Tom Perriello: The Virginia experiment

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The Virginia experiment

Is Tom Perriello ’96, ’01JD, a new kind of congressman? Or just the kind who doesn’t get reelected?
May/June 2010
by Neela Banerjee ’86

Neela Banerjee ’86, formerly a reporter for the New York Times, is a writer based in Washington, DC.

When the Danville Tea Party Patriots from southern Virginia joined hundreds of other activists on Capitol Hill last November 5 to protest health care reform, their congressman, Tom Perriello ’96, ’01JD, met with 30 of them in his office. Other Virginia politicians sent staffers to hear the Danville Tea Party’s grievances. Some high-profile Republicans, like John McCain, had no time for them. Perriello’s staff was the friendliest, Danville Tea Party chair Nigel Coleman said later.

Perriello isn’t a Tea Party ally. He’s a target. Perriello, a Democrat, had bested entrenched Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in Virginia’s deeply conservative Fifth District by 727 votes in 2008—the narrowest of all congressional victories that year. Most of the people who are now Tea Party members didn’t vote for him. Still, Perriello talked with Tea Partiers almost every day last August, when he held 21 town hall meetings in a bid to explain his thinking about health care reform and understand constituents’ concerns. He spent much of every five-hour meeting being berated.