The June 2 issue of American Conservative Magazine highlights the 8th District race, picking up on a theme started here on Bearing Drift — and that is that the race in the 8th represents the future of the GOP more than perhaps any other primary contest in Virginia.
Here are some highlights from the article:
First, identifying the two schools each candidate appears to represent:
A test of the Huckabee and Paul legacies—against one another and against an entrenched liberal Democrat—is fast approaching in Virginia’s Eighth Congressional District. Its June 10 Republican primary pits Amit Singh, an Arlington defense contractor and first-time candidate endorsed by Ron Paul, against Mark Ellmore, described by the Arlington Connection as a “religious evangelical Christian” who “ran on the promise of putting compassion back in ‘compassionate conservatism’” in his first bid for the nomination in 2006.
Second, The Jeffersoniad’s own Crystal Clear Conservative gets a shout-out:
Whether Singh’s fiscal conservatism and foreign-policy realism will find support among other minorities in the Eighth district—and among rank-and-file Republicans in the primary—remains to be seen. His views have, however, proven popular with many of the area’s GOP activists. Two influential Northern Virginia conservative blogs, Crystal Clear Conservative and Red Virginia, have endorsed him—in the case of Crystal Clear Conservative, despite disagreeing with him on Iraq.
Finally, here’s a phrase that made this 33-year-old take notice:
Singh’s press secretary, Navdeep Singh (no relation to the candidate) suggests that several of Virginia’s younger GOP leaders—Amit Singh is 33, Cuccinelli is 39—share an affinity that is
generational as well as philosophical: having come of age when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the 42nd president’s optimistic, small-government sensibility comes naturally to them.
How true.
There’s much more to this article, including an interesting discussion on demographics. However, it is rather one-sided for Mr. Singh.
The bottom-line is that both Ellmore and Singh represent very distinct views on what it means to be a “Republican”. The voters of the Eighth will as much be sending a signal to the rest of Virginia about what “brand” of Republicanism will energize them (and might translate into future victories), as they will be about merely choosing an opponent to Jim Moran.
