The Possible Dream

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Shaping the Man

The story of Anh 'Joseph' Quang Cao, the newly elected Republican congressman for Louisiana's second district, is the definition of the American dream.

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So when the city put a landfill in their neighborhood in February 2006, Cao and other local residents were furious. They formed civic groups to fight back. Cao leapt into the fray, lending guidance and legal strategy to the protests. It was about this time that Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, came to a meeting at the neighborhood church. He said the Vietnamese community would have to get more involved in politics.

"Joseph raised his hand and said he would run for a state representative seat," remembers the Rev. Vien The Nguyen, pastor of the church. "Before Katrina, that might have been a little scary for us. But after Katrina, we saw new possibilities, not just as Vietnamese, but for everybody in Louisiana. Bobby Jindal [an Indian American] was governor. Besides, we were up to our eyeballs with being on the bottom of the pile all the time. Joseph stepped in with the intention of correcting the wrong."

The protest worked -- the landfill was shut down -- but the campaign flopped. Cao ran as an independent and placed fifth in a field of six. Hoang remembers him going alone to knock on doors, and how Cao and a brother put together his Web site.

"He just had no support at all," she remembers.

But Cao's bid caught the attention of Bryan Wagner, a Republican and former City Council member. Wagner -- portly, courtly, white-haired, as Southern as sweet tea -- saw Cao as the personification of the new civic loyalty after Katrina.

He persuaded Cao to join the Republican Party, then helped Cao get on local and state party leadership committees. This summer, he saw to it that Cao secured the party's nomination to challenge the scandal-plagued Jefferson. Wagner introduced Cao to the GOP national convention leaders in September and helped him raise more than $200,000 for the campaign.

Still, Jefferson was the "prohibitive favorite," as the city's main newspaper put it. He had been in office 18 years. He was the first black candidate to win the seat since Reconstruction, a fact dear to the city's 60 percent-plus black residents. And he was a Democrat, the party that had controlled the seat for more than a century.

Jefferson was first among all Democrats in the general primary and handily won a runoff in November.

But Hurricane Gustav had delayed the election cycle a month. Jefferson was vastly diminished by the scandals and was running out of money.

Cao and Wagner had been holding back during the Democratic primaries, doing almost no campaigning, rocking the opposition to sleep. Now they pounced. They poured money into media advertising, plastering signs up all over town, making the political rounds. Cao talked about good governance and levee protection. He talked about honesty. He won newspaper endorsements. He gained the support of Democrats such as Helena Moreno, who had faced Jefferson in the runoff, and City Council President Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson, a member in good standing of the city's political establishment.

It didn't hurt, as Wagner puts it, that in the 2nd District's areas outside New Orleans, where there were more Republicans and conservatives, Jefferson was "just a little less popular than [serial killer] Jeffrey Dahmer."

Final tally: Cao 33,122 votes, Jefferson 31,296.