Bell wins re-election in landslide
Incumbent Republican Dickie Bell won re-election in the 20th House District by receiving 69.8 percent of the vote in his race with Democrat Laura Kleiner.
Bell, a former Staunton City Councilman and Augusta County schoolteacher, was strongest in Augusta County, where he won 82.8 percent of the votes against Kleiner, a recent Mary Baldwin College graduate.
Bell won majorities in every locality in the 20th, which was redrawn in the 2011 legislative redistricting to add Waynesboro and Nelson County. Bell garnered 72.4 percent of the vote in Waynesboro and 66.4 percent of the vote in Staunton, where he had won four elections to City Council before running and winning in the 20th House District race in 2009.
Kleiner performed best in Democrat-friendly Nelson County, though she still fell short of a majority in Nelson, getting 44.1 percent of the vote there.
Kleiner announces candidacy in 20th
For the record, she’s not 21. On Saturday, Laura Kleiner, who announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination in the 20th House District, turned 22.
A dozen local Democrats turned out at an event at the Stratton Building in Downtown Staunton for the announcement. Kleiner to date is the only candidate in the race for the Democratic Party nomination in the 20th, which will now represent Waynesboro and Nelson County in addition to Staunton, portions of Augusta County and the entirety of Highland County.
Republican Dickie Bell, a former Staunton City Councilman, currently holds the seat.
A current member of Staunton City Council, Bruce Elder, helped introduce Kleiner at her announcement event on Saturday.
“We are here on this glorious, sunny, perfect Virginia day to talk about the future of Virginia,” said Elder, a second-term City Councilman who ran unsuccessfully in 2005 for the 20th District seat, losing to former State Del. Chris Saxman.
Also on hand was Creigh Deeds, a state senator whose House district used to represent a wide swath of territory now encompassing the new 20th District.
“It’s tough as nails to run as a Democrat in this part of the world. And I’ve got a few scars I can show you,” said Deeds, who lost as the Democratic Party nominee in the 2009 governor’s race.
“Laura understands that. She’s going into this race with eyes wide open,” Deeds said. “She’s got a positive vision for Virginia’s future. She’s got positive energy and lots of ideas. She’s exactly the kind of person that we need to be encouraging to get involved in the political process. And she’s going to bring leadership to the House of Delegates that moves the ball forward and creates opportunity for all Virginians.”
Kleiner is a Mary Baldwin College senior who will be graduating from the Staunton private college this month. The Blacksburg native pledged on Saturday to focus her attention on job creation, economic opportunity and education.
“I’m well aware of the economic crisis with which we continue to struggle,” said Kleiner, talking up initiatives ongoing in Staunton promoting entrepreneurial startups and opportunities for established businesses to expand their operations locally.
“As your delegate, I will work to cultivate economic growth,” Kleiner said.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Chris Graham: Switch in district lines could aid Dems
The conventional wisdom to the proposed legislative redistricting that would move Waynesboro into the 20th House District along with Staunton is that Republican Del. Dickie Bell gets Waynesboro in his district.
I’m usually not big on conventional wisdom, and I’m certainly not in this case.
I’ve written columns over the past couple of years about how the only hope local Democrats have in getting one of their own representing a Valley district in Richmond is to get two cities into a single legislative district. The best chance for that happening, I’ve been saying, was obviously getting Staunton and Waynesboro, eight miles apart at their closest points, into the same district, the two cities’ populations making up about 60 percent of the district, connected by a sliver of Augusta County.
I would not have envisioned what we’ve seen in the proposal – that the district would also stretch into Nelson County, which has had a strong Democratic presence over the years.
So you’d have Staunton, which tilts Democratic, Waynesboro, which still leans Republican, but has been Democratizing more and more in recent years, and Nelson. Of course the Augusta precincts along the spine are going to go heavily Republican, but I can envision Democrats being competitive in this district, at the least.
Doing so in 2011 might be tough given the time constraints. Bell has the competitive advantage this year. But the district lines are good through 2021. That’s plenty of time for the Dems to find a good homegrown business-thinking moderate who could do us good in the General Assembly.
Not that I have anybody in mind there when I write that …
Chris Graham: Smaller government, with a catch
I don’t personally have any issue with the notion that government needs to be run more efficiently and run more like a business. Anybody with experience managing a business or organization knows that there are inevitably inefficiencies that can be accounted for and corrected to make things run more smoothly.
A problem I have is with politicians who claim to be small-government types on the one hand then on the other hand going out and pushing big government in the form of social engineering.
Case in point: State Del. Dickie Bell and his supposed zeal for small government. Bell told a town-hall audience this week that he’d like to see state agencies adopt a zero-based budgeting method touted by some conservatives as the panacea to growth in government spending.
Aside: Which would be great, except that the great bulk of growth in government spending comes in the area of entitlements – Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits. Very, very few elected officials are willing to even consider even restraining the growth in entitlements because doing so would be at the least political masochism and at worst suicide.
