State Political Profile: Virginia
U.S. Senate
First-term Republican incumbent Sen. George Allen, a cowboy-booted, tobacco-chewing former governor, faces a spirited re-election battle this year against a former Republican and Reagan military aide who, just six years ago, endorsed him for election to the senate.
James H. Webb, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, author of six war novels based on his combat experiences and Navy secretary under Reagan, is promising to be "George Allen's worst nightmare."
With more than $7.5 million on hand in late May to barely $220,000 for Webb, the popular, folksy Allen also has a ready pool of Republican volunteers after two successful statewide campaigns. Even a Republican-turned-Democrat with Webb's made-for-the-movies portfolio will have a very difficult time unseating Allen.
The test, however, wont be whether Allen can eke out a victory over Webb; it's whether Allen can win re-election convincingly.
Allen, 54, is among several Republicans exploring the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. A weak showing against Webb little known to voters despite his Pentagon role and his literary success could doom him in a crowded and competitive field of Republicans fighting to succeed President Bush.
Webb, 60, served the Reagan White House as an assistant secretary of defense from 1984-87 and as Navy secretary until 1988.
A former Marine, Webb commanded a rifle platoon in combat in Vietnam and was awarded two Purple Heart medals, two Bronze Stars, the Navy Cross and the Silver Star.
Webb wrote his first novel, "Fields of Fire," in 1978. His fiction work includes Rules of Engagement, which became a feature film starring Tommy Lee Jones in 2000. His first nonfiction work, Born Fighting, traces his familys Scots-Irish heritage. It was published last year, providing a vehicle for his populist strategy of appealing to "Reagan Democrats" mostly white, middle-class, often rural moderates to return home.
Webb's entry in February into the 2006 race was his campaign for any elected office, but not his first brush with U.S. Senate races in Virginia.
In 1994, Webb denounced his former Naval Academy classmate and fellow former Marine, Oliver L. North, when the Iran-Contra figure ran as a Republican against Sen. Chuck Robb, a Democrat who served as a Marine in Vietnam. Webb called North a liar after North suggested Robb served only light duty in Vietnam because his father-in-law was President Lyndon Johnson.
Six years later, Webb endorsed Allen when he successfully challenged Robbs bid for a third term.
In a bitter primary battle with former Washington lobbyist and longtime Democratic activist Harris Miller, Webb accused Miller of pushing American information technology jobs overseas and called Miller the "anti-Christ of outsourcing" in a televised debate.
Miller ceaselessly noted Webb's endorsements of Allen and Bush, he attacked him over long-ago writings that questioned the fitness of women to lead troops in combat and criticized affirmative action. Miller, a traditional liberal, exhorted core Democrats to remain true to their causes and loyal to him.
Webb, however, received endorsements of nine leading Senate Democrats, including 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry, and got a rare preprimary endorsement from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He won 53 percent of the primary vote over Miller on the strength of enormous support from three of Virginia's closest Washington, D.C., suburbs, where Capitol Hill politics matters.
Allen served in the Virginia House of Delegates and briefly in Congress before getting his big break in 1993. Then little known, he ran a long-shot campaign for governor and defeated heavily favored Democrat Mary Sue Terry convincingly. His victory rocked Virginia politics and launched a GOP ascendancy that, within seven years, wrested from the Democratic Party the last shreds of control it had exerted over state government since the end of Reconstruction.
During the single, non-renewable term to which Virginia uniquely restricts its governors, Allen forced reforms that tightened welfare eligibility and ended parole through a Democratic General Assembly.
With Allens 2000 victory over Robb, the GOP for the first time briefly held control of every elected statewide elected office, majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, both Senate seats and a majority of the states 11 U.S. House seats.
Allen is strongest among anti-tax and religious conservatives, yet he remains one of the few figures who can unify the feuding moderates and conservatives within Virginias fractious GOP. He is an enthusiastic campaigner who tours every corner of the state in a lumbering motor home each summer, easily appealing to crowds with his sunny aw-shucks manner and an ever-present football he tosses about at campaign appearances ranging from outdoor barbecues to formal galas in chandeliered ballrooms.
