In Virginia district, residents feel disconnected from Congress
The shutdown and the sequester are not abstractions in this district, but real pocketbook issues. The economy around these communities really took a hit in the shutdown. David Bergstein, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman
WASHINGTON: Leonard Parker, passing the time over a ham sandwich at the Berryville News Stand in Northern Virginia, called over to a stranger at the next table: “Where’d you get that tan?”
Mike Torrez, in Berryville from Winchester chauffeuring clients to a funeral, winced. “What’s that, sir?” he said.
Parker repeated the question, and Torrez responded, tightly, “It’s natural, sir, natural colour,” figuring that would end the discussion. With so many people moving from the Washington suburbs to this part of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley 80 miles west of the District of Columbia, Torrez hadn’t heard a line like that in a while.
After a few icy moments in the warm, chatty atmosphere of the Main Street gathering spot, the two edged toward common ground by talking traffic, trading tales of neighbours who leave home at 4am to get to the Pentagon. Then they got around to politics, and in this election year, when the congressman who represents a misshapen chunk of Northern Virginia from McLean out to Winchester is retiring after 34 years in office, they found plenty to agree on: Congress works for the rich and the powerful, not for us. Nobody down there pays attention to jobs, which is the big issue.
What finally connected Parker and Torrez was the disconnect that has turned US’ politics into a swamp of dysfunction and mistrust. Even in a district directly across the Potomac River from that swamp, the forces that have alienated many Americans from their government are clearly at play. In Virginia’s 10th District, as in many of the most hard-fought contests in this election year, a swiftly changing population, a sense that mobility and security are ever more palpably beyond reach, and mounting cynicism about the people who run for office are combining to stymie Democrats and Republicans alike.
The district is a product of gerrymandering, a calculated effort by Republicans in Richmond after the 2010 election to create a safe seat for their party in ever-more Democratic Northern Virginia.
The slivers of Fairfax in the 10th are the county’s northern and western edges, mostly affluent areas where Republicans often do well.
This is the country’s 10th wealthiest House district, yet it is one of only 16 in the country that the Democrats have on their red-to-blue list. They have concluded that their candidate, John Foust, a Fairfax County supervisor, has a strong enough shot at flipping a Republican seat that the Democratic Party plans to pump big money into his campaign.
Mitt Romney barely beat President Barack Obama here in 2012, but in the same election, former Governor Timothy Kaine, the Democrat, slipped past Republican candidate George Allen, also a former governor and an ex-senator.
Last year, more ticketsplitting: The 10th went by a hair for the GOP’s Ken Cuccinelli in the governor’s race over Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat who won the statewide vote; but district voters chose Democratic candidate Mark Herring for Virginia attorney general over the Republicans’ Mark Obenshain.
Democrats think they have an especially strong chance in the 10th this year because US Senator Mark Warner, the state’s most popular elected official, will be on the ballot and will spend heavily to get his voters to the polls. Republicans think they have a built-in advantage because popular antipathy toward Obama and his healthcare programme pervades the area, regardless of income level.
Democrats know what they need to do — find ways, as Obama did, to boost turnout among their voters, especially new comers to the area, immigrants, federal workers and non-whites.
“The shutdown and the sequester are not abstractions in this district, but real pocketbook issues,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman David Bergstein. “The economy around these communities really took a hit in the shutdown.”
The Republican recipe in the 10th is not as clear. Some say the path to victory lies with the base, which will come out in force for an uncompromising social conservative like Cuccinelli. Others say the party must find a way to connect with minorities, especially in a place like Northern Virginia, where whites are already in the minority in Prince William County and likely will be by decade’s end in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
Winning the 10th won’t be easy for either party because the district isn’t what it used to be, because the people aren’t quite sure what they want, and because what they do know and agree on is that the politicians don’t get it.
“It’s the economy and bad leadership, not health insurance,” said Parker, 73, who grew up in Washington and Arlington, Virginia and during a career in the drapery business moved ever westward, to Reston, then Leesburg and finally Clarke County. He votes Republican but doesn’t get why his party’s candidates focus so much on the Affordable Care Act.
Wolf’s district looks on a map like a bent, hungry alligator, its body stretched across fastgrowing suburbs from Loudoun County to still-fairly rural Clarke and Frederick counties, its jaws made up of thin strands of Fairfax and Prince William counties.
The 10th is a landscape of contrasts, from Potomac riverside mansions in McLean and Great Falls to increasingly Hispanic neighbourhoods in Manassas, from the tract townhouse developments of Sterling and Ashburn to the vineyards and dairy farms of the Shenandoah. Among the district’s 758,000 residents, 20 per cent are foreign-born, 13 per cent are Asian American, 12 per cent are Hispanic and seven per cent are black.
What Torrez and Parker knew and liked best about Wolf, the Republican who has represented Virginia’s 10th District since Ronald Reagan was first elected, is that he pushed to fund wider roads and extend commuter rail, issues absent from Fox News, but the first thing on the minds of the guys in the Berryville eatery.
“It’s the traffic,” Torrez said, referring to the congested roads around Washington suburbs such as Ashburn, Virginia.
“We’re out here because Ashburn became Cashburn — if you don’t have deep pockets, you can’t live there. You need to put someone in there who will do something about people spending six hours a day on the road.” — WP-Bloomberg