Mia Love: The Rise, Stumble and Resurgence of the Next GOP Star

By Matt Canham

In 2014, Mia Love made history by becoming the first black Republican woman elected to Congress, and she accomplished this feat in Utah.
The story of how she did it begins in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, during the reign of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, one of the world’s most reviled dictators. It continues in suburban Connecticut, where she reveled in musical theater. And after her conversion to Mormonism it shifts to Utah, where a political awakening led her first to the city council in Saratoga Springs and then the halls of Congress.
In this political biography, Salt Lake Tribune reporters Matt Canham, Robert Gehrke and Thomas Burr explore the defining moments in her life, illuminated through dozens of interviews with Mia, her family, those closest to her and those critical of her.
She's dynamic, comfortable in the spotlight, and if you're interested in politics, you're likely to see a lot of her in the years to come. But Mia’s political success wasn't preordained.
During her first congressional campaign, she was forced to replace key staff members, spent too much time campaigning for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and her polls were flawed. Still, she lost to a well-known Democratic incumbent by three tenths of one percent.
In less than two months, she returned to the campaign trail and marched to victory. She’ll take the oath of office in January 2015, joining a House Republican caucus that wants to increase its appeal to minorities and women. Mia Love says she aims to be front and center in Washington, representing her state and her party, as the next GOP star.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Canham
• Release date: Nov 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780986224508

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Mia Love

The Rise, Stumble

and Resurgence

of the Next GOP Star

By Matt Canham

with Robert Gehrke and Thomas Burr

Copyright 2014 The Salt Lake Tribune

www.sltrib.com

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Becoming American

3. Stepping on stage

4. Finding love and faith

5. A political awakening

6. The nominee

7. Triumph and turmoil

8. Down to the wire

9. The front-runner

10. The national stage

Notes and Sources

Acknowledgements

Introduction

On the campaign trail in 2014, Mia Love would recast the story of David and Goliath as a political tale. In her analogy, she and her supporters were like David running at the imposing giant that represented the federal bureaucracy, the debt and the health care law despised by Republicans.

Will you run with me? she’d ask, emphasizing each word, her shoulders back, her eyes defiant. Conservative crowds loved it, but almost without fail, someone would lean toward a neighbor and whisper, Yeah, but in this race, she’s the Goliath.

On Election Day, Mia was able to persuade the state’s Republican majority to run with her in Utah’s 4th Congressional District. She narrowly defeated Democrat Doug Owens and in the process made history. She’ll be the first black Republican woman in Congress, and the first Haitian-American.

Her victory was predictable, but her backstory has surprises and misfires.

How did this woman from a proud Catholic family convert to Mormonism and leave Connecticut for Utah?

How did this aspiring Broadway performer with no grasp of or interest in current events become a mayor and then a congresswoman-elect?

How did this rising political star lose her first congressional race when she had plenty of campaign cash, a district tailor-made for a GOP win and the help of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee whose brand is without equal in Utah?

And now that she’s won the seat, how will she balance the national attention with the needs of the people back home?

A news article is often called the first draft of history. This is The Salt Lake Tribune’s second draft, a deeper look at the major events that brought Mia Love to the halls of Congress.

After initial resistance, Mia and her husband, Jason, other family members and campaign aides sat for in-depth interviews. We talked to her rivals and adversaries, we scoured her record and, in limited cases, we’ve given sources anonymity to get behind-the-scenes details without exposing them to a political backlash.

Mia understands why she has so suddenly emerged on the national stage. She recognizes the Republican Party has a problem attracting women and minority voters and that party leaders see her as an ideal ambassador. She’s tried to capitalize on her race and gender when raising money throughout the nation for her congressional campaigns.

At the same time, she sees the moniker the first black Republican woman in the House as limiting. Mia and Jason Love believe she could help change the conversation in Washington and attract a new generation of Republicans, who, like her, want to move as much decisionmaking as possible from Washington to states and cities.

She aspires to be a leader of a movement, not its mascot.

I am no good to you if I am one vote of 435, she often says, promising a congressional career where she is the public face of the party rather than a legislative tactician drafting bills.

She’s always felt comfortable in the spotlight — and craved it — starting with performing living-room talent shows with her big sister and, later, twirling a rifle during halftime in a crowded football stadium. She’s felt the adulation that comes from an audience moved by her singing. She’s felt the electricity in a crowd when she delivers a powerful political speech.

