Surovell offers another example: “A
couple months ago, when he had start- ed doing a lot of things, I said to him, ‘Ken, my constituents are not happy with what they’re hearing about you.’ “He said, ‘Tell them to make sure they vote next time.’ ”
Cuccinelli’s boyhood geography was defined by a stretch of Kirby Road in Fairfax, just over the border from Arlington, in a middle-class neighbor- hood where he spent his days playing pickup sports and roaming the woods. The address was McLean, but given the chance, Cuccinelli would qualify those elite-sounding roots: “I’m from the wrong side of the tracks in McLean.” The family had moved from a town
near Edison, N.J., where his parents owned a heating and cooling business, when Cuccinelli was about 2. His father, a chemical engineer, took a job with the American Gas Association. During the transition, their health insurance briefly lapsed, and Cuccinelli’s mother became seriously ill. Once sick, she couldn’t get insurance. She recovered after months of hospital treatments, but the expense was a heavy burden, he says. Wouldn’t the health-care reform law
he now opposes solve such problems? “My parents would not then, nor
now, take the help offered by the feder- al health-care bill at a cost of giving up their freedom or forcing other Ameri-
“His priorities are
God, me, the children and everything else,” Teiro Cuccinelli says. “What makes him
more than what people perceive is his very deep-rooted emotion.”
cans to give up theirs, just so that my family would have been spared the fi- nancial hardship,” Cuccinelli says. The oldest of three brothers, Cuc-
cinelli was competitive, a bit bossy, as hard on himself as anyone. “When he was doing projects at school, everything had to be just perfect,” says his brother Kevin, a doctor in rural Colorado. “He would get frustrated because, guess what, he’s human.” The family did not yet have a fixed
political identity. Cuccinelli’s mother dabbled in Democratic precinct poli- tics. But the parents passed down their strong Catholic faith. They sent their sons to Gonzaga College High School for the Jesuit education, but also be- cause they thought Fairfax County was
not the “real world,” Ken Cuccinelli says. Gonzaga was more diverse than his neighborhood suburban schools, he recalls, and was located on North Capitol Street, with a homeless shelter attached. Gonzaga is where, Cuccinelli says, he became the person he is. “I actually consciously thought about,
Where am I? Where do I want to be? How do I want to get there? What are the important things?” he says. “Faith was at the top, and at Gonzaga you’d ex- pect that. But what does that mean in the real world? And we’d talk about it at Gonzaga.” Every student took a course in social justice, where he was taught theories of putting compassion into ac- tion. Cuccinelli tutored middle school students from the D.C. public schools. Another side of his personality, the
performer and occasionally corny cru- sader, also took shape at Gonzaga. The students would gather in a quadrangle for pep rallies. High on a third-floor fire escape, banging a big drum and leading the cheers, was Gonzaga’s mascot, the Eagle, who on game day wore a fiercely beaked and feathered purple and white body suit. Cuccinelli was the Eagle. “That’s a big deal,” says Joseph
Dempsey, the former dean of students. “They’re not going to put a shrinking violet in there. They’re going to pick someone who will put on that stupid costume and go at it 100 miles an hour for the whole football game.”
some observers have been surprised that the Cuccinellis did not move to Richmond. But the Cuccinellis’ home in Prince William County is on 10 acres and is near the Catholic school one of their daughters attends.
august 1, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine
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