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A View from the Cheap Seats by Garren Shipley
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That's what it looks like here in the Cheap Seats, at least.
Some things are expected when you make a living covering politics: Congressional candidates blasting e-mails and faxes looking for coverage, statewide candidates swooping in to the Lee-Jackson Banquet Room every so often to either make inroads or shore up their base in the Shenandoah Valley.
But weirdness is also part of the job: statewide politicians just "dropping by to talk" in Strasburg, the odd letter with no return address alleging that a sitting member of Congress is has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan or finding a $500 donation from an ESPN sportscaster to a state-level candidate.
Chalk this last week up into the "weirdness" category. With Virginia in play for the first time since LBJ, national campaigns are peppering local media outlets with contacts, press conferences, press releases, videos and radio actualities like they're running for governor, rather than president.
My McCain-Obama e-mail vault is quickly starting to look like my Kaine-Kilgore archive from 2005, except with many more YouTube videos.
But there is a stark difference -- partisans on both sides are far more passionate, if not angry, than I ever witnessed during the last gubernatorial go-round here in Virginia. And it's not even August yet.
Stay tuned. At the rate we're going now, Barack Obama and John McCain will both swing by Cheap Seats HQ "just to chat" sometime around the World Series.
Some things are expected when you make a living covering politics: Congressional candidates blasting e-mails and faxes looking for coverage, statewide candidates swooping in to the Lee-Jackson Banquet Room every so often to either make inroads or shore up their base in the Shenandoah Valley.
But weirdness is also part of the job: statewide politicians just "dropping by to talk" in Strasburg, the odd letter with no return address alleging that a sitting member of Congress is has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan or finding a $500 donation from an ESPN sportscaster to a state-level candidate.
Chalk this last week up into the "weirdness" category. With Virginia in play for the first time since LBJ, national campaigns are peppering local media outlets with contacts, press conferences, press releases, videos and radio actualities like they're running for governor, rather than president.
My McCain-Obama e-mail vault is quickly starting to look like my Kaine-Kilgore archive from 2005, except with many more YouTube videos.
But there is a stark difference -- partisans on both sides are far more passionate, if not angry, than I ever witnessed during the last gubernatorial go-round here in Virginia. And it's not even August yet.
Stay tuned. At the rate we're going now, Barack Obama and John McCain will both swing by Cheap Seats HQ "just to chat" sometime around the World Series.
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