Outrageous Attack Shows Foust Not Ready to Lead

In one sneering sentence, Fairfax Board of Supervisors member and Democratic candidate for Congress in the 10th Congressional district, John Foust demonstrated that he is not ready to lead.

“I don’t think she’s even had a real job.”

Others have asked which of Delegate Comstock’s jobs have been unreal? Based on the public record:

She is an attorney. So is John Foust.

She has been elected to the House of Delegates to represent her district three times. Foust was elected to represent his magisterial district twice.

She worked in senior level federal government positions and made partner in her private law firm. Foust was an attorney for developers.

She earned her law degree going to night school while she cared for her sons. Foust earned his law degree going to night school while he worked for C&P Telephone Companies.

As a student and young woman, she worked as a waitress, babysitter, typist, sales clerk, and more. As a young man, he worked summers in Pennsylvania steel mills and on the railroad.

So far, it looks like Foust sees his professional accomplishments as being more important than Comstock’s. The question is why? Is it because she was a full-time homemaker and part-time student while her children were young? Is it because she worked as a senior aide to Congressman Frank Wolf and in the Justice Department while he was a developer’s attorney?

Foust needs to go to school in how to respect the diversity of women’s professional accomplishments. Women’s jobs aren’t one size fits all. And surprise though it may be, women don’t always think alike, look alike, have identical interests, or vote the same way.

Here’s another news flash for the Foust campaign: Pitting women and men against each other is not the way to build a more united, more prosperous, more enjoyable 10th district.

And so far, gender warfare has been central to his campaign. Let me say that again, John Foust’s campaign has focused on what it calls “women’s priorities,” as if women have only one set of priorities… as if women’s priorities and the priorities of all people in the 10th district are somehow in competition.

So, we have to ask: what priorities?

Access to a quality education? To rewarding employment? To quality healthcare from the provider of their choice? To affordable family-friendly housing?
Reducing the regulatory burden on job creators? Ensuring that women who are trafficked aren’t prosecuted; but traffickers are?

Not as far as I can tell. Those are among Comstocks’s priorities and accomplishments. Instead, Foust has focused on a single issue: raising the cost of healthcare and reducing health care choice for everyone (aka Obamacare) and mandating birth control coverage in the process. Now there’s nothing wrong with contraceptive coverage but there is something wrong with representing it – and abortion on demand – as the sum total of women’s priorities.

I’m a woman voter in the 10th district. I don’t speak for all women. Neither does John Foust. Neither does Barbara Comstock.

But this I’ll say: women in the 10th district will be best represented by someone who knows how to create jobs, who understands how unfunded government mandates and over-regulation affect ordinary families, and who respects their freedom to set their own priorities and achieve their own dreams.

Maybe that’s why Comstock has been endorsed by groups representing job creators across Virginia, like the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

UPDATE: Post updated to include link to original reporting on Foust quote.

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