As the Tide Turns

By Eleanor Clift

Newsweek

Updated: 5:06 p.m. ET Oct. 20, 2006

Oct. 20, 2006 - Andrew Duck is an Iraq-war veteran running for Congress in a conservative district in western Maryland. This is his first foray into politics, and when he asked his boss at Northrop Grumman if it was OK, word came back from the legislative-affairs director, “Good luck.” The company obviously thought he needed that luck. Duck says all their campaign donations went to his opponent, Republican Roscoe Bartlett. “They made the same determination as everyone else—[that] I didn’t have a chance,” laughs Duck.

That perception changed with the Mark Foley scandal about sexually explicit e-mails to teenage pages, says Duck, who grew up in the district and was 15th of 17 children in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. Everybody was a Democrat when he was a kid; then they became Reagan Republicans. Now they’re disillusioned with the GOP. The war bothers them along with the growth of government and the size of the deficit. “The only thing that kept them loyal to the Republicans was moral values,” says Duck. ”When Foley came along, that was it. I’m getting inquiries from people I never thought I’d hear from.”