It would have surprised me if Abigail Spanberger hadn’t signed on to back Beth Macy’s run for a seat in Congress in our part of the state.
I mean, Spanberger outing herself as a Beth Macy fangirl, indeed, entirely predictable, when you think about it.
The reason: Spanberger, elected governor last fall, after serving three terms in Congress, and Macy, a bestselling author known for her work examining life in MAGA America, are cut from the same cloth.
“In Congress, Abigail Spanberger was a leader who never backed down from a fight and always put her constituents first. As governor, she’s already demonstrated that she’s set on delivering for Virginians. That ethos she so clearly embodies, of people over party and power, is what this campaign is about,” said Macy, a former Roanoke Times reporter who announced her candidacy for Congress last year.
Macy, and Spanberger, both stand up straight and tall for progressive ideals, but at the same time make it a priority to work with folks in the middle, the center-right and even the out-there folks, to at least see if there’s common ground, and get this, there is.
ICYMI
“Beth Macy has spent four decades telling the stories of outsiders and underdogs — from reporting on offshoring jobs to shining a light on the devastating impacts of the opioid crisis,” Spanberger said in her endorsement.
If you’ve not read Macy’s Dopesick, I won’t mind if you step away from here to track it down online.
Absolute must-read.
That book changed the way I view drug addiction, and how wrong we get it – socially, politically, the rest.
Her latest book, Paper Girl, is based on her real-life effort to make sense of why her Ohio hometown went full-out MAGA 10 years ago.
The through-line from Macy to Spanberger: Spanberger, before she ran for political office, was a postal inspector, investigating money laundering and narcotics cases, then a CIA agent, working on nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
The work for journalists and investigators is steeped in learning things; often, things that are uncomfortable to have to confront.
Me personally, I’ll take an Abigail Spanberger or Beth Macy over a former assistant county prosecutor like a Ben Cline any day of the week.
I’ve yet to meet a local-yokel prosecutor who doesn’t think he’s god walking among us, when the job is 99 percent getting defendants to plead guilty in an assembly line.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Ben Cline, the current Sixth District congressman, and a dedicated MAGA, sees the world as zero sum, us vs. them.
Go sit in a local courtroom and watch them work; it doesn’t take much in the way of intellectual rigor to do that job; it’s glorified paper-pushing.
Criminal justice, as we term it, in this country, is a sham; but that’s another story for another day.
Trying to figure out why the low-level drug dealer has a hard time getting off the junk, despite everybody in her life trying, desperately, to help, like Beth Macy did with numerous interview subjects in Dopesick, not being judgmental, efforting to get at what we can do better to help people make their lives better, that’s several levels beyond, just throw them in jail.
And I’ll just say it – Macy doesn’t go easy on Democrats; her work makes it clear that it was the Democrat-backed NAFTA that jumpstarted the economic decline of Appalachia in the 1990s, which, in turn, precipitated the opioid crisis that itself beget so much else that we’re still sorting through in our part of America today.
MAGA politicians like Ben Cline and JD Vance, who, being fromheres, should know better, sell voters on the idea that the solution is throwing brown-skinned people into gulags and owning the libs.
Beth Macy is a fromhere with a different idea.
Instead of treating every problem like a nail so we can justify using the force of government as a hammer, you know, maybe we work together to try to figure out another, better way.
It’s worth a shot; what we’re doing now sure as crap isn’t working.
“In Congress, Beth will do what she has always done: promoting opportunity, affordability, and dignity for working families. I’m proud to endorse her candidacy,” Spanberger said.
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Chris Graham
