The downfall of Aaron Schock

The Republican from Illinois, who said Tuesday he would resign from U.S. Congress effective March 31, is the kind of guy who has it all. Looks. Money. Success. A six-pack. Schock’s veneer was so resplendent that when Daily Caller asked him what vices he could possibly have, he seemed genuinely stumped, offering the most harmless of answers: magazines. “I read upward of 30 magazines a month,” said Schock, who himself has graced the cover of Men’s Health. “. . . I don’t get to watch TV much.” Of course Schock doesn’t watch TV. He’s too busy succeeding at everything. But there’s some irony to this apparently innocuous admission. Years ago, as The Washington Post reported, Schock was reading a magazine when he came across the work of an interior designer.

Her name was Annie Brahler. She was the one behind Schock’s infamous Downton Abbey office on Capitol Hill, on which he spent $40,000 — and inspired a crush of negative attention that led to his resignation.

Brahler today bristles at the Downton Abbey comparison. “The design of the office is MY DESIGN,” Brahler huffed in an email Tuesday night. “I was in no way inspired, asked to replicate, or even remotely influenced by the show Downton Abbey.” She nonetheless praised “Aaron’s open mind in agreeing to a vibrant color.”

Schock’s choice of that vibrant color underscored his lifelong determination to go big and brash. According to a review of newspaper clippings going back to when he was a teenager in Peoria, Ill., Schock always pushed for more, more, more — and to be the youngest to ever have it.

It’s a characteristic that propelled Schock to be the youngest school board member, the youngest Illinois state

legislator, one of the youngest members of Congress. It pushed him to work out so hard it looked painful, to clog his Instagram profile with action-star theatrics, to get into business hot and early because that’s what Schock does. He wins. He takes risks. He’s bold, like his deep-red office.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he told Peoria’s Journal Star in 2008. “I guess I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker.”

By the fifth grade, according to Schock, he was already planning big things. He did database management for a Peoria book chain, he told the Daily Caller. Then after a stint online trading, he got in with a ticket brokerage firm called VIP Tours and — while in middle school, mind you — reportedly started running four lines into the family home to facilitate his many business calls. But that wasn’t enough for Schock, age 12.

“So I went up to four phone lines in my house and AT&T,” he told the Daily Caller. “. . . But my neighbor had two lines and so I’d use their portable phones. So when I was in sixth and seventh grade, I had six phone lines and 13 credit cards and I’d buy these tickets every weekend, usually a couple hundred tickets for everything.”

Schock, who started his own IRA at 14, was keen to graduate high school early. He wanted out in three years. But the Peoria school board, according to a 2004 Chicago Sun-Times clip, rejected the idea. He had to graduate in four years like everyone else. So he did, grudgingly, but then he ran for the Peoria school board.

And this is where the myth that would become Schock kicks in. According to the Sun-Times, “the bureaucracy took him as a threat” and removed him from the ballot, so Schock organized a massive writein campaign and got elected to the board that way at the age of 19. By the age of 22, he was the school board president.

“There he was: a CEO of the third-largest employer — the public schools — in Peoria,” the Sun-Times raved, calling him a “brilliant young school board president.” At the same time, Schock was looking to be brilliant in other areas.

While getting through Bradley University in two years, he bought 107 acres for $63,000 and sold it two years later for $170,850. Then he got some other scores by purchasing properties and selling them back to Bradley. In all, he pocketed more than $230,000 profit in four years, the Journal Star noted.

“When other kids in high school were buying toys,” Schock boasted, “I was buying real estate.”

All of this can be interpreted in several ways. At 23, Schock’s drive and ambition made him one of the youngest people to serve in the Illinois legislature, sealing his status as a “rock star,” as the Chicago Tribune called him. “He’s a great symbol for the restarting of our Republican Party,” state representative Tom Cross said. “He is the new breed.”

But looking back at Schock’s history, his preternatural drive is unsettling, even for a politician. Schock didn’t want two phone lines. He wanted six. He didn’t want one credit card in middle school. He wanted 13. He wasn’t satisfied graduating high school in four years. He didn’t want to just sit on the school board — he wanted to be its president. He wanted to be the youngest everything. Health wasn’t enough. He needed a sixpack. He didn’t want his office to be beige. He wanted it red.

Washington is filled with young people oozing ambition. But Schock’s rush to the top turned out to be hazardous. Terry Bibo, the Peoria Journal Star columnist, sensed something early on. It was 2008, and President George W. Bush had come to Peoria to campaign for Schock’s election to Congress. The cost of attendance at the fundraising event was high — as were costs to the city, which had to provide security. Schock at first tried to walk away from the bill, until it generated bad publicity.

Bibo described this as one of the first “missteps in a charmed career.”

“Relatively, the average guy can’t afford $500 to meet the president, much less $5,000 for a photo with him,” Bibo wrote. “Relatively, the average guy thinks $38,000 of extra cost to Peoria taxpayers for a private fundraiser they can’t afford to attend is an outrage. Relatively, the average guy thinks if Schock’s campaign received $700,000 from that fundraiser, the potential congressman should have ponied up gladly to the city.”

But, she wrote: “Aaron Schock is not the average guy. In the end, he did the right thing, but it wasn’t his first instinct. Going forward on the national stage, it will take more than luck to balance the politics of finance with the finance of politics.”

That synopsis now seems prescient given Schock’s lavish office decorations, his use of private charter planes, his concert ticket purchases, his trips overseas and other travel. On Monday night, Politico questioned him about what appeared to be his overbilling of the federal government and his political campaign for miles traveled in his car throughout his sprawling district.

Then The Post reported that congressional ethics officials were looking into Schock’s office, an inquiry that had the potential to generate at the very least troublesome publicity and at worst a formal rebuke. With Schock’s quitting, the probe by the Office of Congressional Ethics automatically disappears. But so, perhaps, do Schock’s political ambitions.

But he’s still the youngest something: he appears to be the youngest member of Congress to have resigned in the middle of a term.