City needs voter turnout at polls

The News Virginian
Published: April 24, 2008

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:
THUMBS-UP: If the turnout Wednesday evening for The News Virginian/NBC 29 Candidates Forum at Kate Collins Middle School auditorium is an accurate indicator, voters are carefully attuned to an election that could prove transforming for Waynesboro. About 100 people showed up to hear six candidates tout for 90 minutes their views and vision for the city. Praise goes to Waynesboro Public Schools, Superintendent Robin Crowder and his staff for assisting The News Virginian and NBC 29 in presenting the event and offering the spectacular new auditorium as the venue. Voters deserve a hearty pat on the back, too, for their interest in a local campaign with significant implications. A similarly impressive turnout at the polls May 6 is urgently needed. At stake is the direction of a city long on potential - and accompanying studies on how to realize it - but short on action to revitalize downtown and modernize infrastructure. Careful choices next month represent the first step in altering that dynamic.
THUMBS-DOWN: From a northern locus in the land beyond the mountains, a guttural scream is building in the belly of Howard Dean, inspired by the pricks of knifepoints at his spine. An increasing number of party people think the time has come for the yodeler from Vermont to take his leave as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, an organization that he is deftly steering toward November carnage. His latest accomplishment on an impressive resume of alienating his own has been to shut down a scheduled Democratic presidential debate between Hillary Clinton, who hails from a family Dean despises, and Barack Obama. This is so according to Lanny Davis, a Clinton backer and former presidential aide to the New York senator’s husband. Most Herculean among Dean’s feats of politically driven ineptitude was helping to ensure that votes were not counted in Florida, one of America’s most populous states and, coincidentally, the site of the 2000 election debacle. Were Florida part of the delegate equation, Hillary Clinton likely would be pushing her way toward the party’s nomination. That she is not likely strikes Dean as fortuitous. Having pledged neutrality, he would never concede as much. Neither would many Democrats, albeit for reasons having more to do with the political reality of Obama’s fading support. Whoever does not land the party nomination will be forced to move on. Dean should do so as well, perhaps hand in hand with the candidate and nemesis he helped vanquish.
THUMBS-DOWN: Prolonging its most recent pork-barrel debate, the Senate decided Thursday to grant itself another week to contemplate the $280 billion package of legislative waste known as the farm bill. As we told you last week, the debate centers largely on how to divvy up a $2.5 billion slice of the bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of blue-hued tax-and-spenders want the money funneled into nutrition programs, irrespective of the fact that two-thirds of the total bill already is targeted for food stamps and nutrition programs. Republicans, pushed by such interests as the timber industry, want to devote the disputed $2.5 billion to tax cuts. President Bush, meanwhile, has grown justifiably weary of the subject. He wants simply to halt the debate for now, extend the existing legislation for another year, and leave the mess on the hands of a new administration and possibly a reconfigured Congress. Still, Bush is likely to allow the extra week. The real issue - slashing and ultimately eliminating fat subsidies - almost certainly will not have been dealt with by then. Until that happens, whatever lawmakers produce inevitably will be more feed for the trough. Bush should follow through on his oft-repeated veto vows. Otherwise, real reform will continue to go the way of flying pigs, a fantasy permeated by pork.