Ninety-nine Days Left Until It’s Finally Over

The News & Advance
Published: July 28, 2008

Ninety-nine and counting. That’s how many days it is until Election Day.

The campaigns for president and, here in Central Virginia, for the U.S. Senate and the Fifth and Sixth Congressional Districts have hardly even warmed up, and many people are dreading the day they do.

Why? It’s simple, really: Because many of the candidates are more than likely to go to the sound-bite, the cheap shot, the outright lie before they’ll begin to discuss the issues that matter to voters in 2008.

Consider the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Mark Warner and Republican Jim Gilmore. Former Gov. Warner holds a 20-point lead right now over Gilmore, his predecessor as governor of the commonwealth. To try to close the gap — in the polls and in fundraising — and to generate a little interest in his campaign, Gilmore went negative early, labeling Warner a bold-faced liar, an “elite limousine liberal,” a tax-and-spender who didn’t care about the “little man” in the state. After struggling to find a peg on which to hang his candidacy, Gilmore latched onto the high price of oil and the cost of a gallon of gas with his “Drill here, drill now, pay less” slogan.

Is he using the oil-price crisis as an opportunity to talk about the nation’s lack of a comprehensive energy policy? Absolutely not. He’s simply calling for more drilling in more places, knowing full well that it would be years before any oil from new fields could come to the market. His opponent’s energy plan is more wide-ranging in scope but can’t be boiled down to a bumper sticker, such as Gilmore’s infamous “Cut the Car Tax” slogan in 1997.

And the race promises to get even nastier as time wears on. Each week that goes by sees more news releases and e-mails from the Gilmore camp, trying to make the case that Warner simply can’t be trusted in the job. That’s the extent of the Gilmore message thus far: “Drill, drill, drill” and “My opponent’s an untrustworthy bum.”

In the Sixth District, where Rep. Bob Goodlatte is seeking his eighth term in the House of Representatives, the Democrats chose to put up a mere kid, Sam Rasoul, 27, of Vinton, as his opponent.

A small, small businessman in the Roanoke Valley, Rasoul’s never held an elected office in his life. And now he’s shooting for the political big-time with a seat in Congress? His way of getting a little TV publicity recently was to pay for drivers’ fill-ups at a Roanoke-area gas station recently, claiming that was his way to highlight his energy policy, such as it is.

In the Fifth District, which stretches from Danville in the Southside up U.S. 29 to the People’s Republic of Charlottesville, Democrat newcomer Tom Perriello is trying to unseat six-term incumbent Virgil Goode.

Perriello and Goode have both raised boatloads of cash, and some Democrats even maintain Perriello will knock off the Rocky Mount populist … exactly what they said for Al Weed’s chances … twice. And Goode polled more than 60 percent of the votes cast in both races against the Nelson County winemaker.

How will a 33-year-old, University of Virginia law lecturer play in the district, outside the liberal bastions of Charlottesville? Who knows? He may have raked in a lot of cash, but he’s not been seen or heard from much in hinterland of the district.

Finally, there’s the biggie: the presidential smackdown between Barack Obama and John McCain. The media pretty much has declared the election of Obama, and the Democrat actually seems to believe his own press: Just watch some of video snippets from his “Second Coming” world tour.

Still, it’s a long time to Election Day. Ninety-nine days in fact.

And yeah, it is a long time ... a very long time indeed.