November’s midterm elections were disastrous for Democrats. But even the darkest days have their bright spots—and one of those for Democrats was Christopher Van Hollen, who was one of only two Democratic challengers to defeat a House Republican incumbent. Now that Van Hollen is in office, representing Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, he’s experiencing the midterm election’s fallout firsthand—as he tries to figure out how, as a freshman member of the minority, he can make headway on the issues on which he campaigned.

“What’s supposed to be one of the greatest democratic institutions is actually very undemocratic in the sense that the majority can use the rules to prohibit the minority from offering up alternatives,” Van Hollen explained one January afternoon in his House office. “I’m not talking about losing the vote. I’m talking about the opportunity to have an up-or-down vote on your alternative proposal. They can bring a bill to the floor under a rule that says only Republican amendments are in order.” So, although Van Hollen may have run for office with visions of repealing parts of President Bush’s $1.4 trillion tax cut and passing stricter gun control laws, he now realizes that much of his job will consist of simply trying to fend off Republican proposals.

One of his first orders of business, he says, will be dealing with President Bush’s call for $670 million more in tax cuts. “It’s only putting additional money in the pockets of people who need it the least, and it’s not going to help the economy,” Van Hollen complained. “The rhetoric of helping working people is almost Orwellian.”

Van Hollen’s rhetoric might be sharp, but he thinks it’s necessary. Indeed, Van Hollen blames the Democrats’ midterm debacle, in part, on the party’s reluctance to stand up to President Bush. “I think a lot of Democrats got cowed by the Bush administration on a whole range of issues and tried to be, in some cases, Republican lite,” he says. “When you say, ‘I agree with the Bush administration on a lot of things,’ and then the president comes to your district and says, ‘Well, that’s great, but I’m supporting the other guy because he agrees with me more,’ your message isn’t going to get across.”

Still, Van Hollen says he will look for common ground where he can find it. “The opportunities to build coalitions are going to be issue dependent,” he says. “Gun control is probably an issue for now on which it’s going to be very tough to put together a coalition. But there may be other issues, like working on child abuse and neglect—that’s something I worked on in the state legislature and that [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay has worked on, too. Maybe we can make some progress on that. Working on mental health issues or disabilities issues—at least in the state legislature—we were always able to build bipartisan coalitions.”

The son of a Foreign Service officer, 44-year-old Van Hollen spent much of his childhood abroad, so that by the time he arrived at Swarthmore in 1977, he already had a healthy interest in foreign affairs and public policy. Van Hollen initially majored in history, then switched to physics, and eventually settled on philosophy, writing his senior thesis on Wittgenstein. “I’m sure if I looked at the paper today, I wouldn’t understand a word I wrote,” he jokes. Away from the classroom, Van Hollen pursued his political interests more directly: He was a member of the Swarthmore Anti-Apartheid Committee, which advocated that the College divest from companies doing business in South Africa; and he was active in an organization called the Nuclear Weapons Education Project, an education group interested in arms control efforts such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Then Swarthmore Physics Professor and now New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt was involved in the group.

After his junior year, Van Hollen decided to take some time off from school, and, along with several classmates, he went to Guatemala. “We drove all the way from Washington, D.C.,” he recalls, “in a beat-up old Toyota with old floorboards; every time we went over a puddle, our feet would get wet.” After a few months in Guatemala, Van Hollen rounded out his own personal study-abroad program by traveling around South Asia before returning to Swarthmore in fall 1982 for his senior year.

After graduation, Van Hollen enrolled in the two-year master’s in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (where he met his wife, Katherine, with whom he has three children). From Cambridge, he went to Washington to work on Capitol Hill for Maryland Senator Charles Mathias. He handled arms control and foreign policy issues for Mathias; when the senator—a liberal Republican—retired from politics in 1986, Van Hollen joined the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He began attending law school at night at Georgetown University. In 1990—with the ink barely dry on his law degree—Van Hollen made the move from political staffer to actual politician, running for and winning a seat in Maryland’s House of Delegates, where he represented the Washington suburb of Montgomery County.

