Rep. Joseph Cao, a Vietnamese-American who represents a New Orleans-area congressional district, is being called a Judas by fellow Republicans after he broke with them to vote for the Democrats’ health care bill.

But as Amanda Terkel at Think Progress notes, Cao was motivated by dollars-and-sense concerns in a troubled district still grappling with the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina and a paucity of health care options. Rep. Cao, 42, said from the outset after his upset election win last year that he would put aside questions of race (his district is heavily African-American) and partisanship (his district is historically Democratic) in order to deliver constituents solution-oriented services, programs and policy.

(Viji Sundaram of New America Media interviewed Rep. Cao shortly after he was elected to his seat.)

Instead of implicitly threatening Rep. Cao and questioning his loyalty, GOP leaders like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele might look to him as a blueprint for the party’s future. Like Steele, who is African-American, and fellow Louisianan Gov. Bobby Jindal (who is of Indian descent), Cao adds badly needed demographic diversity to the party.

And he’s no conservative firebrand, but a moderate who has proven he can attract Democratic and independent votes. Cao’s a former immigration lawyer and Jesuit seminarian who almost became a priest, and may be socially conservative, but he’s by no means marching in lockstep with the more radical wing of the Republican Party. Cao has praised President Obama, sought to join the left-leaning Black Caucus, and expressed concerns about global warming.

He has the combination of professional and moral authority the GOP loves to see in its candidates, but fused to a very pragmatic platform focused not on culture war issues but on everyday concerns such as health care and education. As Terkel notes in her article, after Cao’s 2008 win a top House Republican sent out a memo titled: “The Future is Cao.” That’s still the case, even if Cao did look like an outlier when he was the lone Republican to vote with Democrats over the weekend.

Cao may have a hard time winning re-election in his heavily Democratic district (he beat incumbent last year thanks mostly to a corruption scandal) next year. But as a non-ideological Republican from a minority group he represents a plausible direction for the Republican Party to move in if it wants to keep up with the country’s fast-changing demographics. Republicans might be advised to find a few dozen other Caos to build their future election strategies on—pragmatic, solution-oriented, fiscally conservative minority candidates (Cao may have supported the health care bill but voted against the $787 billion stimulus package).