Tag: John Unger

Hoppy Kercheval asks a question we’ve been asking for months: will State Sen. John Unger run? We’ve been trying to draft him (after our early effort to Draft ReddHedd (aka Christy Hardin Smith of FireDogLake failed).

The DCCC is also trying to draft him.

And while we’re open to other candidates (see also here, I believe competitive primaries make for better general election candidates and Anne Barth certainly has many fine qualities), Unger has succeeded at winning in red, and ultra important, Berkeley and Jefferson counties.

Kercheval:

WHEN state Sen. John Unger, D-Berkeley, answered his cell phone last Tuesday, it was Rahm Emanuel calling.

The Illinois congressman, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Caucus, told Unger: “You’ll win the election.”

Emanuel was talking about the Second District Congressional race in `08, a race Unger has not yet decided to enter, a race for the seat now held by one of the most popular and electable politicians in the state — Republican Shelley Moore Capito.

Unger is getting wooed mightily by state and national Democratic leaders to try to do what other Democrats have tried and failed to do.

snip

  There is, Democratic strategists believe, some planetary alignment for `08, and the sprawling second district. Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Gov. Joe Manchin — two recognizable and easily re-electable Democrats — will lead the state ticket in the next election. Their popularity and get-out-the vote efforts help other Democrats and encourage straight-ticket voting.

Second District voters have elected Capito four times, but it remains Democratic territory. Democrats outnumber Republicans in those 18 counties 60-40. Capito has always had to run uphill.

snip

In 1998 Unger, then 28, came out of nowhere to upset incumbent state Sen. Harry Dugan in the 16th District. Unger believes a convergence of circumstances brought him to that race, and ultimately to victory.

Other points Kercheval does not raise, but that Clem and I and others have talked about in the past.

1. Capito’s fund raising in the first quarter of 2007 is far off from where she was in the same period in 2005.

2. The fund raising is especially important because she has to wage an air campaign since she’s awful at retail politics. Unger, meanwhile, a notoriously budget-conscious political campaigner, knows how to make every penny count. He also is renowned for his personal campaigning, with his walking campaign of his entire district. That face-to-face contact is invaluable in West Virginia. Capito so dreads meeting the public that during parades she walks surrounded by campaign staff in the middle of the route so she doesn’t have to make contact or speak with the public. Her last “town hall meeting” was done over the phone.

3. While Capito usually receives friendly press-coverage from the area newspapers like the Martinsburg Journal, blogs like West Virginia Blue are growing as alternative sources of information. It usually takes 12 months for a web site to reach its largest audience. This site should be peaking just in time for the 2008 race to be heating up.

4. The media, as shown even in the usually Republican friendly Charleston Daily Mail, is becoming more questioning and skeptical of her. The Huntington paper and others have improved of late at catching Capito in saying one thing and doing something else. 

5. Capito’s Congressional rating is appalling. Even when the Republicans controlled Congress she was in the bottom tier. Now she’s ranked 421 of 485. She’s not a freshman Congresswoman. She’s been at it for years. Yet she remains an ineffectual voice for West Virginia. Much of the time she takes credit for federal grants going to fire stations that would have received the money anyway through the grant application process. Other times, she takes credit for projects when the real credit should go to Senator Byrd and Senator Rockefeller — two of the highest rated members of Congress.

6. Rising dissatisfaction within GOP ranks over their own candidates. The West Virginia GOP’s bench is weak otherwise numerous reports of her contemplating a run against Rockefeller for the U.S. Senate in 2008 (Run, Shelley, run!) wouldn’t even be given credence. The top tier Republican candidates are loathed by their own base. Rudy Guiliana, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, have all been hit hard by the rightwing grassroots activists for various reasons. Is the conservative base going to support the formerly gay and abortion rights supporting Romney and Guiliana? Are the independents going to support McCain now that he’s no longer a maverick, but a Bush supporter? Are so-called “values” voters going to come out in numbers for serial adulterer Newt Gingrich? No. A weak Republican presidential ticket in 2008 is not going to help the rest of Capito’s party’s lower tier candidates.
…
Defeating Capito in 2008 won’t be easy. But if she were smart, she’d be sweating despite her past success. Whoever the Democratic candidate is, we’ve been working on the Nov. 4, 2008 election since Nov. 8, 2006.

We really like State Sen. John Unger here in the Eastern Panhandle.

He’s done a great job at the State House. Now we’re hoping Unger runs for Congress to represent us in the House of Representatives.

Here’s 5 reasons why he’d make a great representative for West Virginia’s District 2.

(Public domain photo from the West Virginia legislature site.)

* He’s a Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar as well as the first in his family to graduate from college. It’d be nice to have a Congressional representative in WV-02 who was highly intelligent.

* He worked with Mother Teresa to help the poor.

In Calcutta, the work was long and back breaking, but Unger found it very rewarding until about six months in. It was then that a monsoon swept through the City of Joy, where he was working. Mother Teresa put him in charge of a six block radius coordinating relief efforts. But try as he might, he was overwhelmed. Finally he went to his mentor with a confession. “Mother, I don’t think I’m making a difference. Maybe you need to find someone else.” Mother Teresa smiled at him and said “God does not call us to do great things, but small things with great love.” He has tried to live by those words ever since.

* He did extremely well against Republican candidate Jerry Mays despite the fact Mays received considerable support from the Martinsburg Journal and coal baron Don Blankenship. Despite the odds, Unger received 19,640 votes in Berkeley and Jefferson counties to Mays 10,790. Unger won despite being in heavily Republican counties. (PResident George W. Bush won Berkeley 21,293 to Senator John Kerry’s 12,224 and Jefferson 10,059 to 9,301).

* He’s effective. In seven years, he’s had more than 230 of his bills passed.

* He already has an extensive background in how the federal goverment works (he worked with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory on homeland security and economic development issues) and international affairs (he’s worked with refugees from Vietnam in Hong Kong and for the International Rescue Committee as well as Kurdish refugees in southern Turkey and northern Iraq after the first Gulf War).

Let’s compare his biography to his potential opponent’s Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (Rubberstamp Republican).

From her own web site:

Before beginning her years of public service, Capito worked as a career counselor at West Virginia State University and as the Director of the Educational Information Center for the West Virginia Board of Regents. Her volunteer activities include being a Past President and Board Member of the YWCA, a member of the Community Council of the Kanawha Valley, and a member of the West Virginia Interagency Council for Early Intervention. She has also been an active participant in Read Aloud and Habitat for Humanity.

Capito graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in Zoology, and also holds a M.Ed. from the University of Virginia.

What her bio leaves out is that she first won office in 1996 to the House of Delegates riding the coat-tails of her father, former Gov. Arch Moore and maintained her office through the political machine her father built and through receiving huge campaign donations from the political machine built by Tom Delay (her fundraising has plummeted since he left Congress).

When you compare Unger’s life and work experiences to Capito’s, it’s easy to see why we’d rather have Unger representing us in WV-02.