More columns from Chris Graham at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
But I digress. So Bell has this zeal for small government, as evidenced by his zeal for zero-based budgeting. And then he tells the town-hall folks, according to The News Virginian, that he plans to introduce legislation in the 2011 Virginia General Assembly to:
- Encourage prayer at public events and meetings
- Make English the state’s official language
- Create a special “In God we trust” license plate
- Grant unpaid leave to state representatives
That last one has a personal touch for Bell, who lost a battle with the Augusta County School Board for paid leave from his teaching job related to his legislative work.
What in the name of small government is there to any of the above from Bell? It looks to me that what Bell is doing here is creating more work for Steve Landes, who you might remember made it one of his key areas of focus as a state legislator to set up a process for finding outdated and frivolous state laws to have taken off the books.
I know quite a few local Democrats who poke fun at Landes for those efforts, basically saying that Landes could find a lot more worthwhile pursuits to take up his time representing the people in Richmond, but I’ve actually been behind Landes on that from the get-go. From my own experience in business and specifically what we do in business, I think the more streamlined you can be in terms of the rules you have to play by, what you’re trying to present to potential clients or customers, et cetera, the better off you’re going to be.
I support Bob Goodlatte and Emmett Hanger in their efforts to streamline the federal tax code and the way state and local governments assess and collect taxes. Even if the result would be a dollar-for-dollar return on monies collected in the new system, as I’d suspect there would be, think of the savings for individuals, families and small, medium and big business in terms of compliance.
I guess what I’m saying here is, Small government isn’t starving government. Some partisans have made a living out of demonizing government even as we’d all have to concede that we wouldn’t have national defense and internal security and roads and public education without the coalescing of interests and means to pay for it and administer it and maintain it, and that’s what government is, ultimately.
Beware, I’d warn, those who preach smaller government out of one side of their mouth and then out of the other offer up myriad ways for government to grow its influence over daily life.
Legislative breakfast
The Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce invites you and your guests to attend the Legislative Breakfast on Wednesday, Dec. 15, from 8-9 a.m. at Bentley Commons of Staunton.
Our area legislators, State Sen. Emmett Hanger and State Dels. Steve Landes, Ben Cline and Dickie Bell, will be briefing members on hot issues and bills coming before the 2011 General Assembly session in Richmond.
The floor will then be opened up for a question and answer period following their remarks.
Enjoy a delicious breakfast at a cost of $15 per person.
RSVP to chamber@ntelos.net or call 540.324.1133.
Big Brother and local education
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Big government has no place in local education. Does us no good to be sending dictates down from Washingon and Richmond with all manner of strings attached.
No Child Left Behind – bad idea. Standards of Learning – bad idea.
Freshman State Del. Dickie Bell’s proposed state mandate that local school boards allocate 65 percent of its operating budget to instructional spending – bad idea.
The initiative isn’t Bell’s alone. Bob McDonnell had the 65 percent threshold as part of his ’09 guberntorial-campaign platform. I can understand a pol like McDonnell getting something like this wrong, but not Bell, a public-school teacher when the General Assembly is not in session. Read more
Chris Graham: Who I’m voting for in the 20th House
Posted by afp on November 7, 2011 · 2 Comments
This other Dickie Bell, the one who comes across as a hard-core social and fiscal conservative, I don’t know him that well, but I understand what’s going on there. Back when Dickie first got the nomination to run as the Republican nominee for the 20th House District seat in 2009, he was about as close to the political center of the long list of candidates as you could be and still be considered a Republican.
He could have viewed his ultimate blessing by the party hierarchy as an endorsement of his approach to politics, but decided instead to run to the right after having secured the nomination. A curious move, indeed, but it’s hard to criticize – he won the November 2009 election with more than 70 percent of the vote in a district that includes Democratic-leaning Staunton.
Now with the borders of the 20th redrawn to include Waynesboro and Nelson County, Bell could very well face a challenge at some point down the road in a district that is tilting back toward the political middle. This is where the old Dickie, the one that I like, would do well to re-emerge.
He doesn’t have anything to worry about in 2011. Laura Kleiner, God bless her for trying, but it’s hard to imagine a lot of people, even diehard Democrats, being able to justify pulling the lever for her given her age (22) and lack of experience (she’s a recent college graduate with no meaningful political or business qualifications). Bell, for his part, has plenty to call upon – four terms on Staunton City Council, for starters, plus a long run as a teacher and coach in the Augusta County school system.
And he has a history of reaching across the aisle to get things done. I know this personally, having worked with Bell for more than a year in the early 2000s on an effort to develop a public skateboard park in Staunton. Through an orchestrated series of public meetings and private one-on-ones, Bell was able to methodically gain support for the effort, and the results are what we’d both said they’d be when he first brought the idea up and I first began to write in support of it – it’s a rare day to drive by the park on Lake Tams and not see it teeming with skateboarders.
I still have issues sometimes reconciling the Dickie Bell that I’ve known and worked with over the years with some of the public pronouncements I see being made in his name on some issues of the day. In the end, I get it, that’s politics, and when the politics are accounted for, the Dickie that can get a skateboard park built in the face of initial opposition from City Council and the local newspaper is the Dickie that can get things done in Richmond.
That’s why I’ll be pulling the lever for Dickie Bell on Nov. 8.
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