this is cross-posted on Left of the Hill
The candidates for Congress from Virginia's 11th District held another debate last night. Including a fair number of high school students who had come to the debate for their government class, about 50 to 60 people came out the hear the candidates speak in Vienna. Based on conversations I had with people there and the stickers most were wearing, the vast majority of the audience had already decided who they were going to support and many of them were people who are extremely active on both sides of the aisle. In other words, the people in the crowd were knowledgeable about the issues and were largely there to get more information about where the candidates stand on specific issues.
Even though there were only a few days in between the two debates, I was interested in seeing if the candidates had made any changes to their approach to the debate. After the discussions I had with people on both sides of the aisle, after all, it was quite obvious that Keith Fimian's approach of literally telling people that the world as we know it is going to end if we don't elect business executives like him to Congress had really backfired. Unfortunately, he decided to become even more forceful in this argument. It was almost as if he believed that constantly repeating his message and saying it a little louder would make people believe that it was actually true. His performance was so bad that many of the students in the audience were laughing and making fun of him - even the ones who were wearing Fimian stickers joined in.
more below the fold
Perhaps the most interesting portion of the debate came in the first question which touched on how the candidates believed we should go about ensuring that the young men and women in uniform receive the proper treatment if they are wounded in battle. Gerry Connolly told us that he believed that this was an important issue something that we need to take "if we ask young men and women to serve bravely on our behalf, they have to have the highest possible quality health care, mental care, and educational benefits when they return home." While discussing the importance of this issue, he mentioned that he would have voted in favor of Jim Webb's GI Bill. He also gave a personal touch by telling the story of a soldier he knows who was severely wounded just days before he was scheduled to come home from Iraq.
Keith Fimian, on the other hand, told us that in order to take care of our soldiers we need to cut taxes and balance the budget. He even threw in how in the business world a person would probably be fired if they came in over budget. Beyond his opening line telling us that we must take care of our troops, he made no effort he tie this into how doing all of this would help our men and women in uniform. I have to admit I was very surprised by this answer and found it to be absolutely disgusting. I knew that a large portion of Fimian's campaign was trying to scare people into voting for him by literally claiming the world as we know it would end if we didn't elect business executives to Congress, this an absolutely horrendous move on his part. It really says something about his priorities when he turned a question about taking care of our troops into a discussion of his experience as a business executive.
The discussion continued on like this throughout the debate with Fimian yelling about how we had to pay attention to balancing the budget and give tax cuts. At one point in time he even said that rolling back Bush's tax cuts to the extremely wealthy would devastate our economy. In other words, he wants to continue a large portion of the economic policy that has gotten us where we are today - facing the possibility of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street while people on Main Street are struggling just to get by. Perhaps the most ironic part of the whole thing is that a Fimian supporter took an extremely large stack of index cards to fill out questions to be asked during the debate. Despite this clear attempt to sway the debate in his favor, Fimian still came across as a candidate who couldn't reach beyond his one or two talking points.
I think it's important that readers know that one of the candidates actually showed some competence in the issues important to Virginians (Gerry Connolly), so I will be posting some more in depth analysis of the topics covered over at Left of the Hill.