(Reading time: 4 minutes)
Would-be politician Beth Macy spoke before a packed and supportive Staunton audience last night, in what should have been a rousing call to arms to unhorse the horse’s ass currently representing Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District. Unfortunately, the former journalist seems to have forgotten one of the prime directives drilled into all cub reporters, “Show, don’t tell.” In doing so, she foreshadowed yet another easy win for MAGA Republican Ben Cline.
Holding forth at The Frenchmen restaurant in Staunton’s old railroad station at an event hosted by the Staunton Democratic Committee, Macy appeared not to have received the news that she has no primary opponents—that a May 15 U.S. Supreme Court decision had put a last nail into Virginia Democrats’ redistricting efforts. That ended any chance the Sixth District would be reconfigured this year to make it less of a red swamp, resulting in an exodus of potential contenders. And, just like that, Macy became the last Democratic candidate standing in a district that Cline has carried by 60% or more in four consecutive elections.
So why is Macy still so intent on introducing herself as if this were last November? Given an opportunity to rally several dozen potential shock troops with an impassioned denouncement of her only opponent, Macy instead chose once again to put her major focus on burnishing her working-class credentials, while also—yet again—recounting her risk-taking journalism in going after Big Pharma. She had grown up Appalachian-poor in a small Ohio town. Her dad was a military vet, her husband a schoolteacher. She had raised one child who is trans and another who is gay. All her life and that of her family has been a struggle, Macy kept repeating, and that’s why she’s a fighter and that’s why she’ll be a fighter on behalf of the rest of us.
But someone else wrote Hillbilly Elegy first, and it’s all old news by now, anyway. And for all her talk of being a fighter, Macy landed only a single, glancing blow against her opponent, in lambasting him for taking corporate campaign funding.
That’s not to say that Macy didn’t offer the expected round of complaints about the abysmal state of the union, from cuts to Medicaid and food stamps to the diminished helpfulness of Pell grants to the evisceration of the Veterans Administration and its medical resources. But it was all rather bloodless, with few connections linking such carnage to Cline. Where was the itemization of particularly callous Cline votes, the recitation of Cline’s dismissive statements about the very real needs of his constituents, the detailed condemnation of Cline’s coziness with political and religious extremists and zealots? And on other pressing issues of direct importance to a largely rural, agricultural district, there was barely a murmur. What, for example, has Cline done for farmers battered by soaring costs of fuel oil and fertilizer—or just as much to the point, what would Macy do in his stead?
We’re past the point of introducing ourselves to voters. With less than five months until the election, it’s time to re-introduce Cline to his constituents, and in such a way that even his most ardent supporters understand just how much he has waged war on their best interests.
In failing to unleash the dogs of war and taking the battle to Cline, Macy lost an opportunity this week to hone that message with a much friendlier audience than the ones she’ll confront this summer in huge swaths of the Sixth. Out in the rural precincts, where the Stars and Bars are still more prevalent than the Stars and Stripes and MAGA’s stench has yet to penetrate, Macy’s “I’m one of y’all” pitch will come across merely as Cline-lite. Unless, of course, she comes out swinging and shows herself to be the fighter she claimed to be this week. Unless, that is, she does more than merely ask us to take her word for it.
Looking askance 