The contract was terminated with only 2/3 of the money spent. The DoD will re-allocate the rest.

…Much has been posted regarding the decision by the City of Martinsville to sign the performance agreement for $500,000 in state incentives. Charlottesville blogger Waldo Jaquith is currently claiming that the closure of Athena will now cost the Ci…..

Virgil Goode was pretty well entrenched and got similar poll numbers before 9/11 even happened. There’s no need to reach for a lot of abstract theory for why Virgil keeps winning his district. He has very good constituent services and there is not a single major media market in his district to make his failings widely known to his constituents. On top of which all of his opponents have been poorly funded and in most cases not particularly experienced or seasoned candidates. That’s about all there is to it. No grand socialogical theories necessary.

Check the crosstabs for that survey. Almost half (45%) of the respondents were Republicans with 29% Democrats and 23% Independents. In addition, 44% said they were Conservative, 34% Moderate and 11% Liberal. The only categories that seem to be fair/balanced are the gender categories (48% male, 52% female) and the age divisions from 35 years and up (3 groups at 27%, 28% and 28%). So, while it sounds good when you read the analysis at SUSA and in the papers, the “reality” is that the survey was skewed.

For now. And chances are still good that he’ll win. Over 90% of Republicans in the district apparently think he’s worth re-electing. But it’s hardly anything to gloat over.

I’ve been reading for the first time a book I’ve meant to read for years, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Published in 1963 but inspired by the tumult of the 1950s, it reads like an uncanny prophecy of the type of conservatism that has revived in the Bush era, and that helps explain why Goode keeps getting elected despite his diminishing performance. In the following quotation, substitute “9/11″ for “post-war”, “secular humanism” for “Godless Communism”, and “illegal immigration” for “desegregation”, and it could have been written last week:

The political climate of the post-war era has given the fundamentalist type powerful new allies among other one-hundred-percenters: rich men, some of them still loyal to a fundamentalist upbringing, stung by the income tax and still militant against the social reforms of the New Deal; isolationist groups and militant nationalists; Catholic fundamentalists, ready for the first time to unite with their former persecutors on the issue of “Godless Communism”; and Southern reactionaries newly animated by the fight over desgregation.

That’s the wave that Virgil Goode has been surfing on. The last great wave of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. broke upon the reef of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, which woke us up pretty quickly to the dangers of glorying in mediocrity. This time the wake-up call isn’t so much a single external event as the cumulative effects of six years of incompetence and greed among our elected officials and their appointees.

You gonna link to that story over at CC?

Uh. I run an aggregator for all Virginia political blog entries. I link to everything. It’s stupid to accuse me of failing to promote any political blog entry in Virginia.

Hmm… what’s more embarrassing?

A. Trailing in a political poll 4 months before the election, or

B. Being caught taking illegal campaign contributions, handing out pork-barrell contracts that weren’t wanted by the Department of Defense, causing disruption in the lives of the employees hired to work for that company, leading to their eventual layoff and costing the city of Martinsville $500,000 in state grants that must be repaid.

I guess the answer depends on your values.

But, yeah. I. Publius all but agreed to fund the facility’s expansion. So, this has gotta sting.

I’m kidding, of course. You’d never do that. :)