NEW ORLEANS — Soft-spoken, retiring and diminutive, Anh Cao does not appear to fit the role of dragon-slayer.

Yet a day after he defeated Representative William J. Jefferson, the once-untouchable incumbent here, Mr. Cao was being approached by voters on the street Sunday with the bewildered awe reserved for one who has returned from the wars. They asked for his autograph, beamed at him and yelled words of encouragement.

The astonishment was palpable, and it had two sources: first, that the nine-term Mr. Jefferson had been beaten at all, and second, that Mr. Cao, 41, had been the man to do it, winning with 50 percent of the vote on Saturday to 47 percent for Mr. Jefferson. (The election had been delayed because of Hurrican Gustav.)

Mr. Cao was a refugee from Vietnam at age 8, a former Jesuit seminarian, a philosophy student with a penchant for Camus and Dostoyevsky, an unknown activist lawyer for one of the least visible immigrant communities here and a Republican in a heavily Democratic district.

Few in New Orleans were betting on him in the days before the election. Now, Joseph Cao, as he is known here (his last name is pronounced “gow”), has become the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress.

Mr. Jefferson has been a fortress in this city’s politics for more than two decades and appeared to gain strength at home as his legal troubles mounted outside of it.

He was returned to Congress year after year by loyal voters even as whispers of impropriety turned into full-blown scandal, culminating in 2007 in a 16-count federal corruption indictment. He was charged with money laundering and bribery after the FBI found $90,000 in his freezer. No date has been set for his trial.

“They don’t generally turn out candidates with ethics problems,” said Charles E. Cook, a Louisiana native who is the publisher of The Cook Political Report, speaking of New Orleans voters.

Nothing was big enough to undo Bill Jefferson, so went the conventional wisdom here.

Mr. Cao is not large, standing only 5 feet 2 inches by his own sheepishly given reckoning. But he is persistent and has the sort of difficult life story that would have made taking on Mr. Jefferson seem like a lesser hurdle.

He is only a recent convert to the Republican Party, having been a registered independent for most of his adult life, and has no position — at least not one he cares to share yet — on President-elect Barack Obama's agenda. His politics seem less a matter of ideology than of low-key temperament and a Jesuit-inspired desire to “help and serve people,” as he put it.

His mother bundled him onto a military transport plane with some siblings as Saigon fell in 1975 — “She shoved me along with a bunch of relatives,” he said — and he was separated from his father, a South Vietnamese army officer sent to a prison camp, for 16 years. He recalls a letter he received from his father at age 9, sent from the prison: Study hard, and give back to the community.

Bounced from Arkansas to Mississippi to Indiana and separated from his parents, Mr. Cao grew up in Houston, raised by an uncle, and eventually gathered degrees in physics at Baylor, philosophy at Fordham and law at Loyola in New Orleans.

Mr. Cao said that while he was studying to be a priest in the 1990s, he had “the great opportunity to work with the poor in conditions of extreme poverty” in Mexico and in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong — children playing in the slums, children behind bars. He wanted to be a missionary.

“From there, the desire to bring social reforms, or to promote certain social change,” Mr. Cao said in an interview Sunday at an outdoor cafe in the Uptown neighborhood here. But, he added, “Politics and religious life don’t mix.”

Mr. Cao left the Jesuits, set up as a lawyer and began advocating for the small Vietnamese community clustered in the eastern section of New Orleans.

Like others in the community, his life was devastated by Hurrican Katrina in 2005, which flooded his house with eight feet of water. And like others, he quickly bounced back, part of a resilience in the community that was chronicled here in the first months after the hurricane hit.

“I don’t want to conform to any ideology, to be put into a little corner,” Mr. Cao said.

Still, Mr. Cao said he admired Mr. Obama’s opponent in the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain, for whom he was a delegate at the Republican convention. And he said he was wary of seeing “U.S. forces too prematurely leave Iraq,” based on his appraisal of what happened in the Vietnam War.

The central insight he appreciates from his philosophical masters, the Russian and French apostles of existentialism, is the rule for living that “life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it.”

That would have been an excellent guidepost in his quest for Louisiana’s Second Congressional District seat. The district is perhaps 60 percent black, and Mr. Obama won about 75 percent of the vote.

The odds did not look good for Mr. Cao, but he was helped by two circumstances. Whites, fed up with the scandals around Mr. Jefferson, who is black, turned out in force, and blacks stayed home. In largely white precincts, turnout was around 26 percent, while in the blackest precincts, it was only around 12 percent, said Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans demographer and analyst.

Now, Mr. Cao will have to persuade the district’s Democrats to keep him in office, but he says he is not worried. He said the district had not really had a representative, given Mr. Jefferson’s preoccupations.

Besides, he said, “I truly espouse Aristotle’s definition of virtue: To walk in the middle line.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/us/politics/08cao.html?em