The 20th District Republican Party nomination is Dickie Bell’s to lose, just as it appeared this time last week in the hours after Chris Saxman’s stunning announcement that he was dropping out of the race.
Bell is an ideal candidate in more ways than one. The 62-year-old moderate is in his fourth term on Staunton City Council, and he’s been popular at the polls, leading the voting in the all-at-large elections in 2004 and coming in second to Ophie Kier in 2008, and that’s saying something given Staunton’s progressive leanings in recent years.
The question for a Bell candidacy would be, How would his understated political style translate in a race for a state House of Delegates seat? I think that is a serious question that Republicans will have to answer between now and Monday night, when local Republicans will meet for a public forum at Buffalo Gap High School, after which the party will determine its House of Delegates nominee.
Former Augusta County supervisor Charles Curry is another big name on the list of candidates seeking the party nod. Curry served three terms on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors in the 1980s and 1990s. The drawback to his candidacy for the House of Delegates will be his run for the North River District seat in 2007 as an independent against Republican incumbent Larry Howdyshell. Party leaders on both sides of the aisle tend to frown upon candidates who step outside the party structure to challenge in general elections for seats held by party members.
Western State Hospital community-services director John Beghtol could be an interesting darkhorse moderate choice, though I’d have to wonder about how he would translate from the administrative realm to the political arena. Former Staunton commissioner of the revenue Ray Ergenbright could also be a bit of a wild card here, the chief drawback to an Ergenbright candidacy being that he has lost his last two runs for office in Staunton, in 2003 when he ran for the clerk of court job and in 2005 when he fell short in his re-election bid for commissioner of revenue.
Another wild card is former Staunton Republican Committee chair Cliff Fretwell, who with Ergenbright has been at times at odds with the current Staunton Republican Committee leadership over control of the local party committee.
I have to admit not knowing much about Charles Hawkins, a Staunton resident who is a data architect with a Harrisonburg software company, other than that the brief bio sketches that we’ve seen of Hawkins in the local media refer to him as being an advocate for limiting government spending and creating jobs.
I do know a little about David Karaffa, a 25-year-old cardiac nurse from Stuarts Draft and former member of the executive committee of the Augusta County Republican Committee. I first ran into Karaffa at a Mark Warner town hall in Staunton in April the day after the nationwide tea-party protests. Karaffa worked his way into the public limelight at the town hall by raising issue with the federal stimulus with Warner in the question-and-answer session and then finagling a photo op out of the United States senator for his troubles afterward.
The Karaffa candidacy, I have to say, is most intriguing to me, because Karaffa appears to me to be the one candidate in this field who would be able to fire up the Republican base, which is important because the Republicans are going to need to have an energized base to do the heavy lifting in this suddenly competitive campaign.
Karaffa’s ties to the Kurt Michael/Lynn Mitchell power base that is still a force, albeit in the shadows right now, in local Republican circles could be a key factor in the fall.
On the flip side, I have to wonder if a Bell or Curry candidacy wouldn’t perhaps de-energize the base, since both come across as establishment types, and we know how the Republican base reacts to GOP candidates who come across as establishment types.
Another thing that makes me wonder is based on what I’m hearing from Democrats about Bell and Curry. To a person, every Democrat I’ve talked to in the past week is solidly behind Democratic Party nominee Erik Curren, but that said, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Bell and Curry, and one local party leader I talked with said being a Virginian first, then a Democrat, if Curren were to lose, he’d hope it would be to either Bell or Curry, because either of the two would be expected to do a good job representing the 20th District in Richmond.
In the weird, wild, wacky world that is politics, that kind of endorsement from somebody on the other side can actually be a detriment, and if you don’t believe that to be true, ask Emmett Hanger his thoughts on the matter.
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Final analysis: My bet is that Dickie Bell gets the nomination because I’m betting that local GOP leaders are going to want to play it safe. The David Karaffa option scares the Democrat in me, I have to admit. To me the analogy that comes to mind is choosing who you’d rather face in his prime in a heavyweight-title fight, Evander Holyfield or Mike Tyson. Bell, like Holyfield, will fight you fair and square. Karaffa, like Tyson, strikes me as the type who would bite your ear off if necessary.
– Column by Chris Graham
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