Looks like we’re going with the expansive definition of the Shenandoah Valley for the conclusion of the Deeds Country Tour.
The closest the tour will get to the actual Shenandoah Valley is on Sunday when it wraps in Deeds’ home Bath County with a homecoming event. Which is all well and good, but we’re leaving out a wide swath of Western Virginia voters by not coming into the Valley proper.
For example, here in our home base, the Waynesboro-Staunton-Harrisonburg triangle, we either drove over the mountains to Charlottesville last Sunday or drive over the mountains to Warm Springs this Sunday.
Guess we’re not in Deeds Country, huh?
Funny, I had this debate on Facebook with a reader this week about whether or not we’re really country anymore anyway. I’m of course of the opinion that we’re not, but admittedly I live in a downtown district and have a jaundiced point of view on these kinds of things as a result.
I’m also a Democratic Party committee chair in my spare time, and my locality has been blessed with exactly one visit from our nominee since he announced for governor in 2007, a couple of days before Christmas last year.
I had an inkling that we weren’t going to see Creigh on the Deeds Country Tour because nobody had called ahead of time to get us to help line up an event, but still I assumed we’d be able to get people over to Staunton or at the least up the road to Harrisonburg for some sort of regional event on behalf of our standard-bearer.
We’re talking roughly 150,000 residents in our two-county, three-city region that somehow didn’t merit even a flyby.
Ferchrissakes, Barack Obama himself was here last year a week before the daggone election. And we can’t get a guy who represented our rural area in the House of Delegates for a decade to give us 20 minutes at Mrs. Rowe’s off the interstate?
Just so we can be clear on this, the Shenandoah Valley runs from Winchester to Rockbridge County in between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians to the east and west and the Potomac River and the James River to the north and south.
If you say you’re coming to the Valley on a tour, you’d better come to the Valley on your tour.
Oh, and if somebody from the Deeds campaign could get us some campaign materials – anything, really, it doesn’t matter what. We’ve been asking for them for weeks, and we’re tired of driving around and seeing all the Republican swag on the side of the road and not having anything to counter what they have out and about.
You can tell I’m in a good mood.
– Still nothing from the Steve Shannon campaign. I’m beginning to wonder if we really have a nominee in that one. Well, I get the press releases.
– Our House of Delegates candidates out this way are working their arses off. And yet they’re not going to get a lick of help from the state party. Should we just start waving the white flag now and save our time and trouble this fall?
– On a positive note, I was named the president of the Waynesboro Generals Valley League baseball team this week. I’m prepared to put my birth certificate online. I’m also prepared to have 45 percent of our fan base tell me that they think I was born in Indonesia.
– Column by Chris Graham
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