A year ago this time, Democrat Steve Sisson was running against Republican incumbent Sen. Emmett Hanger in the 24th District of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. I didn’t think much of Sisson’s campaign at the time — it was nasty, full of distortions, and based on the Bizarro-World premise that Hanger would be willing to raise taxes while Sisson refused to do so. (To Hanger’s great credit, he did vote to fund Virginia’s budgetary obligations in the subsequent General Assembly session.) Hanger, throughout the race, remained cordial and straightforward, which made Sisson look like a crazed Chihuahua.
Sisson got beat down, ending up with 28% of the vote to Hanger’s 72%. He has maintained since his defeat, though, that he will run for the seat again when it comes up in a few years’ time and — this is my favorite bit — he wouldn’t do anything differently. (Repeating the same action and expecting different results is the definition of “insanity,” in a Biercian pop dictionary.)
Presumably bitter about going down in flames, Sisson has emerged as a serious critic of the Virginia Democratic Party, but rather than doing so in a thoughtful, intelligent manner, he’s pursuing the same Chihuahuan approach that so endeared him to voters in November of 2003. In his latest bi-weekly column in the Augusta Free Press, he accuses Governor Mark Warner of “relegating Virginia to third-world status,” sending “400 years of Virginia history…down a Richmond toilet and into the James River basin,” developing “a fraudulent state budget,” dubs him “Governor Mollycoddle,” and his press secretary “Ellen ‘Disingenuous’ Qualls.” Apparently believing himself to be the person who hands out “-gate” scandal titles, he names minor political conflicts “Votergate,” “Budgetgate,” and “SOLgate,” thus driving any meaning of the suffix completely into the ground. He expresses his great displeasure that Governor Warner “plays politics” with the budget process. He even accuses the Virginia Democratic Party of “Jim Crow-styled voter disenfranchisement.”
The problem isn’t that all of Sisson’s accusations are completely baseless — they’re all based on reality, although some of these “problems” are only seen as such by the Virginia Republican Party’s press department. Governor Warner’s office has followed the standard governor’s-office fund transfer process in Virginia, which it seems falls outside of the legal fund transfer process. D’oh. And it’s true that Virginia’s Standards of Learning employs different standards than No Child Left Behind, but the SOLs were first, and No Child Left Behind sucks even more than the SOLs, so what’s it matter? And the Democratic Party does appear to be taking some strong preemptive action to prevent the Republican Party from intimidating voters, but that is something that the Republicans did a tremendous amount of in 2000 and have already started doing for 2004, leading to criminal charges in a few cases in the past few weeks.
Again, what Sisson is saying is based on reality, but it’s a carnival-glass version of reality, the sort of nonsense that gets spouted on Crossfire and the like. Worst of all is his belief that he qualifies as a Democrat with this sort of nastiness. We don’t tend to tolerate his brand of nastiness, as the 2003 election results show. If he wants to call himself a Democrat, I ain’t going to stop him any more than I think anybody ought to stop Sen. Zell Miller from doing the same, but that doesn’t keep it from being silly. Most pathetic of all is his apparent belief that he could actually get the nomination again in 2007 and have any chance of winning. He can’t spend years bashing Democrats, bestowing insulting nicknames upon them and trumped-up charges against them, and expect that we’re going to welcome him with open arms when he wants to start tilting at windmills again. Sisson’s political future consists of either doing exactly what he’s doing right now — penning bitter columns a couple of times a week — or trying to oust Republicans more moderate than he in the nomination process. I’m not ruling out either.