KEY POINT: When a candidate is down by double digits in the polls and seriously lagging in fundraising with a month until Election Day, the gut reaction of a desperate politician is the “bowl of spaghetti” strategy: Toss out a mishmash of issues and talking points and see what sticks to the wall.
That’s evidently where Corey Stewart, the Republican challenging U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, finds himself today, and it reveals a pretty desperate man running a very desperate, long-shot campaign.
Stewart and the Facts He Won't Admit
The Danville Register & Bee Editorial Board
When a candidate is down by double digits in the polls and seriously lagging in fundraising with a month until Election Day, the gut reaction of a desperate politician is the “bowl of spaghetti” strategy: Toss out a mishmash of issues and talking points and see what sticks to the wall.
That’s evidently where Corey Stewart, the Republican challenging U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, finds himself today, and it reveals a pretty desperate man running a very desperate, long-shot campaign.
Early on in his campaign against Kaine (and previously in an unsuccessful run for the GOP gubernatorial nod in 2017), Stewart associated with prominent figures of the alt-right, posing for a photo op with one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.
But now, behind in the polls and money, Stewart is trying to rebrand himself as a pragmatic, get-things-done politician who’s made a few mistakes in the past. He fired a longtime political adviser and campaign aide, blaming him for the campaign’s early links to the alt-right and other darker forces on the political fringe.
But the “old” Corey Stewart — some would argue the “real” Corey Stewart — can’t help but show himself.
In the first debate of the campaign, Stewart slammed Danville as the perfect example of the damage that asinine national economic policies and inept local and state leaders can do to a community. Taking his talking points from an online article at Breitbart News, the primary “news” source of the alt-right, Stewart painted a picture of Danville as a city about to disappear into an economic sinkhole, done in by NAFTA, Democrats and Wall Street.
The blows Danville sustained from a changing national and global economy are all true, but Stewart ignored every bit of hard work city leaders have undertaken to rebuild: luring new businesses, investing in downtown revitalization and shoring up public schools. Stewart should know about all that, but just this week he repeated his slander of Danville at the Virginia Municipal League convention in Richmond. And city leaders in attendance quite rightly walked out rather than listen to such garbage.
NAFTA, he should also know, had nothing to do with the fall of Dan River Mills. Textiles were declining throughout the 1980s, and Dan River’s White Mill closed more than a year before NAFTA’s enactment in December 1993.
And the tobacco industry? It had been on the ropes since the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning in 1964 that cigarette use caused lung cancer. When Big Tobacco entered into the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998, Virginia came into billions of dollars. Through the Virginia Tobacco Regional Revitalization Commission, millions have been directed to Danville and the rest of Southside to lay the ground for a new economy.
While the “bleak, boarded-up” Danville that Stewart references was the case, to a degree, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is not the case today. Tens of millions of dollars in private investments are flowing into historic downtown Danville. Indeed, Foreign Direct Investment magazine recognized Danville last year as one of the top micro cities in the nation for its economic potential.
Come back to Danville, sir, and take a tour of the growth the city and region are cultivating. Come with an open mind, not with a preset agenda.