Issues in the Virginia Governor's Race
As I anxiously await the first returns from Virginia's elections, I have to take issue with Matt Yglesias' jaundiced take on the issues in the race from his vantage point across the Potomac in DC.
I generally agree that too many candidates in state and local races campaign on issues they will have no control over (e.g., the now-famous Harriet Miers stand for a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as a candidate for Dallas City Council). But there's no way that Jerry (No Relation) Kilgore and Tim Kaine are equally guilty of that sin.
Kilgore's anti-immigrant posturing is especially egregious because (a)establishing and enforcing immigration laws is a 100% federal responsibility, which means that any lapses are attributable to ol' Jerry's GOP friends in Washington; and (b) the day-labor-center site in exurban Herndon that Kilgore is demonizing is the result, as Kaine has pointed out, of a 100% local decision that has no bearing on the rest of the state.
Matt says Kaine is equally off-bounds in talking about limits on development, because "zoning" is a local issue. But local powers over development are determined to a large extent by state law. And Kaine's position is to expand those local powers.
Moreover, the whole issue of development controls is intimately related to the major state issue in Northern Virginia: the transportation crisis. Kilgore's answer is to build and expand roads as rapidly as possible, using those new tax revenues he fought relentlessly against. Kaine's answer is to balance road construction with some locally-determined limits on the development patterns that have driven the NoVa commuting nightmare.
As for the alleged unwillingness of candidates to talk about "real" state issues like education, again, you can't say that about Kaine. For one thing, Kaine's criticism of Kilgore's road-building promises is heavily based on the argument that Jerry will have to raid education spending (the centerpiece of Mark Warner's budget priorities, supported by Kaine) to do what he promises to do. But more importantly, as several people on Matt's comment thread point out, Kaine's number one policy initiative has been a proposal to create a statewide pre-K system.
To be sure, Matt's only watching the campaign ads targeting NoVa, where transportation is a much bigger issue than education. Out and around the state, Kaine has mainly emphasized his determination to build on Warner's record (which again, was heavily focused on fiscal solvency and protecting investments in education), while ol' Jerry has basically spent his millions arguing that he's a salt-of-the-earth conservative running against a godless liberal.
We'll soon see how the whole campaign turns out, but I don't think it fair to say the whole thing has been irrelevant to the issues facing Virginians.
Comments (14)
I live in Arlington and it seemed like I got a "roads" mailer about every third day from Jerry Kilgore. Well, they had pretty pictures of fast-moving traffic and "Kaine doesn't have a plan to build more roads in Northern Virginia" sort of phrase at the start of the glossies, anyway.
Kaine ran a heavy-rotation schoolhouse cake ad that said he was for education and that Jerry would build all those good looking roads by borrowing from the education nest-egg.
I looked into it and found some truth to the roads vs. schools framing.
So given - and this is a big given - that both a governor Kilgore and a governor Kaine would want to keep the bond rating high through a balanced budget, I saw this election as a race between educating kids or getting to work faster. Since I walk to work, it was a no-brainer.
Now that's state and local issues for one voter, anyway. All the other immigration crap is just that, crap.
November 8, 2005 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that both the original posting by Ed "no relation" Kilgore and by the observer from Northern VA remind us how easy it is to fall into the trap of 'a plague on both your houses' where indeed, the Democrat in question may not be perfect, but is making difficult political choices in an imperfect world, and doing their best to defend education, in this instance.
I was more puzzled that Kaine, not Kilgore, was putting the abortion issue so front and center in such a solid red state. If Kaine is able to win this one, which is unclear, it should really lay to rest any of the oft-heard) though fortunately not at this site nonsense about abortion being an 'albatross' issue around the necks of the Demcratic Party.
November 8, 2005 4:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
We'll soon see how the whole campaign turns out
The Associated Press has declared Kaine the winner, according to the ABC affiliate in Richmond! (It looks like the rest of the ticket will go Republican, but that is, unfortunately, not really news.)
Not surprising that Kaine, the former mayor of the city of Richmond, would strongly support local initiative.
November 8, 2005 6:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a Virginian who listened to every debate (and also a Democrat) I am breathing a sigh of relief that my state has looked at its own self-interest and voted in a prosaic progressive who could articulate an actual view. Kaine has a real plan to carry our state forward rather than Kilgore, who could never mange to say anything except that he was FOR education, FOR good roads, FOR employment, and FOR lower taxes. Not one word about HOW. Tonight I am a happy Virignian.
November 8, 2005 6:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
(It looks like the rest of the ticket will go Republican, but that is, unfortunately, not really news.)
I was too hasty; the last tallies I saw had the Attorney General's race in a dead heat, and the Lt. Governor's race extremely close. And the Demo candidate for Lt. Gov has a reputation for being VERY liberal--sort of Virginia's equivalent of Barbara Boxer. I expected her to get skunked; that she's managed to hold her own really IS news!
November 8, 2005 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a Virginian who listened to every debate
How on earth did you manage that? I didn't think public broadcast was allowed (at the Kilgore campaign's insistence) except for one of them, and I'm not sure just where or when that was broadcast. (Maybe on Sunday evening on the public radio station here; I have a weekly choral rehearsal during their public affairs hour timeslot, unfortunately.) The public television station here in Richmond broadcast, consecutively, individual appearances by both Kaine and Kilgore, but there was something else I was doing that evening--I can't remember what.