Mia has used her stage presence to take advantage of the unusually high-profile opportunities that have come her way — Sunday political talk shows and a prime-time appearance at the Republican National Convention before she ever won office. If she were Mia Love, the white mayor of little Saratoga Springs, Utah, those things likely never would have happened.

And yet she downplays race at every turn. She says she’s never experienced racism in Utah, where the black population is less than 1.5 percent. Instead, she’s heard the occasional odd comment. The difference, she believes, is her mindset.

I don’t walk around with a victim attitude, Mia said, noting that even if she found out someone treated her differently because she is black, she wouldn’t get upset. That’s not my problem, that’s their problem.

She credits her parents with teaching her to be comfortable in her skin and for all of the life lessons that led her to see the world through a conservative lens.

Her parents — in particular, her father — are the central figures in her political-origin story.

Mia mentions her parents in every speech, never failing to say she is the daughter of immigrants who came to this country with just $10 in search of the American Dream. Maxime and Marie Bourdeau fled an impoverished nation ruled by a murderous dictator to start a new life, while their two young children stayed behind with relatives.

I think it is kind of momentous when you think about what they were willing to leave behind to come to this land of opportunity, said Mia, who was born in the United States. It actually gives me goosebumps and leaves me a little teary-eyed because I don’t know if I could make that type of sacrifice. If you think about what they were willing to do to give their children opportunities, I get really emotional just thinking about it.

Mia also peppers her speeches with wisdom passed down by her father. At one major rally during the 2014 election, where Romney and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert appeared on her behalf, her campaign put a banner with her image stage left and this quote from her father stage right: Mia, your mother and I never took a handout. You will not be a burden to society. You will give back.

Maxime and Marie did not attend that rally and are rarely present at her political events. When they do make an appearance, they are shielded from reporters. Mia is deeply uncomfortable with reporters talking to her parents. When The Tribune sent a reporter to their doorstep, Marie Bourdeau declined to talk, but Maxime gave what remains the only extensive interview he’s given.

He discussed his unusual childhood in Haiti and how he forged a new life in New York. He spoke about raising Mia and watching her take an unexpected turn into politics, which he has relished. One topic he didn’t want to talk about in detail is exactly how he became an American, and neither did his daughter. It leaves Mia open to questions about how her immigration stance squares with her family’s experience.

What Maxime was willing to share, though, sheds light on his hasty departure from Haiti and the lofty, near-religious faith he holds in the promise of America, the kind that ends up being the centerpiece of a congressional campaign.

Becoming American

Mia Love, her father, Maxime Bourdeau, and daughter Abigail hug after she is sworn is as mayor of Saratoga Springs.

Maxime Bourdeau celebrated the 40th anniversary of his immigration from Haiti in 2014. He arrived with little money but a wealth of optimism and resolve. His wife, Marie, joined him months later, and relatives helped ease their transition.

The Bourdeaus haven’t been clear about the details of their visas; the comments they’ve made have been contradictory. But they agree that Mia’s birth helped them remain in this country, and eventually, gain citizenship.

My parents have always told me I was a miracle and our family’s ticket to America, Mia said.

Maxime put it this way: I always tell Mia, ‘You are my gift because you are born here.’ … Mia is a citizen born in this country and at that time the country was favorable for children.

It appears they are referring to a lenient immigration law that was set to expire on Jan. 1, 1976, just 25 days after Mia was born. It benefitted immigrants from within the Western Hemisphere who had a child in the United States. Her family would have been allowed to register her birth with the State Department and get preferential treatment in getting green cards, or permanent resident status, for the entire family, according to Margaret Stock, a Harvard-educated immigration attorney now living in Alaska. Since at least 1924, the law has generally barred minor children from petitioning for permanent status for their parents.

This was a very unique, unusual provision of the law that only existed briefly, she said.

Mia has said her parents entered the country with tourist visas. If true, there’s a flaw in her oft-repeated narrative that her family never ran afoul of U.S. immigration law. Tourist visas are short-term, and recipients are not allowed to work. Her parents had been in the country for two years by the time Mia was born, and they had jobs.

Maxime says he came here on a residence visa with the help of his family and that it allowed him to work legally. He recalls only that he signed the papers immigration agents asked him to sign and he provided the information they wanted. He never really understood the system or how it worked.

The family declined when asked to petition the federal government for the release of Bourdeau’s immigration file.

Opponents have used the ambiguity to accuse Mia of being an anchor baby, a derisive and debasing term. Mia dismisses talk of her parents’ legal status as irrelevant: The United States government granted them citizenship, the trump card to end the conversation.

