H/T Patrick P.

Sam Meas is running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional District.  It’s Massachusetts and the seat is currently held by someone with a famous last name, Nikki Tsongas, but in a year like 2010, one can’t completely rule out a longshot victory by an appealing candidate.

Could Sam Meas be such a candidate?  Honestly, the chances of him being able to raise enough money to beat an incumbent Democrat are very small.  But I just made a modest campaign contribution to do my part to help.

Meas is one of four Republican candidates in a September 14th primary election.

I became aware of Mr. Meas, whom I hope to have on my radio show in a couple of weeks, when my friend Patrick e-mailed me a link to an article entitled “D.O.B unknown – Former Cambodian orphan and refugee running for Congress“.

Meas was born in Cambodia sometime between 1970 and 1972. According to his web page, “Mr. Meas’s father was sent to be ‘re-educated’ by the Khmer Rouge and was never heard from again. During the chaos following the regime’s collapse in 1979, Mr. Meas was separated from his mother. He never saw her again. Marching night and day toward the Thai border with a cousin, Mr. Meas recalls stepping over corpses and watching bloated bodies float down jungle waterways.”

After about 6 years in a refugee camp, at about the age of 15, Meas was adopted, via Catholic Charities, by a single parent in Virginia who raised a guy who appears now to be everything that Americans should revere in their nation.  While not rich, he is nevertheless the epitome of the American Dream.

While not very political in the past, Meas helped organize Cambodian voters for Scott Brown, claiming to get about 800 votes for Brown.

Meas’ political views strike me as between conservative and libertarian, with an emphasis on “live and let live” combined with support for Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law.  He’s for cutting government spending and taxes and for defunding Obamacare in advance of repealing it.  You can read more on Meas in the article linked above and at the pages referenced below.

This sort of semi-professional video is the kind of thing that I think would have great appeal to many voters, though people in Massachusetts are not like regular Americans so it’s hard to say how they’ll react:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1hx1–c094

You can find out more about Sam Meas at his campaign page and his Facebook page and I encourage you to do so, as well as to donate to his campaign, even if it’s just a few bucks.  I have not done much homework on Mr. Meas and it’s possible that there’s some information out there about him that would make him someone I wouldn’t support.  But based on what I know how, I hope that we might be able to help him in the same way that so many people from outside Massachusetts helped Scott Brown.  I’d bet a few bucks that Mr. Meas would be a much more reliably pro-liberty member of Congress than Mr. Brown is.

Who could be more American than a Cambodian-born victim of communism who views his adoption into the USA as “going from hell to heaven” and who ends his campaign ads by saying “I’m Sam Meas. I approve this message and I approve of the American Dream."?