Mike Signer and the 25th.
Last week, I sat down for a beer with a fellow by the name of Michael Signer, who intends to seek the Democratic nomination for the 25th District Senate seat, currently occupied by Sen. Creigh Deeds. The purely-speculative race is contingent on the election of Creigh to the position of Attorney General, but that hasn’t kept folks from getting interested in the race in the past year.
Signer is from Northern Virginia — his experience with the 25th consists primarily of having gone to the University of Virginia after attending Princeton and Berkeley. Though he’s recently moved to Charlottesville, his long-distance phone number and time spent in Richmond reveals his status as a newcomer. He’s fresh off an extensive education, and ready to take on the world, beginning with the 25th District.
Though his local chops aren’t so hot, his credentials are impeccable. His extensive education is in law and political science (that’s Dr. Signer to you), he studied with UVa Prof. A.E. Dick Howard (father of the Virginia constitution), and he’s worked in Governor Warner’s office for the past three months as his deputy counselor. He’s both curious and well-informed on matters of policy (particularly foreign) and the mechanics of democracy, though his work on behalf of the Kerry campaign in Virginia made clear that he’s not content to watch from the sidelines. (See his November 2005 piece for the Washington Post, “A Winning Southern Model,” for more on policy and the Kerry campaign.) Prior to that race, he worked for the Clark campaign and even once worked as Creigh Deeds’ legislative aide. Better still, he’s a blogger, for the newly-established “Democracy Arsenal”.
Signer’s what some call “ambitious.” Some Charlottesvillians speculate that he’s got his eye on the governor’s seat, and that running for this seat is just a stepping stone. The term “ambitious” is a bit of a hobby-horse for me. I’m a big fan of cultivating talent, and I think Charlottesville would do well to spend less time eating our young and more time giving a boost to would-be candidates for much-higher office. So while “ambitious” is often used as an insult, I see it as a high compliment. If Signer wants to be governor — and I have no reason to think so — I think that’s great.
I have another hobby-horse, though, and that’s the localness of candidates. I’m not a fan of candidates that just parachute into town and declare that they’re here to help. We saw that recently with Kim Tingley’s candidacy for House of Delegates here in Charlottesville — the guy just showed up out of nowhere, nobody ever having heard the man’s name before, ran for office, came in last, and promptly disappeared again. You’d think he’d have done something — anything — beginning a couple of years ago to make a name for himself, to give people a positive impression of him, to be something other than a complete and total stranger to everybody in the district.
Signer’s relationship to Charlottesville is quite similar, to say nothing of the vast land mass of the whole of the 25th that exists to the west of town. The folks who know him in town know him because he’s talking to all of the Right People™ about running for office. But that won’t win him any votes in the rest of the district, most of which has nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing — to do with Charlottesville.
After watching the unknown-in-Charlottesville Creigh Deeds trounce his competition (Nancy O’Brien, Meredith Richards, and Al Weed) in the November 2001 nomination convention held in downtown Charlottesville, I feel pretty strongly that it’s an uphill battle for anybody from the eastern edge of the district to get this nomination. Eighty-five percent of the 800+ people who showed up at that convention were from Charlottesville and Albemarle, but weighting the vote by population meant that the rest of the district (Allegheny, Bath, Buckingham, Buena Vista, Covington, Nelson and Rockbridge) carried a great deal of weight. Creigh did get a lot of votes from C’ville and Albemarle — a plurality, in fact — which allowed him to win on the first ballot, with 51.5% of the vote. But with the second place winner coming in at a distant 23.5%, he could have done without a huge chunk of that local vote and still kicked ass.
If I was going to move into this district to run for office, I would have moved to Covington a year or two ago, and started making friends among folks west of the mountains, whose individual votes are going to be many times more powerful than each vote from Charlottesville and Albemarle participants in the convention. It’s all but inevitable that some other local notables are going to throw their hats into the ring, only further splintering the vote — why get caught up in the crowd squabbling over the same slice of the pie?
I like Signer. I think he’s a smart guy, and whether he wants to be in the state senate or the governor, I think that’s great. But I can’t honestly see how he’s going to pull it off this time around, and I think he’d be a more logical fit with a Northern Virginia district, since that’s his home.
FWIW, I’m a big fan of the Nelson County Board of Supervisors’ Connie Brennan (who is in Sorensen with me this year). She’s well-known in the western 75% of the district, she has the experience with local government that so badly needs representation in Richmond, and I think she’s a total badass. I wouldn’t say I’m biased (in that I’ve never been on her payroll nor have either of us been in one another’s debt), but Connie is my preference, both because we’re friends and we’re in Sorensen together. Consequently, anybody who talks about running, I’m going to look for fault in, whether that’s Michael Signer or anybody else.
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