Bill Thomas for Congress, 2010 election, Republican Primary September 14, Maryland's 8th District, Montgomery County

About Bill Thomas

If you had asked me a year ago what I'd be doing today, running for Congress wouldn't even be on the list. But watching the direction the country is taking changed me from political observer to political participant, determined to do something about this government 's irresponsible spending and dangerous foreign policy.

Part of that determination comes from the fact that I grew up in Maryland's 8th District. My wife Irina and I live in Chevy Chase, where she's a businesswoman and our children attended public schools.

My parents, who moved here from Chicago, were civil servants. My father worked for the Treasury Department and my mother worked part-time for the Agriculture Department while raising my brother, two sisters and me. A paper route helped to pay my way through DeMatha High School. Then, after a year at the University of Maryland, my real education began. The first lesson came, as a member of the United Auto Workers union, on an assembly line at a General Motors plant in Oakland, California.

Under the circumstances it didn't take long to realize the importance of learning. I returned to the University of Maryland, where I graduated with a degree in English. I pursued a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, and for the next five years was an assistant professor of literature at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Hood College in Frederick, and Goucher College in Baltimore.

Leaving academia in my early thirties, I began a career in journalism. Starting at Congressional Quarterly, I have written about Congress and the White House for more than 25 years. I've been a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, a columnist for Roll Call and The Hill newspapers and an editor for the London-based Economist Group. Currently, I'm a contributing writer for The Washington Post Magazine.

You can find my work in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic and many other publications. Assignments have taken me from street demonstrations in Iran to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. I covered the turbulent 1991 communist coup attempt in Moscow and reported on civil wars in three former Soviet republics. More recently I have written about the U.S.-Mexico border, events in South Africa and unrest in the Republic of Georgia.

I've also published several books, among them: Lawyers and Thieves (Simon & Schuster); Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the New Russia (Dutton); and Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill (Scribner's).

Since the late 1990s, I have been a moderator and speaker at dozens of national security training programs for the Defense Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. In that time I have met some of the most brilliant minds in the county. But you don't have to be an intelligence expert to see that our nation is veering badly off course.

As you can tell, I am not a professional politician. I'm a concerned citizen who can no longer watch the destructive growth of government and elected officials who say one thing and do the opposite. With your support in the Republican Primary on Tuesday, September 14, together we will have accountable government in Washington and an end to machine politics in Maryland's 8th District.