U.S. House
Seven of Virginia's U.S. House incumbents will have challengers in November, including one of the nation's most fiercely contested battles.
Republicans own eight of the states 11 House districts, and five of the eight have challengers.
In the 2nd District, Democrat Philip Kellam is waging a vigorous challenge to Rep. Thelma Drake's bid for a second term. Both parties plan to spend deeply on the race, which the Democrats believe they can win. President Bush visited the district in May to hold a fund-raiser for Drake.
Drake is a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates who was thrust abruptly onto the ballot in 2004 when Republican Rep. Ed Schrock resigned after a Web site published claims that he solicited sex with another man on a gay phone dating service.
Kellam is the commissioner of revenue in Virginia Beach.
In Virginias 9th District in the states mountainous southwestern tip, Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher seeks his a 13th consecutive term against Republican Charles W. Bill Carrico, a former state trooper and a three-term member of the state House of Delegates.
While the region bounded to the west by Kentucky and Tennessee to the south favors Republicans on such issues as opposition to abortion, gay rights and gun control in particular, its a coal mining and textile milling area far more tolerant of organized labor than the rest of Virginia.
Since he first won the seat in 1982, Boucher, 59, has managed a difficult balancing act in the region long known as the fighin 9th He consistently secures the support of both the National Rifle Association and unions, helping him dispatch one Republican challenger after another in recent years.
Carrico, 44, now in his fifth year as a delegate from Grayson, has a modest legislative portfolio dominated by law-enforcement measures and issues dear to religious conservatives. His most high-profile legislation was a proposed constitutional amendment he sponsored in 2005 that would have expanded the right to pray, preach and proselytize in government-owned venues, including public school classrooms. The measure passed the House but died in a Senate committee. He has not reprised the measure this year.
In Virginias 5th District, Republican Rep. Virgil Goode faces his second consecutive challenge from Democrat Al Weed, a vintner from the Blue Ridge Mountain community of Nelson County.
Goode, 58, defeated Weed in 2004 with 64 percent of the vote, and the folksy lawyer and former state senator from Rocky Mount is favored to defeat Weed again in the largely rural, tobacco-growing region of south-central Virginia. Goode has never finished with less than 60 percent of the vote since he first won his seat in 1996 as a Democrat.
Long disaffected with his party and the Clinton administrations crackdown on smoking in particular, Goode in 2000 declared himself an independent aligned with House Republicans. Two years later, he joined the GOP.
Goode is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and a proponent of erecting a $2 billion fence along the border with Mexico to stem illegal immigration.
This campaign, however, he is certain to face questions about campaign contributions he accepted from defense contractors at the heart of the bribery case against former Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham, a California Republican. Cunningham resigned and pleaded guilty last year to accepting $2.4 million in bribes and faced up to 10 years in prison at his February sentencing.
There is no indication that donations to Goode and other House members were improper, nor have prosecutors suggested that the probe that snared Cunningham involves Goode.
Weed, 63, retired from the U.S. Army after 42 years as an enlisted soldier in 2002. He has never held elected office.
Ballot Issues
In January, a resolution that would make Virginia the 19th state to write a same-sex marriage ban into its constitution faced certain approval in the Republican-dominated General Assembly. That puts the issue on the statewide ballot in November for voter approvalthe final step in amending the state Constitution.
The measure won overwhelming passage in two consecutive legislatures (also required to amend the Constitution) and is expected win easily with Virginias conservative electorate. It also stands to be more passionately contested than anything else on the fall ballot, spilling over into the Senate and U.S. House races, if not dominating them.
Nonprofit advocacy groups allied with conservative and religious organizations on one side and those aligned with human rights, gay rights and civil liberties interests on the other are likely to spend millions of dollars in an emotional and bitter fight for votes.
In the 2004 election, similar constitutional bans on gay unions were approved in 11 states, mostly by wide margins. The heavy turnout it produced among conservative voters was credited with giving President Bush a critical boost in those states, including Ohio, in his close re-election victory over Democrat John Kerry.
Legislature
All 100 House of Delegates seats are up for election in 2007, as are all 40 seats in the Virginia Senate. Republicans hold majorities in both chambers.
-The Associated Press
