The most interesting person I’ve met at the Faith & Freedom Conference has to be Brian Hegerty, one of around 50 New Jersey conservatives who came to D.C. to support longshot congressional candidate Anna Little. (What “longshot” means this year is up for discussion; at least Little supporter buttonholed Karl Rove to inform him of how winnable the race was.) Hegerty, a construction contractor, is in Washington today for this event, in New York City tomorrow for the protest against the “ground zero mosque,” and back in Washington on Sunday for the FreedomWorks 9/12 rally. How does he do it?
“I got laid off!” he said. “How do you think?”
Hegerty told me that he’d been busier and busier with political activism since 2008, and that after he was filmed “giving [congressman] Rush Holt a piece of my mind,” he was invited on Fox News to talk about it. He was fired shortly after that.
“That’s funny, huh?” he said. “I’m not saying that was why I got canned, though. There’s 5000 other guys who got laid off who weren’t on Fox News.”
Hegerty told me that his fellow Little supporters had taken the week off from campaigning; at the ground zero protest, they were waiting until the official remembrance ceremony to end before rallying, “because we don’t want to dishonor the day.” He wasn’t worried about the GOP winning Congress (“there’s no way the Democrats win, no way”) and he wasn’t quite sure why the rest of the country thought Chris Christie was a rock-solid conservative.
“I want to see him sign up on repealing ObamaCare,” said Hegerty. “I want him to get rid of the cap-and-trade we have in New Jersey. There’s a lot he’s not doing.”