That was one of the things I held against Kilgore--the virtual shutting down of public debate. (And this is one good argument for continued funding of public broadcasting: they're they only ones who give any significant attention to state and local elections before election night.)
November 8, 2005 7:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
The obscenity of NOVA's traffic is almost beyond description. If you look at the metrorail lines and the growth, you will see no correlation at all. Tyson's Corner on the west side of the Beltway has more office space than all of downtown Baltimore, but has no rail connection at all, and the roads are jammed. Ditto with the Soviet-esque mega-apartment towers in an area called Bailey's Crossroads; no rail there. The original Metro rail had lines through Bailey's to Burke in the SW but those got cut. Maryland has six "spokes" of a metrorail system serving its residents; Virginia has "three" but really two since Metro's Yellow Line is a toy farce compared to the realities of that jurisdiction.
There is a commuter rail "service" running on diesel rolling stock that is SLOW SLOW and unreliable, unlike Maryland's much faster, electrified and somewhat more (though not perfectly) reliable MARC line from Baltimore through BWI to DC, and the lines do not really track a lot of the growth. Plus they turn at odd, almost dog-leg angles.
If you drive on local roads in VA they even just plain look untouched from the 1960s in many cases. There is a lot of bus service but the busses are slow. Why? They are stuck behind the cars on skinny roads, little prayer of a dedicated right of way.
Basically, the two sides of the DC suburbs reflect the nation's divisions as a whole. Maryland is more Black, Jewish, liberal, higher taxes and more activist government, more pro transit, a toned down North Jersey. Virginia is more conservative, pro military with the Pentagon and the CIA there, definitely whiter and more Protestant, a toned down Arkansas. Southern fried chicken tastes a lot better than Virginia's Southern fried transportation evasion. Check out www.wmata.com if you want to see the differences with your own eyes about what a transit system is in MD v. VA. My politics are strongly libertarian on most issues but on this one the liberal Democrats are the only hope.
November 8, 2005 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a commuter rail "service" running on diesel rolling stock that is SLOW SLOW and unreliable, unlike Maryland's much faster, electrified and somewhat more (though not perfectly) reliable MARC line
Is that a result of the same problem that Amtrak has--namely that CSX owns the rail lines south of DC? I know that's why Amtrak has to switch between diesel and electric engines when they stop at Union Station in DC.
November 8, 2005 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another possible factor in Kaine's win, from the Washington Post:
The paper cited an immigrant from Iran with the opposite viewpoint--he voted against Kaine because of Kaine's support for a publicly funded jobs center for immigrant day laborers in Herndon--but if I'm not mistaken, Hispanics are a much larger group in NoVa than Middle Easterners.
November 8, 2005 7:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know if Amtrak owns the track from DC to Richmond outright or if CSX leases rights to Amtrak on that track. CSX does lease out track to the MARC on the other two MD lines; CSX does so grudgingly out of fear of political backwash.
There has been occasional discussion of electrifying south of DC. Diesel engines can work perfectly fine on electrified track; for a while NJ Transit had a few Diesel Express trains mixed with its electric engines on his half-hourly passenger service on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor from Trenton to NY.
November 8, 2005 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know if Amtrak owns the track from DC to Richmond outright or if CSX leases rights to Amtrak on that track.
I am quite sure that Amtrak does not own it; they lease it from CSX. That's the chief reason that northbound trains originating out of Florida are so appallingly late so much of the time. If CSX needs the track anywhere between Florida and DC to run its freight trains, Amtrak has to yield. And Amtrak has no control over maintenance on the tracks, either.
I learned a long time ago to avoid trains originating out of Florida if I cared about when I got where I wanted to go.
November 8, 2005 8:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
How on earth did you manage that?
slb - I watched one debate on telivision (don't recall the date, but even Potts was allowed to participate -- I guess Kilgore couldn't do anything about it.) I listened to another debate on my NPR station (Potts was not allowed - by Kilgore) to participate in that one. Oddly, Kilgore is even worse with just audio. He really reminds me of a child with his sentence structure and poor logic.
I think there was another debate which I didn't hear.
November 9, 2005 7:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right - I don't know why the Republicans hate mass transit. If they have their way AMTRAK will bite the dust. Ronald Reagan, the architect of the downward spiral of the collective good in this country, did his best to gut it. This nightmare of traffic has so inflated property values in close-in communities that it boggles my mind. I moved from Arlington to Charlottesville 9 years ago, but I still get post-cards from a never-say-die Real Estate Agent, and houses that sell for $80,000 above the asking price are not uncommon.
I don't miss that mess at all, but you are right; only Democratic administrations will address this issue, (and then they will get the moniker of "tax and spenders"). Today, I am just so glad that Kaine won I am going to bask in it a while, and not worry about any fallout that comes when he actually tries to do the right thing for our state.
November 9, 2005 7:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, I think there were three debates, but I thought the conditions for at least 2 of them was that no tape from them would be used for broadcast.
I suspect the one with Potts that you saw was the one CVET put together from separate appearances, the one I missed for reasons I no longer remember. I was hoping they'd rebroadcast it, but I never saw that they did. The radio broadcast was more than likely broadcast during WCVE's public affairs hour, which conflicts with my weekly choral rehearsal. Ah, well!
I'm glad Kilgore wasn't completely successful at shutting them all down!
November 9, 2005 8:05 PM | Reply | Permalink