I attended the meet and greet in Shepherdstown Friday evening for West Virginia’s new Democratic candidate for WV-02 Anne Barth. About 200 people packed the event, a great turnout for an event on such short notice and on a day when the weather involved a freezing rain.
The room was packed, but I saw many familiar faces from Democratic and progressive groups from across the Eastern Panhandle. Some of my favorite people from the Kerry-Edwards campaign in ’04 are among her staunchest supporters and think highly of her.
I got a great first impression from her. She’s just six days into this race and she’s got a solid stump speech. What I really liked about her speech is how she weaved her personal background in smoothly to show how it shaped her career in public service. But what I liked most about her stump speech is she goes straight at Capito – politely, almost quietly, yet landing the lines that drew sharp distinctions between herself and her Republican opponent. Capito is a backbencher who has supported Bush’s agenda against the interests of West Virginians and Capito has worked against the rest of the West Virginia delegation in Congress. Barth did a great job of pointing that out in her speech and those lines drew the most enthusiastic response.
I spent most of my time speaking to Berkeley County Democrats about county issues. We’ve also got some great candidates running in Jefferson County and (note to self) I’ve got to write up a post about them.
I did not get a chance to go over a checklist of issues with Barth. While her campaign has hit the ground running, it is just six days into it. As eager as I am to find out where she stands on a wide variety of issues, some patience is required. As soon as her web site is up, either I or someone here will link to it.
But from what I saw, there’s a lot to like in Barth as a candidate. She was poised, she was personable and there’s a solid network of supporters for her in the Eastern Panhandle. This is where the battle for WV-02 is going to be decided because this is, unfortunately, Capito’s base. To defeat Capito, and Clem and I have said this all along, a successful candidate can’t just rely on voter turnout in the more Democratic counties and ignore the Eastern Panhandle. That’s not worked in the previous campaigns. A successful candidate has got to peel away voters from Capito here by going after her here.
Barth assured the party loyalists that she’ll be in the Eastern Panhandle a lot. She has good friends to stay with in the Eastern Panhandle who can build the kind of friend-to-friend GOTV that is much more effective than traditional stranger-to-stranger canvassing and phonebanking.
This region is Capito’s strongest point and Clem and I are just stealing a play from Karl Rove’s playbook when we say the best way to beat her is to attack her where she’s strongest. Barth came across as a candidate who’ll take the fight to Capito while keeping a charming, winning smile on her face the entire time. That’s going to make Barth a formidable ball carrier* now that the football has been handed off to her.
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* Since I’m breaking out the football metaphors anyway, I’ll repeat a story I’ve told before because I think it fits.
Make no mistake, it’s an uphill fight against an opponent that has campaign coffers filled from the corporations and rightwing conservatives she’s supported in Congress. In terms of size, Capito is a much bigger opponent.
Long ago in a land far away, I played on football team for a small high school where our biggest lineman weighed just over 200 pounds and our opponents came from much larger schools with much, much bigger players.
And every Friday night, our head coach gathered us together before our games and said:
“Boys, it’s not the size of the dogs in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dogs.”
My senior year we went 9-1 and won the league championship. Our only loss was to Oak Hill, which won because of extremely questionable officiating on their home field (not that I hold a grudge two decades later — the bastards.)
The other teams may have been taller and outweighed us, but nobody, not even Oak Hill, ever out hit us.
I got the sense tonight that Capito might out spend Barth, might pull out every dirty Republican trick in the book to try to stop her, but there’s no way she’s going to out play Barth, who after 21 years on Senator Robert C. Byrd’s staff knows the ins and outs of West Virginia politics. There’s a lot of desire to win in Barth and desire and heart can take you a long way.