McIntosh forgoes re-election to Congress to run for governor

Everything in his life pointed to politics -- conservative politics -- but David McIntosh never planned to be a politician. \nNow, Congressman McIntosh, R-2nd, 41, is Indiana's Republican nominee for governor.\nMcIntosh moved with his mother, two sisters and brother from California to Kendallville, Ind., when he was 5. His father, Norman, had died of stomach cancer and his mother, Jean, wanted to be closer to her two brothers.\nIn Kendallville, he and his siblings rode bikes around the neighborhood. He recalls that they prided themselves on knowing every street, and the neighbors looked out for each other. McIntosh didn't play many sports, but he did enjoy riding his bike, studying American history and being on the debate team, he said.\n"As I look back, many of the things I took for granted then really shaped the way I am today," McIntosh said.\nHis mother was the city judge, and he followed her when she went campaigning. McIntosh didn't plan to follow her political footsteps, but he said he enjoyed the trips they made.\nHis mother's lessons laid the framework for his conservative views.\n"She always encouraged me to be looking out for my younger brother and sisters," McIntosh said. "What I realized then was those ties in the family are critical.… That bond of love is something that is unique and needs to be fostered." \nEven though McIntosh developed his conservative, pro-family philosophy long before replacing his backpack with a briefcase. His mother, the city judge, raised him as a Democrat, and even though he did not plan to enter politics, he thought he would always pull the lever on the left, until he got to college.\nMcIntosh graduated among the top of his class at East Noble High School and went to Yale. He said he realized that his pro-family, Christian perspective was too conservative to fit in with Democrats. \n"I thought I was a Democrat and liberal, and then I went to college and realized my views were conservative," he said. "I had a strong faith and belief in freedom and free markets."\nIn 1980, he voted for Ronald Reagan. He still didn't plan to enter politics, but in a few years he would be working for Reagan.\nAfter graduating from law school at the University of Chicago, one of McIntosh's friends told him about a job opening in the U.S. Attorney General's office. McIntosh hadtrained under Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and he was interested in constitutional law. He ended up in the Justice Department and worked on domestic policy in Reagan's White House. Later, he worked with Vice President Dan Quayle. \nWhen the Democrats won the White House in 1992, McIntosh went to work with Quayle at a conservative think tank in Indianapolis, and he married Ruthie McManus in 1993. \n "He sat next to my mother at an Episcopal church in Virginia," she said. "She talked his ear off and dragged him across the courtyard to introduce us."\n His humility also drew Ruthie's attention to her future husband. When she asked where he went to college, he told her it was a school in Connecticut. Later, she found out it was Yale. \n "He was the master of understatement," she said. "So many people had bragged who had no right to brag, and he had bragging rights and he didn't use them."\n The couple settled in Muncie. The next year, McIntosh -- with the full support of his wife -- won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. \n "Every wife has a different role," she said. "I try to just be in the audience when he's talking and give him a great, huge smile ... I have no agenda other than loving him."\nMcIntosh said his first priority is his family.\n"I realized probably after the first couple years of marriage that if it meant giving up a career in politics for my wife and my family then I would do that," McIntosh said.\nApplying his family focus to policy, he wants to abolish the marriage tax. \n"Financial pressures are one of the big reasons families break up, and the government doesn't need to be one of those pressures," he said. "I don't want to create a situation where if you get a divorce you get a tax break."\nAnd the marriage tax is not the only tax he wants to cut. McIntosh is avid about cutting property taxes. \nThe best governments allow people to be free, McIntosh said. The government should protect the economy and provide a safety net where necessary.\n"If I were on welfare I would not want a handout," he said, "but I would want somebody to be there when I'm completely penniless."\nFaith-based groups and other organizations usually fill that role better, though, McIntosh said.\nWhen he was 25, McIntosh volunteered to work with teenagers in a church youth group. He said he saw both the painful effects bad families can have on children and the powerful effects churches and families can have.\n"Part of government and politics is taking some of those values and experiences and finding out how to use them to help people," he said.\nPeople who help him campaign see how much he believes in the policies. \n"I think he's a very solid man with strong convictions, a strong moral basis," junior Anne Scuffham, who works for the McIntosh campaign as the youth coordinator for IU.