Maxime is 70 years old now, although he looks to be in his 50s. Only his cloudy, watery eyes betray his years. He’s gregarious and proud, a storyteller who peppers his sentences with you know what I mean when he’s searching for an elusive word in English, his third language.

A couple of years ago, he retired from a lifetime of maintenance jobs that allowed him to emerge out of poverty into a comfortable middle-class life. He still likes to tinker.

When inviting a reporter into his Stratford, Conn., home two months before the midterm election, he apologized and made room to sit at the kitchen table by pushing aside a dismantled water dispenser from his refrigerator that he was fixing, and an old worn Freemason handbook.

His white house sits on a corner lot in a middle-class neighborhood about halfway between Hartford, the state capital, and New York City. The walls hold art evoking his home country, such as one painting showing a woman balancing a basket on her head, along with numerous family photos, mostly of his three adult children.

As soon as his kids were old enough to listen, he told them they had to go to college and make a better, easier life than their parents had.

Those children graduated from college long ago. They have families and careers. They appear happy. What more could a father ask?

Maxime says he has lived his dream — and recently he has developed a new one.

He envisions his daughter Mia slowly gaining influence within Congress, reaching a position that allows her to nudge and nurture Haiti toward a future with less poverty and more stability. For a man who smiles easily and often, this dream unfolds on his face in the biggest of grins.

If, at some time in the future, Mia could make her country become my country, to bring a change in Haiti so people could have a better life, that would be noble and the name of the family would go far, he says.

He sees her collaborating with Haitian President Michel Martelly, who is nicknamed Sweet Micky from his days as a musician. Maxime considers Martelly an honorable man, a politician who is trying to help the people.

I want Mia to meet him, to talk to him, help him to bring the country where he want to bring it, he said. It’s only America that give me that child. She is my hope. To see if she is in power, what she can do for Haiti.

No country in the Western Hemisphere is poorer than Haiti. Almost 60 percent of its people live on less than $2 a day, and this widespread poverty has persisted for decades. A devastating earthquake in 2010 reduced many of the cinderblock homes to rubble and set back any hope for a modern-day revival.

This small country between Cuba and Puerto Rico shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and has an outsized place in world history.

Christopher Columbus and his crew landed here on Dec. 6, 1492, and the native Taíno welcomed their unexpected guests with a gift of gold. Spain assumed the island was brimming with the precious metal, and the explorers quickly made Hispaniola a Spanish colony.

Within five years, hundreds of thousands of native people would die, most from diseases such as smallpox. Many others committed suicide or were slain fighting the colonists who enslaved them. The Taíno as a people were wiped out.

When the gold mines, never prolific, ran dry, Spain’s interest waned. The island was largely abandoned by the conquering nation and became a haven for pirates, many from France. Eventually the two world powers split the island, with Spain keeping what is now the Dominican Republic.

France claimed the half that would become Haiti, turning it into vast farms using slave labor to produce sugar cane, coffee, indigo and cotton. So rich was the bounty that these colonists dubbed the island the pearl of the Antilles.

But when Haiti’s slaves learned of the French Revolution, they revolted. On Jan. 1, 1804, Haiti became the world’s first black republic.

While free, the nation never found a political equilibrium. Skin color still marked an ingrained class system. Mulattos were often well-off and held key positions in business, politics and the military, while the black masses were mostly poor and repressed. The two groups would struggle for power over the next century and beyond.

From the slave-led revolution to 1915, Haiti had 26 presidents. The military overthrew 14, three were assassinated, one committed suicide, six died in office and only two served a full term and left willingly.

After a string of military coups, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam held the Haitian presidency for all of five months before being assassinated in 1915. Concerned that Germans were trying to control Haiti amid the political unrest, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent in Marines to restore order. The United States took control of the country’s finances, merged some of its troops with the Haitian military and forced the election of a mulatto president it could control.

The U.S. occupation brought some stability to the island but didn’t solve Haiti’s poverty or social disparities. After the United States eventually left, a young man named François Duvalier emerged to lead a black-power movement that would give him total control of Haiti.

Duvalier was just 8 years old when the United States took control. The son of a teacher and baker, he grew up near the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, but his family wasn’t part of Haiti’s elite.

He watched as people began to resist the U.S. presence and the mulatto leaders the Americans propped up. He began writing articles for an anti-occupation newsletter that encouraged worker strikes and uprisings, which eventually persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to withdraw in 1934 and let Haitians again govern themselves. During those years, Duvalier also went to college and then the University of Haiti’s School of Medicine.

