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News Town mulls ordinance changes09/02/10 - 6:55 am
The South Boston Current Issues Committee on Monday afternoon discussed changes to two sections of the Town Code. The first change, to the Town’s Air Pollution Control Ordinance, deals with…
South Boston police chief details numbers of arrests09/02/10 - 6:55 am
Officers with the South Boston Police Department arrested 570 people on various charges during 2009, with the largest number of suspects — 87 — charged with drunkenness. The next largest…
SHOW TIME09/02/10 - 6:50 am
As his former coach, Frosty Owens accurately calls former Comet pitching standout Jeremy Jeffress “the first to the Big Show.”
Sports Comet volleyball beginning to click09/05/10 - 11:40 am
The Halifax County High School varsity volleyball team is starting to click.
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Opinion Goode ol’ boy
SoVaNow.com / February 17, 2010
“Entering the race? Goode won’t say,” read the headline on the Danville Register & Bee’s website the other day (godanriver.com). Uh-oh. Sounds like our former Congressman-For-Life hasn’t adjusted very well to Life-Out-Of-Congress.When Virgil Goode announced back in July that he wouldn’t try to recapture his old Fifth District seat, taken from the GOP by Democrat Tom Perriello in the closest Congressional election of the 2008 cycle, I figured the decision to stay out of politics wasn’t Goode’s alone, but also the work of Republican Party bigfoots who know how to make life very, very hard for unwelcome candidates. For all the world, our former Congressman looked like a man who had just been kicked to the curb. And for good reason. Let us not forget: with his incessant immigrant- and Muslim-bashing, his taste for pork, and his increasingly bizarre and ridiculous public utterances, Goode was only slightly less likely by the end of his Congressional tenure to pop up on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show or The Colbert Report than ride in the Chase City Christmas Parade. Better for the Republicans to put forward a fresh face, the idea went, and make a straightforward pitch for restoring GOP rule without all the baggage that Goode carried. Which, in fact, has been pretty much how the script has played out until now. (Imagine it’s 2008 all over again and your name is Eric Cantor — an up-and-coming player in the party, with a major role in shaping the GOP strategy for the 2010 midterms. Disgusted by the upset loss in the nearby Fifth District, the Richmond-area congressman and Republican whip must have looked at Virgil Goode and reasonably concluded: this guy really is poison for our long-term prospects. The nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc is Hispanics, a well-known Goode bogeyman, and we just got wiped out in the presidential race by a black guy. Our only hope is to become the party of hard-line but principled opposition. Aside from the fact that Goode is likely to stray from the reservation at any time, his bigoted rhetoric simply is too much for a party already on the outs). That was the theory, anyway. Silly of me to buy it! A funny thing happened on the way to the 2010 midterms: the Republican Party swung harder right than a lot of people expected, fueled by the rise of the Tea Party, a pitchfork rebellion with gusts of anger and ignorance billowing in its sails. Qualities that one associates with Virgil Goode, too! It’s unclear how long the Tea Party and the GOP can remain aligned, given the predilection of the latter to bow to its masters on Wall Street and other special interests roaming the halls of the Capitol, but one thing we do know is the national Republican Party isn’t quite the top-down organization that it was as recently as two years ago. Leaving aside Democratic prospects for a moment (and as fall approaches I suspect we’ll learn all over again that Rep. Perriello is no pushover) the Republican primary, set for June 8, really ought to be a classic matchup. On one side you have the old guard, corpucrat wing of the Republican Party — the Country Clubbers, if you will — represented by State Senator Robert Hurt, a scion of one of Pittsylvania County’s oldest and most distinguished families. On the other side are a number of candidates in the populist, fire-breathing Tea Party mold, with no clear leader breaking loose from the pack. The names of these lesser candidates aren’t even remotely familiar to most voters, and that’s how matters are likely to stay. Hurt has one big problem with the Tea Party crowd: as a state delegate in 2004, he voted for then-Gov. Mark Warner’s tax increase. Horrors! Or maybe not. Despite Hurt’s past apostasy, a Public Policy Polling survey released last week gave the senator 22 percent support among likely GOP primary voters, with Ken Boyd, an Albemarle County supervisor who is the only other elected official in the field, running well behind at 12 percent. The rest of the munchkins came in around 2-4 