Four years later, he won a seat in the Maryland Senate. In An-napolis, Van Hollen built a reputation as a liberal but pragmatic politician, proving effective at building coalitions on issues like school funding, gun control, and protecting the Chesapeake Bay. To many in the Maryland Capitol, it was clear Van Hollen was marked for bigger things; after a second term in the State Senate, he set his sights on the U.S. House.

Despite his impressive legislative record in Annapolis, Van Hollen entered the 2002 congressional campaign a decided underdog. His first challenge came in the Democratic primary, where he faced one of his Maryland General Assembly colleagues, Mark Shriver, son of Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver.

“There’s no doubt that everyone in the Washington political establishment—the Democrats on the Hill, the political consultants, all the insiders—saw [me] as the underdog,” says Van Hollen. Although Van Hollen may not have been the favorite son of the political establishment, he was no slouch where it counted most, in his district. He was well known there from 12 years of legislative work in Annapolis and capitalized on that to score a narrow victory over Shriver in September’s primary.

But Van Hollen wasn’t able to rest on his laurels because his next order of business was squaring off against an even more formidable opponent, the eight-term Republican Congresswoman Constance Morella.

Fortunately for Van Hollen, he had some help. Although Morella was still popular in a district where her generally liberal voting record endeared her to predominately left-leaning voters, her party affiliation had become a burden. Democrats sensed that she was vulnerable, and the national Party put its weight behind Van Hollen, helping him with fund-raising and sending out big names like then Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and New York Senator Hillary Clinton to campaign with him.

The result was a heated—and sometimes bizarre—campaign. Van Hollen mostly refrained from attacking Morella head on but seldom missed an opportunity to portray the race as a contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. “When President Clinton was in office, there was always a safety net; if anything really bad got out of the Congress, there was his veto pen,” Van Hollen explains. “Under Bush, it’s the opposite; so we focused a lot on the fact that the first vote Representative Morella cast each Congress was for the Republican leadership.”

Morella, meanwhile, obfuscated on the party question: “Connie Morella doesn’t represent a political party, she represents us,” one campaign mailing stated (never mind that the mailing was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee). But she couldn’t obfuscate enough. On election day, Van Hollen won 52 percent of the vote.

Although Swarthmore alumni made up only a small portion of those voting for Van Hollen, they played a disproportionately large role in his campaign. Early in the campaign, Greg ’65 and Lee Smith Ingram ’66 contacted 15 other Washington-area Swarthmore alumni and asked them to help organize a fund-raiser. “We had a preliminary meeting, and we all agreed that we would reach out to all the people we knew,” recalls Esther Ridpath Delaplaine ’44. “I helped get people from the 1940s classes.” Michelle Pokomy Parker ’90 and Kathy Stevens ’89 hosted another Van Hollen fund-raiser a few months later. Several Washington-area alumni helped Van Hollen’s campaign in other ways.

“He established a corps of volunteers who were dedicated to him and who had the kind of enthusiasm you cannot buy in politics,” says Frank Sieverts ’55. Says Van Hollen: “The Swarthmore contingent in the area was terrific. . . . As the campaign went on, it just seemed like everyone was from Swarthmore.”

In fact, Van Hollen’s life as a House freshman hasn’t been that different from the life of a college freshman. When I visited him in his office in early January, the congressman was in the midst of unpacking boxes, hanging pictures, and getting a tutorial from a staffer about how to buy lunch with a congressional debit card.

Then, there was the task of putting names to all the new faces— a task that’s particularly important for Van Hollen since he’s discovered that, thanks to his race’s high profile and the fact that it occurred in Congress’s backyard, he’s not a typical freshman. “Every member of Congress, whether they represent Hawaii, California, or Florida, they were here, and whenever they turned on their TV sets, they saw this race, or whenever they picked up The Washington Post, they read about it,” Van Hollen says. “There are advantages to that in that a lot of people know who I am coming in here. So my task is to quickly get to know who all the others are.”

Jason Zengerle is an associate editor of The New Republic.