The Corner

Meet Cuccinelli

Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia attorney general and GOP gubernatorial candidate, is well known for his conservativism and opposition to Obamacare. But he’s also a sometimes goofy (and generally, surprisingly relaxed) politician, a dad of seven children, a basketball fan, and a long-time volunteer for various causes. From my profile of him today:

[Cuccinelli] and his wife, Teiro, have seven children, ranging from three years old to college age. “Going home” is his favorite part about having so many kids. “It’s a great arrival when they’re up, which is most days,” he says. “It’s wonderful. I don’t even know how to describe it.” ..

The five oldest children are daughters; the two youngest, who tussle occasionally, are boys. (Cuccinelli jokingly refers to one of his sons as “Osama bin Cute-in” because he’s a “domestic terrorist.”) Cuccinelli insists that he generally does not, as do the fathers of some large families I know, accidentally call his children by the wrong name. “The two there used to be a problem with were [daughters] Riley and Reagan,” he reminisces. “We named two children in a row with the same first letter. It never occurred to me this would be a problem, but in that period of their lives where I needed to yell at them a lot, then it was a problem,” he says lightly, before launching into an imitation of how he would shout their names.

Cuccinelli has volunteered for a variety of causes: “food drives, tutoring in high school, sexual-assault prevention in college, coached a basketball team.” As a law student at George Mason University, he occasionally helped at a shelter for the homeless on cold nights. He’d go in around 9 p.m. and, after sleeping some, make breakfast and talk with the people there. They would converse, he remembers, about “everything you can imagine,” including sports. Sometimes they would play cards. The purpose of the shelter was to “give them a respite more than anything.”

Read the whole piece here

 

Katrina TrinkoKatrina Trinko is a political reporter for National Review. Trinko is also a member of USA TODAY’S Board of Contributors, and her work has been published in various media outlets ...
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