It has been a good week for state Sen. Robert Hurt. On Thursday, he delivered a strong performance in the third of his five one-on-one debates with Democrat incumbent Rep. Tom Perriello. Today, Hurt picked up endorsements from the editorial boards of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Danville Register & Bee and the Lynchburg News & Advance:
Staying the course America is on violates the rule of holes — if you’re in one, stop digging — and continues to threaten our future while creating an ever-increasing number of people with their hands out.
As we’ve seen in Greece and most recently France, a government cannot offer the moon and stars to its people and then easily take those benefits away in tough times. In business, they say it’s important to under promise and over deliver. Governments have a bad habit of doing just the opposite: They promise way too much and then fail to deliver.
That can’t be allowed to happen.
When [Robert] Hurt speaks of the American dream being endangered, he speaks to all of us who know what would happen to our own lives if we managed our family finances the way Washington has managed the federal budget. The national credit card cannot be run up, forever, without serious consequences.
“We’ve got to balance our books,” Hurt said.
Who better to help do that than a champion of Southside Virginia? As a local and state legislator, Hurt has never been allowed to overspend. It’s been drilled into him from the first oath of office that he took that he must — every single year — balance the budget.
…On Nov. 2, it’s time for the people to return the favor and send Robert Hurt to Congress.
Perhaps because of Sen. Hurt’s good week, the Democrats have turned to an interesting issue for the campaign’s closing week: the independent candidacy of Jeff Clark. Clark, a Tea Party activist from Danville, who is running a very distant third in every poll conducted of the 5th District race, has campaigned as the conservative candidate in the race. (The 5th District Tea Parties, while refusing to endorse Robert Hurt, have also distanced themselves from Clark’s candidacy.) This weekend, the Democratic Party of Virginia sent a mailer to homes throughout the district extolling Clark’s support for the Fair Tax, social conservatism and desire to abolish the IRS. It concluded with the statement: “Maybe [Robert Hurt] is afraid to face our families because he’s not the conservative he says he is.” Apparently, though, no one warned the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that Clark is the DPVA’s hero du jour; the DCCC sent a mailer–the same day–warning voters that Jeff Clark is “too conservative for Virginia.”
Aside from the Democrats’ ambivalence over the Clark candidacy, what can we learn from their sudden fixation on Jeff Clark? It seems possible that Rep. Perriello and Virginia Democrats have concluded that the numbers just aren’t there to propel Rep. Perriello to a second term in a two-man race. With Republican/conservative voters more energized than Democrats/liberals, with the swing/independent voters now siding decisively with the GOP and with the issues favoring Republican candidates, perhaps the Perriello campaign has realized that Perriello will be unable to win by running on his own record. If he cannot expand his base and if his issues are non-starters with the 5th District’s independent voters, perhaps Rep. Perriello has decided his only avenue to victory is by promoting Jeff Clark’s candidacy and chipping away at Sen. Hurt’s conservative base. We will see if this was a wise strategy in just nine days.
