If you are not familiar with the story behind Jason Chaffetz and the conservative principles that motivate his candidacy, please invest the time to acquaint yourself with the Utah Republican that I consider to be a Mitt Romney clone.
~~John Cronin~~
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/285061/1/
Kate McNeil - Daily Herald
On one hand, Jason Chaffetz wants to pinch himself.
After all, the 41-year-old Alpine resident accomplished the unexpected. In the June primary, he defeated six-term incumbent Chris Cannon to become the Republican candidate for Congress in Utah’s 3rd District.
But, on the other hand, the former Brigham Young University football player expected the victory.
“I’m a very confident person,” he said. “I know if I apply myself and give it 110 percent I can do it. I don’t want to sound cocky, but if not me, who?”
A product of the West, Chaffetz was born in California, attended grade school in Arizona and graduated high school in Colorado. Recruited by then BYU football coach LaVell Edwards as a place kicker, Chaffetz joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in college and hasn’t left Utah since.
After finishing college with a degree in communications, Chaffetz joined Nu Skin as an intern. He would stay at Nu Skin for nearly 11 years, moving up the ladder and holding titles such as managing director of marketing and product development and general manager for Australia and New Zealand.
Since leaving Nu Skin in 2000, he has worked at several other companies including at Covol Fuels, now Headwaters Energy Services. He now owns his own marketing business, Maxtera, with his brother Alex. Maxtera’s clients include Ford, Omni brokerage and Orchard securities, Chaffetz said.
Chaffetz says he didn’t plan on going into politics, though he’d been involved in political campaigns, even serving as co-chairman in 1988 of Dukakis for Utah. Chaffetz’s father, John, had married and divorced Kitty Dukakis before she married then Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.
His conversion to the Republican Party happened over time, he said, starting while working during the 1988 presidential race. That’s when he says he discovered that he fit in better with Republicans. But the change was complete when he met Ronald Reagan in 1990, when Reagan came to Nu Skin as a motivational speaker.
Years later, another politician would change Chaffetz’s political life — Jon Huntsman Jr.
“… I thought I could put up a few yard signs,” he said. “That pretty much changed my life.”
In 2004, Chaffetz was angling for a job, any job, with Huntsman’s gubernatorial campaign. He had volunteered for other campaigns in previous years, including U.S. Rep. Chris Cannon’s in 1996, going so far as to write a letter to the editor lauding him as the best man for the 3rd District seat.
While Chaffetz hadn’t played a significant role in any of those previous campaigns, he was eventually chosen as Huntsman’s director of communications. Huntsman surprised him during a trip to Fillmore by asking him to take the next step and become his campaign manager. Shortly after rolling to victory in the state’s general election, Huntsman asked Chaffetz to stay on as his chief of staff, a job he freely acknowledges he wasn’t qualified for. While Huntsman would eventually tell the Deseret News in 2005 that Chaffetz was the “most gifted political strategist I have ever encountered,” his stint as chief of staff was both short and rocky.
He left after less than a year — the official line was “to pursue other business opportunities” and to nurse a badly broken foot that happened in a fall at home.
“Those two years working with Huntsman, the political bug bit me,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can do this, and I can do this better than Chris Cannon can.’”
He set his sights on defeating Cannon early.
“In early 2007 instead of riding my bike I was down in my basement, calling delegates,” he said. “More than a year before the convention I was driving to Richfield to meet three people. Good old-fashioned hard work — there’s no substitute for it.”
Statistically — 98 percent of incumbents in the House of Representatives win their races — and financially — Cannon outspent him by $600,000 — Chaffetz’s chances for victory were slim.
“We really changed the equation,” he said. “Traditionally big dollars plus big name identification might mean big victory. But now policy plus principle plus good old-fashioned hard work equals big victory.”
Chaffetz is where he is today because, as he put it, he raised his hand.
“So few people raise their hands but those that do make a big difference. A big part of my life is raising my hand when most others wouldn’t — it’s how I became place kicker, it’s how I became Jon Huntsman Jr.’s chief of staff, it’s how I became candidate, it’s how I met my wife.”
Now that he’s raised his hand to become the 3rd District’s congressman, the father of three has plans to revamp some of Cannon’s policies. His biggest plans are for immigration.
In September, the candidate faced heat for his suggestion that illegal immigrants should be detained in tent cities surrounded by barbed wire. Chaffetz says that his plan has been misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued.
“I want to enforce the law. And I’m sure that far-left, liberal Democrats like [New Mexico Gov.] Bill Richardson and Bennion Spencer don’t like it,” he said. Spencer is one of Chaffetz’s opponents in the 3rd District. “I’ve never said I want to round up people based on their ethnicity and throw them in a tent.”
He has since stated he regrets using the word “tent.”
“I can do better calling them eco-friendly, highly portable, low-cost detention facilities,” Chaffetz said. He now points to structures like those built by Utah company Sprung Instant Structures as a model. “You don’t go down to Cabela’s to get these things.”
Still, his stance on immigration remains the same, even calling for the elimination of birthright citizenship if the parents are illegal.
“We can’t reward illegal behavior,” he said. “We must hold people accountable when they break our laws. But we must also be accountable for the poor policy decisions that got us where we are. My priorities are to fix legal immigration, reject amnesty, secure the border and enforce our current laws. We must remove incentives to come here illegally and give businesses the tools to stay in compliance with the law.”
He’d also like to retool Cannon’s fiscal policies.
“Over the 12 years that he was in office, our budget doubled. There’s nothing conservative about that,” Chaffetz said. “We have to rein in spending.”
Saying that how a candidate runs his campaign is indicative of how he will be in office, Chaffetz is most proud of the fact that he has run his campaign debt free. His campaign has raised more than $359,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that tracks money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
In July, Chaffetz flew to Alaska and met with Gov. Sarah Palin to see the Artic National Wildlife Refuge and said he returned “more in favor of drilling domestically than ever.”
“We need to extract oil shale in Utah and on the continental shelf and I think we can do it in an environmentally friendly way.”
Although his opponent, Spencer, a Riverton resident, criticizes him for not living within the 3rd District, Chaffetz says, “I have a lot more in common with Utah County than anywhere else. We’re lifers here, we’re not moving.”
And while he admits confidence comes easy to him, Chaffetz said it will be humbling to represent 850,000 people.
“Hopefully I can stay grounded and represent Utah to Washington not Washington to Utah.”
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