Our pick in the Fifth: Virgil Goode

From staff reports

Published: October 29, 2008

In less than a week, in addition to electing a new president and U.S. senator, voters in Nelson County also will be be casting ballots for a members of the House of Representatives.

In the Fifth Congressional District, 12-year veteran Rep. Virgil Goode of Rocky Mount faces Democratic challenger Tom Perriello of Charlottesville.

For Perriello, this is his first try at elected office, and he’s shooting for the big leagues.

With the challenges this country faces today and in the future, on the economic and foreign policy fronts, we sincerely believe voters would be making an unwise decision to toss aside a capable, seasoned, experienced legislator such as Virgil Goode.

We strongly, and enthusiastically, endorse Goode for re-election.

Virgil Goode has been a fixture in Southside and Central Virginia politics for most of his life. Before being elected to Congress in 1996, he was a longtime state senator representing Franklin County and its environs in the General Assembly.

He has a well-deserved reputation for hard work that has made him invaluable to his constituents over the years; his level of constituent services sets the bar for any public servant. He also has a rock-solid reputation for fairness; when Republicans pulled even in numbers to the majority Democrats in the State Senate in the early 1990s, Goode (then a Democrat) forced his own party to share power with the GOP, a move that benefited all citizens of Virginia.

In Congress, representing the rural Fifth District, he’s hewed true to a traditional, Main Street conservatism of small but efficient government, low taxes and support for the American free enterprise system. He’s cast votes we strongly disagree with, such as his opposition to the financial sector stabilization last month; his rhetoric on the issue of immigration can be over the top at times. Still, he’s in the right camps: staunch for free enterprise and protection of the taxpayers and in support of legal immigration and protection of our national borders.

His opponent is a good person, with a history of service to his fellow man across the globe, from Africa to Afghanistan. He also is quite blunt on where he believes his own Democratic Party has strayed from common sense on a number of issues from foreign policy to domestic issues.

But the two candidates’ views of government and its role in the lives of everyday citizens is what we base our endorsement decision upon.

Goode, unlike his opponent, sees government as a necessary evil for the functioning of a well-ordered society, but his ultimate faith is in the individual. We detect more than a small degree of reliance on big government in his opponent’s platform regarding any number of issues: energy, education, competitiveness and health care to name just a few.

A member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Goode believes instead in making the government we have to have work better for its citizens. He’s not there to add to the problem; and that’s a big reason we strongly support him for re-election.

With the challenges we face as a nation these days, experience and level-headedness is an asset in Washington. With Virgil, the Fifth District and its residents have those attributes in spades. Why throw them away for no reason whatsoever?