“You’d think he could get somebody to vote with him every once in a while,” a friend who is a longtime local Republican leader was telling me this week at the Augusta County Fair about Dickie Bell, the GOP nominee in the 20th House District.
I had just said something to her about how I assumed Bell’s consistent conservative voting record on Staunton City Council would be a feather in his cap among Republican voters. “At least he can say, you know, he’s got bona fides as a conservative.”
“But every vote is 6-1, and he’s the 1,” my Republican friend said. “You’d like to see him maybe get somebody else to vote with him on some things. Maybe get the others to vote with him to get something passed every now and then. It doesn’t do much good to have him on there voting no on everything and not getting anything done. Is that what he’s going to do in Richmond?”
Good points, all, I thought, and it made me think. I talked with a Staunton City Council member to try to get a sense of how Bell works with Council members. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he does do things behind the scenes to get fellow Council members to come to his position on issues of the day, and they just don’t bend his way, so to speak.
“Dickie doesn’t want to work with anybody. He’s content being over in a corner by himself,” the Council member told me.
Thirteen years on City Council, “and I’ve tried to think of something that Dickie can say is an initiative of his that he saw through from the idea phase to getting it accomplished. Only one thing comes to mind – the skateboard park,” the Council member said, and that’s the one where I have experience working with Bell. I was the editor of The Shenandoah Valley Observer weekly newspaper at the time, and we endorsed the skateboard-park concept and worked with Bell as he worked to gain support for the initiative.
Behind the scenes, “The reason we ended up doing it wasn’t Dickie. It was downtown-business owners saying, Do something to get the skateboarders out of downtown,” the Council member said. “They would have done anything to get them out of their hair. So that one wasn’t even all that controversial. Pretty much when he brought it up, it was going to get done.”
Outside of that, Bell being the 1 in 6-1 votes is pretty much the image that City Council members have of Bell, who famously said at the public forum for candidates for the 20th District GOP nomination at Buffalo Gap High School last month that city-level politics in Staunton have “shifted from conservatism to something that is alarming.”
Which is to say, the feeling seems mutual, and again, my thinking on that had been up to this week that Republican voters would appreciate that and reward it on Election Day. Not to say that my one Republican friend is a harbinger or anything, but she’s obviously thought through the issues and come to something of a strong opinion on Bell.
“If he can’t get anything done in Staunton, what’s he going to do for us in Richmond?” she said. “You can’t just vote your principles. You have to be able to work with other people to be able to get things done. And he doesn’t have a good track record on City Council.”
We might have found the soft underbelly of the Bell candidacy.
– Column by Chris Graham
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