, not being heard. And that’s where I think people feel, in some of these debates, they don’t understand what’s going on and I think we’ve done a poor job of communicating it but they’re also not sure about some of the substance.

In my district we have not one tea party movement, but five separate tea party networks. I’ve met with them numerous times in D.C. and in the district, done the town hall meetings and you know there are a lot of voices out there of real concern. And I think that can either be a great thing, I think we’ll either look back on this as a moment of tremendous civic engagement, of actually having debates about the Constitution, having debates about to what extent we are in this together or not. These are big debates.

In some ways, these different readings of freedom and the Constitution are the same ones that the Founders had. And the Constitution is in fact a compromise document between somewhat different theories of individual versus state versus federal power. So hopefully we’ll look back on this as a great moment where Americans took that civic duty seriously, but we may look back on it as the beginning of a really divisive time in our country.

Lloyd: I want to give people in the audience a chance to ask some questions, but let me just ask you, as you look at the landscape of issues before the country, before the Congress, before the president, which are many and massive, how would you prioritize the things that you hope the Congress and the government can get something done on in the next, say, twenty-four months?

Perriello: Well certainly I think the economy trumps everything else right now. People are in real pain and real fear. I’d like to see us go, you know, not do one giant jobs bill, with everything turned together, but with pieces that we know and maybe even can reach some agreement on. You know we need to get direct lending going to small, medium-sized businesses. We know we need an infrastructure built out. We know there’s massive retrofitting we can take to scale that will make us more competitive and will put people to work right away. There are things we could do in that area.

But to me, I think we have to understand this more in terms of how all the issues play out. Right now people are saying, “You’re either with us or against us.” We’re out here, we’re getting crushed, working middle class folks, we’re getting nickeled and dimed by our utilities that are jacking up rates, and credit card companies and insurance companies. We’re not seeing the jobs coming to this country. We see a lot of bail-outs going to Wall Street, not a lot coming to Main Street. We sent you there for a better kind of politics where someone was going to be standing up for us.”

And I think those are great questions to be asking and in that case, something like the decision from the Supreme Court next week and doing something about campaign finance, doing things that are going to bring down premiums for middle-class families, things that are going to focus on job creation, all those are part of people outside of Washington feeling like finally people here get it. They understand what’s going on at our kitchen table, and they are fighting for us.

People back home sometimes ask, “Hey are you getting pushed around by Nancy Pelosi or Rahm Emanuel, or whatever?” I said, “Hey look, the power brokers in this town are not the party bosses, they’re the interest groups, they are the lobbying groups.

They spent a million dollars against me on TV last year and it wasn’t even an election year. And most of that money isn’t even going directly through the Republican Party any more. It’s directly from the utilities and the insurance companies and others.

I mean that’s what makes politicians pull back and be risk averse, is the sheer power of these groups. So I think people are smart enough to understand that, and they’re looking for some folks that are willing to actually push back, not in a symbolic way, but really do put patients ahead of the profiteering of insurance companies and not if it’s just a bunch of kickbacks for some state, or carve-outs for others.

Lloyd: Let’s go to questions from the audience.

Deryl Davis: We’ve got questions here to start with, and I want to ask audience members if you are still working on a question to pass that to the center aisle for us. A first questioner asks about the health care reform bill or bills, and what your thoughts are about moral imperatives around providing universal health care coverage.

Perriello: Well, you know, I think that in some ways, just like on the climate debate, you don’t even have to get into the climate science to see all the good economic and security reasons to do it. With the health care debate, I think we focus a lot on the moral imperative to care for the least among us, and I happen to believe that that is a moral imperative.

But health care is more about the fact that we are in this together. The fact is that people say, you know, “Why should I have to pay for poor people’s health insurance?”

Well, you already are. I mean, that’s the concern we have now. The status quo is I think what many people are concerned about. You are paying, you know, the poorest are covered through Medicaid. In addition to that people without insurance go to the emergency room and that bill shifts to us, who have private insurance.

I have met with every hospital in my district and they all show me the exact same chart: Here’s how much money I lose on the uninsured, and here’s how much I have to make on the private insured. My business model is to make more on those with private insurance than I lose from those without insurance.

So part of where we have to get to is not just a moral question about how do those who have take care of those who have not, but a deeper sense of interdependence. That there are ways in which people not having insurance is the reason that my brother, who is a high school teacher and coach, has seen his premiums go up 25 percent each of the last four years, and his insurance is more than his mortgage.

There’s a reason for that, and a lot of it is the anti-competitive monopoly protections, it’s a lot of the incentives are off, it’s the medical loss ratios and at the end of the day, a lot of it is more and more uninsured or under insured shifting that burden over.

So I think we sometimes only have the moral dialogue in this country of should we take care of the least among us or should it be laissez-faire and trickle down?

And I think both of those miss the deeper point. We are in this together, we are already interdependent. What we need to figure out is the most efficient and effective way to deal with that reality.

