PEABODY — When you grow up one of nine kids, Bill Hudak said, "you learn to be loud."
Attempting to grab people's attention four days before the 2008 presidential election, he put a sign up in the yard of his Boxford home. It showed then-candidate Barack Obama made to look like terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
"So America, you want change?" the sign said. "Just wait."
It was meant to implore people to "think hard and long before we make a mistake that we're going to regret," Hudak said.
Two years later, the sign is all anybody wants to talk about, according to Hudak. He is now a Republican candidate for Congress.
"Four days of my life doesn't define 52 years of all the things I've done," he said.
Whether they do or not is something voters will have to consider when they head to the polls Tuesday and again in November, if Hudak is able to overcome Rob McCarthy, a Republican lawyer from Saugus.
Hudak, 52, was raised in Sharonville, Ohio, a middle-class community north of Cincinnati. His parents had a straightforward philosophy.
"You're entitled to nothing in this life other than what you earn on your own," Hudak recalled during an interview on Wednesday.
At Princeton High School, he joined the debate team. "I was the Ohio state champion in my senior year," he said.
He attended Seton Hall University and then received a law degree from Boston College. He worked at firms in New York City and Boston before launching his own practice in Saugus.
He was never politically active until 2008. What got him "off the couch" was his displeasure with the steps government, Democrats and Republicans included, took to bail out the country's financial system.
"That's not the way I believe this country should be," Hudak said. "The government's job is to facilitate and provide the opportunity and then get out of the way as much as possible. Its role, especially at the federal level, is supposed to be limited to things the Constitution talks about."
He has been running for 14 months. He has raised and spent a lot of money, much of it coming out of his own pocket. Of the $577,192 Hudak has received in contributions, almost $235,000 (40.7 percent) has come from the candidate.
His campaign has been energetic but, at times, bumbling. The day after Scott Brown's election in January, Hudak announced that the senator-elect had endorsed his candidacy. But he subsequently apologized to Brown and retracted a press release touting the endorsement because it included comments that were not made or approved by Brown or his campaign.
Brown and others within his party, including gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker, are hesitant to publicly back Hudak, despite Baker's appearance at a Hudak fundraiser over the summer.
In addition to the lawn sign, Hudak has been linked to "birthers," or those who believe President Obama was not born in this country. A 2008 article in a weekly newspaper asserted that Hudak thought Obama was born in Kenya.
Hudak claims his birther ties "have been blown so far out of proportion."
"I challenge anybody to find anything that even says I suggested that he wasn't really born here," he said this week.
He was asked to review court documents — he says he can't remember by whom — that alleged Obama was born outside this country and only meant to suggest in the 2008 article that, if the allegations were true, then Obama wasn't a citizen. But he believes that Obama was born in the United States, Hudak said.
Regarding the economy, Hudak said the government is "stifling growth" by overtaxing individuals and businesses. And its unchecked spending is on the verge of bankrupting the country, he said.
He called the health care reform law "absolutely, positively one of the worst laws that have passed in my lifetime." It should have focused on reducing the cost of delivering care by increasing cost transparency and curtailing the practice of lawsuit-wary "defensive medicine," he said.
Hudak agrees with the troop escalation in Afghanistan and would heed the advice of military leaders if elected.
"I take my information from the troops on the ground," he said. "I don't care about the politics of the issue."
He is anti-abortion, in favor of "traditional marriage" defined by the union of a man and woman, and promises to be a strong defender of the right to bear arms.
Hudak said he has been campaigning at least 15 hours a day. If he wins Tuesday and earns a chance to face Democratic incumbent John Tierney, he expects his work days to get even longer.
Bill Hudak
Address: 165 Herrick Road, Boxford
Age: 52
Occupation: Attorney
Education: Princeton (Ohio) High School, 1976; Seton Hall University, 1980; Boston College Law School, 1983
Elected office: None
Family: Wife, Angela; son, William ("Trey"), 22; daughter, Joanie, 19
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