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By Matthew Brown
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
After sixteen years in office, U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R) looks and acts the part of a politician.
Mild-mannered, grey haired and quick to quote biblical verses, Wolf, 59, can — and does — launch into verbal diatribes on cue. But he breaks the standard political mold in one important sense: He doesn’t toe the party line merely to please his fellow Republicans, even when that means a potential loss for his constituents.
Whether he’s criticizing the government of Sudan for persecuting religious minorities, or singing his own praises for bringing transportation dollars home to the 10th District, Wolf’s remarks are relatively free of the political double-speak common among his colleagues.
“I just hear a different drum,” Wolf said. “I do what I think is appropriate.”
Last year, “appropriate” translated into a clandestine visit to Tibet, where Wolf was able to see firsthand — and later decry in the national press — the Chinese government’s harsh treatment of Buddhist monks.
At home in the 10th District, meanwhile, the incident made barely a splash. “There’s no reason to publicize all this,” he said. “I’m not going to run for any other office.”
Marching to a different beat has gotten Wolf into trouble in the past, such as when he was one of only eight Republicans to vote against Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.
And, ironically, it may have also cost Northern Virginia some transportation dollars over the years.
Though Wolf, chairman of the House Subcommitee on Transportation Appropriations, is widely known on Capitol Hill as a pothole politician — a derogatory term he readily embraces — the congressman refuses to play the type of porkbarrel politics commonly used by others to bring pet projects to their districts.
WolFs political outlook is not exactly set in stone, however. It’s shifted subtly to the right over the years — much as his constituency did when the 10th District’s lines were redrawn following the 1990
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