percent, with “undecided” leading all contenders with 51 percent. In the general election Perriello and Hurt would start out tied, 44-44. Such numbers suggest a fluid primary and the distinct possibility of a Tea Party upset, but aside from the problem of six or seven candidates competing for pretty much the same pool of voters the insurgency faces a another challenge: overcoming the faux-genteel politics of the southern part of the Fifth District, where the race figures to be won. Tea Partiers, being relatively new to this game and not shy about being abrasive, may not have proper appreciation for the defining traits of Southside Republicans: they may seem polite, but they aren’t an especially principled bunch, and they don’t especially like outsiders making demands of “purity” (let’s leave aside for now the fact that pure Tea Party “principles” are, in fact, wildly misguided). When the chips are down, you can count on most Fifth District Republicans to do one thing: fall into line. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is my first-cousin-not far-enough-removed, Fifth District GOP Chairman Tucker Watkins. Watkins’ support for Hurt has been so blatant that Goode himself called out the party chairman in a recent interview with The Washington Post. (By foolishly putting Watkins in charge of his 2008 re-election campaign, Goode has no one to blame but himself for losing to Perriello). Watkins is a reactionary sort from the old school — generally one in spirit and mind with the Tea Partiers, but too interested in sucking up to power to raise a fuss when party leaders anoint an obvious poseur like Hurt to the throne. Perceived access to power, not fealty to principle, is what underscores Republican cohesiveness in the Fifth District, along with the social standing that goes with associating with the “right” sort of people. The Democrats? You won’t find many of them at the local country club. Deference to political authority is an old habit in Virginia, going back to the Byrd machine and, indeed, to the South’s plantation roots. One of great ironies of Virgil Goode’s career is his rise to power from a mountain tradition that bucked this mannered yet nasty tradition. Goode’s father was a populist tub-thumper of the genuinely honorable sort; the son retained some of the mountain trappings at the same time he voted in Congress with the worst of the GOP sellouts: tax breaks for Enron, socialism for the wealthy and well-connected, with an occasional broadside against free trade (totally ignored by the business wings of both parties) thrown in. By the end of the Bush years, the Republican agenda was revealed as utterly bankrupt, and Goode was hung out to dry; the parts he didn’t support Goode couldn’t change, either. By any reasonable standard, Virgil Goode’s political standing ought to have fallen to the status of punch line — except Fifth District Republicans aren’t laughing. Goode is the one candidate with the political and personal bona fides to bridge the gap between the rabble and the hoi polloi, and if he gets back in the race Eric Cantor and the fellas on K Street better get used to plastering smiles on their faces. The same PPP survey that showed Perriello and Hurt in a tie also found that Goode would rewrite the storyline if he decides to enter as a third party candidate. According to PPP, Perriello and Goode would each start out with 41 percent of voters, with Hurt dropping like a stone to 12 percent. Which would be a truly unfair fate for such a nice young man as Hurt demonstrably is. But if Hurt can’t bridge the divides in his chaotic party — and the Pittsylvania senator never will be a credible Tea Partier — then why shouldn’t Goode step in to displace him? It’s a question that I imagine Goode must ask himself each and every day. Now, if only Goode can figure out how to explain all those earmarks he fought for as a member of Congress the next time he shows up at a Tea Party meeting .... *** Several times over the past month, our local state senator, Frank Ruff, has called on the public to tighten its collective belt in the face of the worst budget deficits in recent Virginia history, with tens of thousands of job cuts looming for school teachers, government workers and other people who evidently don’t make suitable contributions to the wealth of the Commonwealth in our senator’s estimation. Hence the question that begs to be asked: What belt tightening is Frank Ruff willing to undertake in these grim economic times? People may not know this, but senators and delegates receive office allowances as part of their admittedly paltry pay for serving in the General Assembly. If legislators don’t spend the allowances on actual expenses, they can pocket the difference. And surprise of surprises, Frank Ruff doesn’t maintain a district office. So why then hasn’t he offered to return any unspent state funds back to the state treasury? Not good for the gander, perhaps? |
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