When the Senior Statesmen of Virginia hosted their eighth biennial Fifth District congressional candidates’ forum on August 11, one of the participants was independent challenger Jeffrey Clark of Danville.

Clark is running against Democratic incumbent Representative Tom Perriello of Ivy and a Republican challenger, state Senator Robert Hurt of Chatham. Clark and Perriello, but not Hurt, chose to attend the forum.

Prior to the start of the debate, Clark spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his political philosophy and the issues he’s emphasizing in his campaign for Congress.

“Limited government, lower taxes, and ensuring individual personal liberties and freedom” are his top three issues, Clark said.

Earning Libertarian Votes
Addressing how he would earn the votes of libertarian voters in the Fifth District, Clark noted that “like most conservatives, when you take the libertarian test, I skew very high on the libertarian scale.” By “libertarian test,” he was referring to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which was developed by the late Marshall Fritz and Advocates for Self-Government as a way to overlay political beliefs on the two-dimensional Nolan Chart, which is superior to the one-dimensional left-right spectrum usually employed to explain political leanings.

“As a matter of fact,” Clark continued, “I took a libertarian test with the Libertarian candidate running out of Roanoke,” Sixth District candidate Stuart Bain, “and ironically we scored the same exact number on the test. He got a laugh out of that.”

Clark pointed out his disagreement with some aspects of the Libertarian Party platform, then softened his response.

“Maybe not” disagreement, he said, but he just doesn’t think “the country’s in the position to accept those points of view. In an ideal situation, in an ideal format, yes, the idea of individual responsibility, liberty and freedom experienced to its utmost, while still understanding the importance of an established republic, I think those are great views and I think a lot of libertarians will find things in my platform and where I stand to be important to them.”

Breaking the Duopoly
Clark suggested that third parties – mentioning specifically the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party – “need to realize the only way they’re going to break this duopoly” of Republicans and Democrats is to “find a way to put aside some of their disagreements, find the portions of their platforms they can agree on, and then start to work[together] on the local level, state level, and even federal level.”

Clark said he doesn’t have “any party affiliation, and I kept it that way on purpose. Not because I don’t think that I could identify with a party, [but] I just think that parties can be prone to falling into the same trap that the two major parties are falling into.”

“If we can get a few independents in Congress,” Clark argued, “people can see that our government isn’t going to grind to a halt, the world’s not going to end, that independents can have a voice, [and] they can get up there and effectively govern. I think it will open the door to more independent points of view.”

He asked: “Who knows? Maybe the Libertarian Party will benefit the most from that at first. Maybe it’ll be the Constitution Party. Who knows?”

He suggested that what will “happen is it breaks that duopoly. It shows that we can move in a different direction, we can do something different, and really the power lies with us.”

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