Davis: A couple of questioners here are asking your thoughts about faith and the public square, faith and public life and also if you have involvement with different faith groups or prayer breakfasts on Capitol Hill?

Perriello: To me, there’s a difference between the establishment of religion by the state, and a presence of faith and morality in our public life. I think having debates about our deepest values are incredibly important. And I have often said, you know, let’s just take the issue of stem cell research. If a politician is against stem cell research for religious reasons, I don’t want them to stand up and tell me that it’s for medical reasons, when really it’s for religious reasons.

I think we should be able to have an honest debate. If that’s what your decision is coming from, then I think we should be able to have that conversation. Now the goals of that are to do so in a way that doesn’t shut down debate. One of the things that is difficult about faith is that often it does reduce down to “it’s just what I believe,” and sometimes that’s harder to have the same public discourse you can have over facts.

But the reality is we all have some substrate of faith, and we should be able to have that discourse.

The second is that you never want people to feel alienated because they have a different faith, or because they are atheist. So to me, I think the question of what is the proper balance?

We open Congress with a prayer every day. People back home seem shocked that Nancy Pelosi starts Congress with a prayer every day, but the reality is that as much as we think some lines are there we’ve found a way to reach a space on this.

For me, there’s no question that my desire to serve comes from my faith. When I talk about my biography, I am more comfortable about it. When it gets to policy, I am more hesitant to make the arguments on pure faith ground, but you know, sometimes that’s what it comes down to for me. Torture is a form of blasphemy. It is a sin against the image of God in another person, as well as the security and other implications. So sometimes I think I know we try to respect those barriers. If it’s the reality of what’s motivating somebody then I think it should be part of the conversation.

Davis: Another is asking about your heroes in religion or politics or social justice sphere. Are there particular people, living or dead, who have motivated you by their example?

Perriello: Oh, certainly one of my all time heroes is William Wilberforce. And one of the great streets in Sierra Leone which was the launching point for a lot of the slave trade was Wilberforce Avenue. And what’s amazing about him was an ability to see beyond the constraints of his time.

I’m sure you all know he was probably the leading advocate for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Parliament. But when he started out as a young parliamentarian, he was on the fast track to being prime minister. He was in all the cool clubs. He was all that and basically made a decision that alienated him from many of his peers in the elite, but it was because, based on his faith, he felt like there was this he had to advocate for.

But he also understood that there was a dynamic relationship between the culture of instant gratification of his time, and the ability to just simply turn the other cheek to the fact the slave trade was going on. So his combination I think of moral authority and effectiveness.

In this country, you know, Bobby Kennedy is probably one of the guys who comes to mind, who was inspiring to me and remains so in the ability to, I think, bridge divides, speak to a deeper pain in our own community, someone who had a wisdom from his own losses—not just the loss of his brother, but from feeling maybe like he’d had been on the wrong side of a couple of decisions early on in his career, and finding wisdom from that; and a willingness to go right to the people that disagreed with him most. He would go to, can’t remember whether it was University of Georgia or Alabama Law School to talk about their civil rights strategy, and going right to students when he said, “I don’t think there should be student deferments on the draft. If we’re going to have a draft, there’s no reason you should be off the hook,” and going right out at a lot of the Wallace voters, in the south, the white voters whom the Democrats had lost over the civil rights thing. And that willingness to engage deliberatively from his deepest faith was I think something that was pretty exceptional.

Davis: We have several different questioners asking about your thoughts on issues such as campaign finance reform and lobbying, as we are hearing a lot about both of those again these days.

Perriello: I think the decision last week was a shocking decision of folks who—and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Supreme Court, but shocking in that it was overturning a 5-4 decision from just six years earlier, doing so in a way that I think represents folks… There’s a way to think about things in academia, there’s a real world, and you kind of have to have a little bit of an eye to both.

What we are seeing right now, I think, is a very serious move of capture of our government. I mean, if you look at the fall of empires around the world that was usually when there was a decaying first of the elites and then down culturally, the loss of the res publica the common space in the Roman Empire and the like. And I think we’ve seen a certain sense of that here in the ’80’s in this country. Here the threat… one of the things I talk to the Tea Party folks about in my district is that I agree with them that capitalism itself is under threat in this country but the difference is that they see it primarily as the government taking over the private sector.

What I think is that it has been corporate capture of the largest interest groups of the government and what happens is you end up in a very dangerous cycle. You know when the bail out happened, which I happened to oppose, it wasn’t the government going to Wall Street saying “Please, let us bail you out.” Wall Street came and said, “You must bail us out.” Well, once you have done that, you are in a very dangerous space, because all of a sudden there are bonuses being paid with taxpayer dollars. So on the one hand I shouldn’t be telling this company what they should be paying their executives. On the other hand, taxpayer dollars are going to give a bonus to someone who failed at their job, and that’s not acceptable either.

