Airline pilot Michael McPadden of North Garden is one of seven candidates seeking the Republican nomination to run for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District. If he wins the primary on June 8, he will go on to face incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello in November. The Fifth Congressional District covers a lot of territory – it has 21 counties and cities in a land area the size of New Jersey, making it Virginia’s largest.

McPadden spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on May 1, at the district GOP convention at Hampden-Sydney College near Farmville in Prince Edward County.

He outlined his top issues for the general election campaign.

Economy and Jobs
“That’s easy,” he said. “We have got to get this economy going. Everything hinges on the economy.

“We’ve got people out of work,” he continued, offering the example of Martinsville with unemployment above 20 percent.

McPadden explains that reducing taxes will bring jobs back. “The only thing that’s been proven to bring jobs back into our communities is drastic tax cuts across the board. Not particular taxes, all taxes. Put that money back into our communities, rebuild our communities, as we rebuild our communities businesses start to expand, [and] hire people, that’s how jobs are created.”

His number two priority, he said, is “the size and growth of government.

“If we do not cut the size and growth of government while cutting taxes,” he said, “we’re going to get larger and larger deficits, increasing the national debt. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

McPadden’s third priority is energy independence. He explained that “if we were able to switch from our economy today of sending $800 billion overseas to becoming energy independent, that $800 billion would cut our unemployment rate in half, just the money alone.”

Moreover, he said, jobs “would be created by drilling off shore: 160,000 high-tech, high-paying jobs [that] would add trillions of dollars to the revenues of the federal government, which we frankly need to pay off this national debt.”

Party Unity
Asked how he would unify the party after a possibly fractious seven-way primary, McPadden said that he will “call each of the candidates and ask them to work with me to reach out to their own supporters to get back on board. We have got to have a unified Republican field. It will take a couple of days for people to get over the loss. I know, if we don’t win this election, my supporters will be a little down for a while but we’ve got to link arms and go forward against the Democrat machine in the Fifth District and win this election.”

Protecting the Republic
On the disparate elements within the Republican party – libertarians, social conservatives, economic conservatives, and others – McPadden said that “the most important thing right now is restoring the Constitution and protecting our republic.”

The reason, he said, is that “if we lose our republic, the social conservatives will no longer have a voice in how things are going to be run from a social conservative [perspective] and neither will the libertarians.”

McPadden concluded: “That’s what the most important thing is: defending the Constitution and restoring our republic.”

Perhaps that is why McPadden defines his effort to unseat Tom Perriello as “the constitutional conservative campaign.”

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