Name: Wendell Levy Moreland
Party: GOP
District: North Carolina 6th
Born: Charlotte, North Carolina, December 26, 1953
Ethnicity: Irish/Russian/Hungarian
Education: Double Major in Business Management and Public Administration, North Carolina State University
Wendell Moreland was the quintessential Cold War child. Born in 1953, he spent his school days practicing duck and cover drills beneath his desk and his summers being douses in DDT at the public pool. Although his parents were of modest means, they forbade him from working in high school, insisting he concentrate on his studies. This paid off, as he graduated valedictorian from his high school class and received a generous scholarship to North Carolina State University. While pursuing a double major, he found it impossible to make ends meet with just his scholarships and was forced to take a job washing dishes in a nearby nursing home. This experience launched his lifelong disdain for manual labor, but laid the foundations for his future career.
Upon graduating in 1975, he transferred to another nursing home in Burlington, North Carolina, where he worked as assistant purchasing director. Ambitious and armed with the latest insights into advantageous vendor agreements he found himself director of purchasing for an entire chain of nursing homes in the Piedmont Triad. It was there that he discovered the first of three formulas that would ultimately serve him so well in politics:
1. Old people know what they want and aren't afraid to demand it.
2. They vote. A lot. For everything.
Sensing opportunity, he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1980, utilizing his contacts in the nursing home industry to win the election with a record 88 percent of the senior vote. As mayor, he found non-senior constituents to be vexing at first, until he developed his second key formula.
1. Give people what they want and they will be content.
2. Get someone else to foot for the bill however, and they will love you for it.
With all the charm and false smiles of an 80's Wall Street broker, Moreland became a master at funneling state and federal money into his city. Absolutely no possible grant money could pass by the area without Smiling Wendell explaining why a chunk of it had to go to Burlington. With his city's streets repaved, his police department in new cruisers and his City Hall using actual personal computers- all while maintaining a budget surplus- Moreland was loved by his citizens...and loathed by his neighboring mayors. Seeing the writing on the wall, and knowing he was about to be pinned up as the poster boy for pork barrel politics, Moreland went to his colleagues with an olive branch: Support him for Congress and he'd put his wheeling and dealing to use for the whole district. In one of the most shocking turn of events in American political history, reality trumped idealism and Moreland was elected to Congress in 1986 with the overwhelming support of the mayors and city councils of the Piedmont Triad.
Upon entering Congress, Moreland quickly developed his final formula for success, and has stuck to it ever since.
1. It's a real big pie out there and everyone wants a taste.
2. Red or blue, the more hands you got working together, the bigger the taste you get.