Today, the two candidates for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District had their first sustained public exchange of views. I made a point of going along to the forum, which was held in the large, nicely funded Senior Center just north of Charlottesville. And I was confirmed in my judgment that our Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, is a dangerous, mean-spirited man who needs to be defeated. But I also came away with some questions about the approach being followed by the Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Tom Perriello.
Here are the main things I noted at the 90-minute forum:
- 1. The degree to which Pres. George W. Bush’s record was not a big part of the discussion.
Goode, quite understandably, didn’t make many mentions of Bush at all. (And when he was asked about the tensions with Iran, he seemed eager to distance himself from Bush. He said he thought the President should make a point of having broad consultation before imposing any blockade on Iran, and should not pursue a “go-it-alone” policy. H’mm. I wish he’d fought for that same position during the build-up to the war on Iraq, too.,)
But for his part, Perriello wasn’t trying to position himself as running against the Bush legacy, either. I would have thought that in most of the Fifth District, which stretches from Charlottesville a long way south to the state line with North Carolina, and which includes numerous very economically depressed communities, running against the Bush legacy would have been an attractive thing to do… As would be noting that Goode has voted almost in lockstep with Bush on virtually every issue… As would noting the truly massive amounts of taxpayers’ money that Bush has shoveled into the horrendously wrong-headed invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Perriello made almost no mention of any of these things. And get this: where he did refer to the failed legacy of Bush, he nearly always twinned this by referring to an equally failed legacy of Pres. Clinton, as well.
I found that stunning. I do, certainly, have many criticisms of what Clinton did during his eight years in office. But to put those failures on a par with Bush’s failures, as Tom did? That boggles both logic and the imagination.
Thus, for example, he said nothing about the fact that Clinton had balanced the budget and was poised to start bringing down the national debt– until Bush came along and with his completely unfunded wars plunged the country back into deep deficits again.
- 2. The readiness that Goode showed to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment as part of his campaign.
He made the quite unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a big part of the health-care crisis in this country and argued for their summary deportation, the building of a huge wall system all along the border with Mexico, and an end to the phenomenon of “anchor babies.” Not clear how he proposed dealing with these squealing bundles of joy. Quite clear: the mean-spiritedness with which he showed himself ready to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for his own political gain.
- 3. The degree to which Perriello was positioning himself as a certain kind of a “post-partisan” politician.
It wasn’t just those unfair references he made to the Clinton legacy, it was also the whole (extremely long-drawn-out) self-narrative that he presented. He described himself as belonging to– or “representing”? not clear– the second generation after the cohort that he and many Americans have taken to calling, in somewhat maudlin fashion, the “Greatest Generation”. (What Jim Crow?) So he talked quite a bit about his grandparents and their sterling qualities… And then, he said that many members of the next generation after theirs– he didn’t get personal about his parents here– had had a quite wrongheaded belief in the power of government to solve social and economic ills.
I found that critique outrageous. There was nothing there about the value of the civil rights movement– no mention of the civil rights movement, at all! That, here in Central Virginia, remember. Nothing about Medicare and Social Security– even though there in the Senior Center you had a clear majority of attendees at the forum who were the lucky beneficiaries of Medicare. Nothing about Head Start or any of the other great social programs of the 1960s, the era of belief in the possibility of a “Great Society.”
And then, he said, along came his generation, which did not believe that government could solve all the country’s problems but instead sought to make a difference through private entrepreneurship and work in non-profit organizations. (I’d bet that most of Tom’s income since he graduated Yale Law School in 2001 has come from inter-governmental or governmental funds, one way or another?)
He never did explain to my satisfaction how it was he made the transition from not believing that government has a significant role in solving social problems to thinking that he, personally, should run for political office. But evidently, that transition got made.
Tom’s positioning of himself as “post-partisan” in the way that he did made me distinctly uneasy. Not only because he really seemed not to have thought very deeply about many of those issues there, but also because I’d be very worried if Barack Obama shared this particular version of post-partisanship.
How can a person just blow off the whole experience of the Great Society– and also, by implication, the New Deal before that– and expect to have something useful to propose regarding the mounting social and economic difficulties this country faces? Does Tom Perriello think they can all be addressed through the work of private entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations? That would be a very dangerous position to hold, indeed.
Tom’s version of post-partisanship also seemed, at some points, to be related to a slightly vacuous self-referentiality. Especially in his opening comments, which were all about him and his place in his “three generation” scheme. Yes, he did make a passing reference there to having “a seven-point plan” for dealing with the country’s woes– but he never once told us what those seven points were! Ah, maybe he should have sent us to this page, on his campaign website.
Well, in the lengthy Q&A session, he was a lot better, and he generally gave answers that were sensible and thoughtful…. though he did get a little bellicose in talking about the need to “win America’s wars.”
Also of note in the forum: Both candidates made a number of references to the need to achieve “energy independence”, and to the dangers of “borrowing from the Chinese.” Two misleading memes there? Both also indicated some opposition to NAFTA.
Goode positioned himself as extremely anti-taxation (as well as anti-immigrant). At one point, right at the end, he made the outrageous claim that Obama “wants to send $845 billion” of US revenues to low-income countries.
Excuse me?
But Goode also, intriguingly, seemed to be predicting (or threatening?) that Obama would win the presidential race, when he used the argument that Virginians would benefit from having a strong Republican representation in congress to keep Obama in check.
I found the whole forum fascinating, though a little bit depressing. (Goode’s diatribes against immigrants got a disturbing amount of applause from the crowd. This, despite our city’s reputation as being a huge blob of liberals stuck at one end of a socially conservative district.) Still, there is something really important about having a constituency-based electoral system, where the people who represent you in the legislature have to come back to their districts each time there’s an election and stand face-to-face with their constituents. The political “representation” involved just seems so much more direct in this system than in a broad, nationwide p.r. system.
Anyway, if Tom Perriello reads this, I hope he (you) takes my remarks as an invitation to further discussion on some of these issues. I know that back in October, I also criticized some aspects of Tom’s “post-partisanship”. After that, I had a good, 40-minute discussion with him in the home of a neighbor. But I’m still concerned about his eagerness to criticize the work of earlier “generations” of Democrats.
Here’s a suggestion. Wouldn’t a stronger and more principled way to be “post-partisan” be to express appreciation of the work of some prominent members of the other party– as Obama has, with Chuck Hagel and even with some of his references to Ronald Reagan– rather than to feel you have to beat up on earlier “generations” of people from your own party?
Actually, I think that’s one key difference between Perriello’s version of post-partisanship and Barack Obama’s. That, and the fact that Obama seems to have a much more textured, informed, and realistic view of the role of (good) government in society. That view perhaps derived in large part from the direct, hands-on experience Obama gained working as a community organizer for low-income and other marginalized communities in Chicago, in his 20s.
Perriello has had only a little experience of doing work comparable to that– and most of that was in the distinctly “bwana-ish” situation of working in western-dominated institutions in West Africa and Afghanistan. But even in those situations, does he honestly think the dire social ills he witnessed could be solved just by private entrepreneurs and non-profits– and without the peoples of those countries finding a way to resolve their countries’ very deep-seated problems of governance? So far, he hasn’t given us any indication he has thought deeply about those issues, at all…