By Lingfeng Li and Trent Serwetz

As we look forward to the 2010 elections, The Gothic Guardian sat down with Frank Roche, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress representing North Carolina, for an interview.Our interview with BJ Lawson, Roche’s opponent in the Republican primary, can be found here.

The Candidate

Frank Roche values courage – he uses the word directly no less than five times during the course of an hour-long interview, and alludes to it in countless other instances.

Courage may explain his choice to run for U.S. Congress in a district that Democrats have held in a headlock for the last 20 years. It may also contextualize his decision to leave Wall Street, where he had worked as a foreign exchange trader at Societe Generale, and relocate to North Carolina. Facing buyouts from companies that had started to rely more on computer algorithms than human traders, Roche knew it was time to make a change.

Roche is running for the Republican Party’s nomination for North Carolina’s fourth congressional district. The fourth district spans part of the triangle area including much of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The democrat incumbent, David Price, has lost his seat only once since assuming office in 1987. Price, a Ph.D in Political Science from Yale University, represents the “ivory tower” opposition to Roche’s dark horse campaign.

Roche first came to the South because he was “never really enamored with being in New York City,” and he was tired of living in a cramped, 600-square foot apartment in the City lifestyle. Having spent his whole life in the Northeast – completing both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics in his home state University of Rhode Island before entering his banking career in New York – he wanted to move South. “I knew that I couldn’t look back North and East to Rhode Island or where I came from because the liberalism up there, the taxation, the imposition of our liberties, the high cost of living generally, was just offensive to me,” he says.

Roche’s responses reveal his awareness of the doubts inherent in his status as a political newcomer. He has never held a political office, so critics naturally doubt his experience. But Roche argues that his academic training in economics and Wall Street background have helped him understand global politics up close. “Every single day, analyzing data, analyzing correlations between economies, focused and watching trade relations, watching geopolitical relations, anything you can imagine that moves . . . it gave me the knowledge that I need to run for office,” he says.

In fact, Roche argues that his distance from the political history of the fourth district actually works to his benefit. “The strength it really gives me is objectivity, the ability to look at the situation in the 4th district with new eyes, not being a part of what was once there,” he says. Reveling in his political inexperience, Roche quips, “don’t call me a politician yet, wait till I get elected first, then you can call me a politician.”

Immigration and Foreign Policy

Nonetheless, during the course of the interview, Roche demonstrated his political tact, articulating clear platforms when asked about popular issues. Some answers are short: he is firmly against the Patriot Act and wants to slash federal spending at least 10 to 20 percent.

But Roche remains clear-cut even when taking controversial stances – for example, he vehemently supports U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. Roche titles the UN “an effort to create a global government and diminish national sovereignty in the United States of America.” Relying more on our existing consulates and embassies and less on the UN, he argues within his courage paradigm, is the only way for America to “move forward without restraint.”

Some of Roche’s views are more detail-oriented. When asked about his proposed two-year freeze on immigration, he discussed the problem of illegal immigration and argued at length that such a hiatus on legal immigration would give bureaucrats enough time to catch up on the backlog of immigration applications. The hiatus would provide enough time to reflect on where our current policy has taken us, Roche argues, how it may have damaged our “sense of unity.”

Another topic that stirred Roche concerns the war in Iraq (he even used to write about the subject on a personal blog). He says that though he does not support an explicit time-table for withdrawal, he recognizes that the United States should try to withdraw from the country as soon as responsibly possible. His responses are layered with a level of grit, especially on military matters. “For me, when it comes to the use of military force, I want it done aggressively, quickly, brutally, and without hesitation,” he says.

His response to the question about Iraq also reveals a deeply-rooted sense of patriotism, which is echoed in his disdain for the northeast and his continual emphasis on the importance of courage and unity. Whatever his personal feelings are towards Iraq, Roche believes that he should always support the President’s decision. “I am of the mind once the President of the United States whoever he or she is makes the decision to put our armed forces at risk, I get behind it right away,” he says.
Personally, Roche argues that “a strong military focused on defending our corporate interests and our national interests is all that it should be there for.” He doesn’t see America as the global policeman, but argues that we should respond to international threats with containment and deterrence. “Try to fire one nuclear weapon towards our nation and we will destroy you,” he says, taking a reserved but hard-line approach.

The Primary Race

The other topic that prompted an adversarial tone from Roche concerned his opponent in the Republican primary, BJ Lawson. Lawson ran for Congress in the 4th district in 2008, winning only 36 percent of the vote against David Price1. Initially, Lawson again looked to be the frontrunner for the Republican ticket in 2010, but he dropped out of the race for some months before reentering.

This inconsistency, Roche says, is among the reasons why he has reservations about Lawson’s candidacy. Another point of contention between the two — the primary one, according to Roche — centers around Lawson’s campaign against the Federal Reserve. Lawson supports both the dissolution of the Federal Reserve and the use of localized currency, two ideas of which Roche disapproves. “It implies for a guy who supports the US Constitution, that he really doesn’t support the US Constitution because the US Constitution is about a federalist republic based on unity and one big giant nation,” he says. Emphasizing unity, Roche calls the dissolution of the Federal Reserve “a dangerous way to go.”

Roche also takes issue with Lawson’s socially progressive views, calling him a “progressive” candidate whose views shed doubt on his status as a republican. Despite endorsements from Presidential candidate Ron Paul, Roche says that Lawson was just as unsuccessful in 2008 as his predecessors at unseating the incumbent Price. “If we continue on that path,” Roche says, “we will continue to lose to David Price.”

For his own campaign, Roche has chosen to steer focus away from his views on social issues. He says that “[leading with social issues] has been hurting Republicans for election cycle after election cycle,” taking away from the more important issues of jobs, taxes, healthcare, and education. Roche’s social views fit more of a typical conservative profile, for example, he is pro life. But he says it is not the content of his views but his willingness to put social issues on the backburner that makes him “a different Republican.”

Against David Price

Since Price’s only congressional defeat versus Republican Fred Heineman, North Carolina’s 4th district has been redrawn. The inclusion of more of Durham county and less of Wake county, Roche says, has helped to prevent a repeat of Heineman’s 1995 upset. Roche’s plan to counter Price’s incumbency stems from his background in statistical analysis: “targeted campaigning.”

Roche advocates a careful plan for congressional campaigning — “knowing who votes, when they vote, how often they vote, what the issues of concern are to people” are his keys to victory. Dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party is at such a height that Roche feels his campaign will attract even “southern democrats, conservative democrats,” for whom the party is moving in an unacceptable direction. “I know exactly where we need to go to get the votes to win,” Roche says, citing the centrality of intelligent spending to his campaign plan.

Answering whether or not he, as a former New York banker, will be able to connect with Main Street America, Roche is confident that he is sufficiently distanced from the investment banking culture that has garnered so much flak in recent years. “I was never a CEO, I never received a 7 figure bonus,” he says. And while Societe Generale participated in the derivatives trading, Roche says Wall Street is not solely responsible for the housing crisis.

Ultimately, the issues all seem to lead back to courage for Roche. He repeatedly stresses the need for a “new courageous kind of determination from a candidate,” the ability to take clear initiative in important decisions. He remarks on the importance of having “the courage to say the words to every single American citizen, [deficit spending] must stop,” invoking courage as both the impetus and paradigm for his 2010 Congressional campaign.

1 “North Carolina Election Results 2008.” New York Times, December 09, 2008.