The same year the United States pulled back, Duvalier became a doctor and began his residency at the teaching hospital attached to the school. It was here that he’d meet and later marry Simone Faine, a nurse. They eventually had four children.

He left the hospital in 1943 to study public health at the University of Michigan for a year, then returned to Haiti for a post with the U.S. Army medical mission. Fighting the spread of malaria and a tropical infection of the skin and joints called yaws, he traveled through Haiti’s rural areas, helping poor black people who lovingly dubbed him Papa Doc. But he was stung by racist comments from members of the U.S. military.

He began studying voodoo, the native religion practiced largely in the rural and poorer areas of the country, and he steeped himself in racially charged politics, encouraging blacks to band together to wrest power from the mulattos.

Rallying black nationalists and voodoo practitioners, Papa Doc Duvalier won the 1957 presidential election in a landslide. The second-place contender, from the country’s more established aristocracy, couldn’t muster half the votes that Duvalier received.

Duvalier set a benevolent tone in his first presidential address: For a long time now the Haitian people have been associated with suffering; this is an image that must be destroyed.

But almost immediately, he showed his true intentions: holding power, even if it meant terrorizing his own people to do it. Papa Doc would become one of the world’s most reviled dictators, setting a course that would drive hundreds of thousands to flee Haiti. Maxime Bourdeau and his family would be among them.

Maxime was 13 years old when Duvalier became president. His upper-middle-class parents, Jean Marc and Madeleine Bourdeau, managed a family-owned plantation on the outskirts of Jérémie, known as the city of poets.

If you think of Haiti as a boot, the capital, Port-au-Prince, nestles in the curve where the ankle meets the foot. Jérémie rests atop the big toe, 177 miles away. The coastal city felt even more remote because the road to Port-au-Prince was rutted and hard to cross.

Maxime was born on Jan. 5, 1944, the second of seven children and first of two boys. The Bourdeau children didn’t work on the plantation, where hired hands harvested sugar cane, bananas and yucca and raised goats, pigs and cows.

Instead, Maxime and his siblings lived with his aunt in Jérémie, where he went to school with other privileged children. He played volleyball and soccer, mixing in with children from mulatto families.

During summers and school breaks, Maxime would play on his family’s vast farm, sometimes shimmying up a tree to pluck a coconut. Or he’d dive in the nearby ocean for conch shells.

Haiti couldn’t live up to its constitutional mandate to provide a free education for its young people, and school never became a cultural norm. When Maxime was a student, only about one in five children attended public schools, let alone made it through high school. Maxime dropped out when he was 16.

Papa Doc Duvalier knew his Haitian history. The Army was the nation’s most powerful institution, and it had a history of removing presidents who tried to cling to power. So he weakened the Army by removing its top leaders and creating his own security force — the Tonton Macoutes. The term means Uncle Knapsack in Creole, and it refers to an old Haitian tale about a bogeyman who hunts down bad children and kidnaps them in a bag.

These Duvalier loyalists, many of them voodoo practitioners, were provided blue denim uniforms and guns. Some wore tin helmets, others cowboy hats. Duvalier gave the Tonton Macoutes license to bully, extort and, if people resisted, to murder. They targeted Communists and the educated, trade unions and even the Boy Scouts — anyone who would defy the president. In all, 30,000 Haitians are believed to have died at the hands of Duvalier’s henchmen.

Papa Doc declared that he’d been unanimously re-elected in the fall of 1961. It was an audacious fraud. His name was the only one on ballots for the presidency, along with his hand-picked candidates for legislative posts. Two years later, he forced through a resolution naming him president for life and empowering him to pick his successor.

The government promoted Papa Doc as a man with supernatural, even divine, powers and created a new version of the Lord’s Prayer for children to read in school: Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country. …

Duvalier faced at least nine invasions from these anti-patriots, largely Haitian exiles hoping to spark a rebellion.

In one of the most prominent attacks, 13 Haitian guerrillas landed at Cap Dame Marie on the southern peninsula in August 1964 and launched a fight with the government that lasted nearly three months. They dubbed their rebellion Jeune Haiti, or young Haiti, and they tried to rally the peasants to their cause.

When they failed, Papa Doc was merciless. He had one militant’s body shipped to Port-au-Prince and strung up across from the Welcome to Haiti sign at the airport, where it was left to rot.

Two others were executed by firing squad outside the national cemetery in November. Papa Doc closed government offices and schools and bused in hundreds of people to watch.

For those who couldn’t view the executions, the government made pamphlets that read: "Dr. François Duvalier will fulfill his sacrosanct mission. He has crushed and will always crush