If you look within the health care debate, I think we’ve seen a preview of what is coming with finance. The ads that were in my district—they ran over $700,000 of negative ads after my health care vote, and the insurance companies said, “Oh that wasn’t us.” And then the AP broke the story that they had dropped over thirty, forty, fifty million dollars on these ad campaigns that were run through the chamber, through a series of front groups, and it’s a barrage, a constant barrage that I think takes the one person, one vote out of the system, because there’s simply too much tilting. And it’s a very serious threat.

We should be having robust debates. I think we need to fix some of the new issues that have been there. But I think we need to go deeper, whether that is publicly financed election or something else.

Our democracy is way too precious. The return on a lobbying dollar is much higher than the return on a research and development dollar. So we’re actually disincentivizing research and development, and it comes back again on this capitalism point.

If we reward failure, capitalism cannot flourish in that environment and what happen with campaign finance is that the companies that are succeeding today in this world can use financial influence to lock in the status quo. So we continue to build bad cars and are eventually less competitive. We continue to be stuck on the same oil and gas and coal technology because those guys block the status quo.

It’s a direct threat to the capitalism you would want where, in other countries, what they are doing is trying to help incentivize what’s going to be big in ten, twenty years, not locking in what was there before. So I think this has huge implications for people’s faith in our democracy, but also the notion of our ability to continue to innovate and be entrepreneurial if people simply use their past success to lock in future success.

Lloyd: It seems to be enormously difficult in a democracy, when people are running for office all the time, to get people to be willing to make decisions about the long term. Every impulse is to vote for the person who is going to cut my taxes today, not think about what needs to be in place for the long term. So when it comes to issues like climate change, where the horizon of devastation is probably a century or fifty years, even though we are beginning to see pieces of it already, it seems enormously difficult to get people to take short-term discomfort or short-term changing and moving things around, undoing the way they are used to doing things for the sake of something that’s got a twenty-, thirty-, fifty-, hundred-year horizon. Do you think there is any way to break through that?

Perriello: We used to see this primarily in foreign policy, I feel like. But now it has dominated domestic policy. In foreign policy, you know, Churchill always had these concerns about whether you could do good foreign policy in a democracy. And the point is that you know, something like Afghanistan, if we’re going to do it, and there’s a debate about whether we should be there, is certainly a very long project, much longer than election cycles or even administrations, so it’s hard to do.

Domestically—and I may be naive about this—but it seemed like there used to be enough of a sense of public responsibility that the parties would come together from time to time on things like some of the major tax reform overhauls and entitlement reform overhauls to extend the life of Medicare and Social Security and other things where people—you know, senators, others—would come together and make some tough decisions for the long term.

Part of what makes it easier to do that is if both parties have put skin in the game then it’s harder for either to demagogue the other issue. You don’t see that now and I think that’s a shame.

I think Americans were ready a year ago for the president to give a tough love message. People understood that we had dug ourselves into a very deep hole, and I don’t think they expected anyone to say we’re going to get out of this tomorrow. I think a deep message then, of “we’re in an era of accountability on Wall Street, accountability in Washington, and frankly an accountability for consumers, that we’re making bad decisions across the board”—people were ready to see that as long as they saw a path, even if it was a very rough path, to stability down the road.

But if you see, you know, the president, tried, for example, for this bipartisan commission on entitlement reform, and for all the noise about fiscal responsibility, couldn’t get it through the Senate. And I don’t think there was a single Republican vote but the Democrats didn’t want to step up and walk that plank either, so he is doing it with executive order. The challenge of these things…

If you take for example, the cap and trade bill, ironically, was a Republican idea. It was a Republican idea in that it was first done by the first President Bush to solve acid rain, probably the most successful and efficient environmental program because it was a market incentive. Basically it was the core of the McCain Lieberman approach before with the idea of a tradable permit scheme.

And then once the Democrats embrace it, not only does it have to be a bad idea, but it has to be Armageddon itself. So I think that it makes it very difficult, even when there’s an attempt to reach out and take the other side’s idea seriously and engage, that then we can’t give them a victory on it… and I mean, both sides do it. People ask me why if all the savings are in out there in health care, all this waste fraud and abuse, well why don’t you just go after that?

Well the answer is that either party who is willing enough to touch that was immediately going to be attacked for killing Grandma by the other side. And the Democrats would have done it in a heartbeat if the Republicans had stepped up and said here’s three hundred billion.

So here you have people saying, let’s go after hundreds of billions of dollars in waste of government programs, which is what voters say that they want, and then we have a problem where often good ideas take thirty minutes to discuss and thirty seconds to destroy. And the gap between those two things is where leadership is required and I think we need some improvement there.

Lloyd: One more question.

Davis: This questioner asked, you referenced earlier, in an unanswered phone call, “What has to happen in order for us to restore civility in dialogue and government, and what do you do to avoid becoming cynical about the way business is done on Capitol Hill?

Perriello: I don’t have an answer to that yet. I think this is going to be an interesting year. I think there are a lot of different forces at play right now.

In my district… I can’t even keep track any more—there are eight, nine people running against me, and the combination mostly Republican, a few conservative party saying the