By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald reporter
May 11, 2008 07:57 pm
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Joe Manchin abides religiously to an old axiom that a candidate either runs sans opposition or scared for his political life.
Since he has opposition, does it mean the Democratic governor is on the hustings with fear in his eyes?
Not really, since his token challenge, freshman Delegate Mel Kessler, by his own reckoning, knows it would take “a miracle” for him to pull off the upset of the century and outpoll Manchin in Tuesday’s primary.
Nonetheless, the incumbent is pulling out all stops and so far has acknowledged spending $627,825 to secure his party’s nomination for the right to face the Republican challenger, former state Sen. Russ Weeks.
Unlike Kessler, now completing the second year of his first term in the 27th District of Raleigh and Summers counties, Weeks thinks he can pull it off.
“The more I’m out here, the better I see my chances are,” Weeks said while wrapping up a long blitz from the Eastern Panhandle to the Huntington area.
“People are coming up to me and saying, ‘Thank God, we have a choice.’”
Weeks is trying to define his campaign by drawing a parallel between it and the first time he waded into political waters and went against the stream, taking on and upsetting then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Bill Wooton, D-Raleigh, in the 9th District senatorial battle of 2002. No one, not even Republicans, had even given him a chance.
“Will I be surprised if I win?” Weeks repeated the question. “No, sir.”
Sara Payne Scarbro is heading up Manchin’s re-election effort and says her boss is intent on reaching as many people as possible, even if he is facing Kessler, virtually unknown outside his delegate district.
“He wants to take the campaign directly to the voters and get his message directly to them,” she says. “He believes that’s very important.”
Scarbro wouldn’t discuss the potential negative impact on fallout over Manchin’s daughter, Heather Bresch, getting an unearned degree at West Virginia University, but says Manchin is sticking to the positive message of his first term — cutting both debt and taxes while creating new jobs.
“We’ve made some great accomplishments — those are the core issues I think people want to hear about and talk about,” she said.
Manchin is out campaigning as often as possible, and his team is running the traditional television spots since the governor sticks to his “run unopposed or run scared” philosophy.
“So he’s definitely not taking this for granted,” Scarbro said. “He’s working it every minute.”
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By his latest accounting, Manchin had spent $627,825 while Kessler’s pale-by-comparison campaign had cost just over $11,000.
“I still understand it would be a miracle,” Kessler says of his bid for an upset. “Crazier things have happened. We’ll see.
“I’ve said all along I have to run on the premise that he beats himself. I can’t beat him. It’s up to the people, and unfortunately, it’s all in name recognition. People don’t understand that the same people that gave him the $2.5 million (in donations) are the same ones that are beating West Virginia to death.”
Kessler says the same folks who ponied up to the Manchin war chest are the lobbyists from timber, coal and big pharmaceutical firms who strut around the Capitol as if they own it.
“They do own the place,” he said, following up on his first remark.
“When a guy’s got 500 pages of campaign contributions, it’s very easy to look at and see we’re bought and paid for.”
Few people have given Kessler any money, and some of them have been Republicans.
“I just didn’t think he would spend that kind of money in a race against me,” he said. “I just didn’t think it would be necessary. To me, it’s kind of pathetic. You’re seeing his ads on TV two or three times an hour. It’s just unfortunate that the system is set up like that. That’s why we need campaign finance reform to make it a fair playing ground, not for me necessarily, but for everyone. Give everyone an opportunity to run.”
Kessler isn’t sure what impact, if any, the Bresch diploma scandal will have on the campaign, but one thing is certain — if elected governor, WVU President Mike Garrison had best get his resume updated.
“I think the people who want rid of Garrison will vote for me because he’d be gone in January when I go in,” Kessler said.
“That would be that simple. It’s not a complicated thing. I’d give him the opportunity to produce those phone records and everything else that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette requested under the Freedom of Information Act. I’d like to see who was in on this thing. I feel like Garrison would go to jail before he’d turn over anything that would implicate the governor in this thing. I know he would.”
One reason Kessler says he decided to run was a failed effort to pressure Manchin into leaving $8 million in the budget for libraries, senior programs and a breakfast program for children.
But a major motive for Kessler has been his criticism of BrickStreet, the private company that now handles workers’ compensation in Manchin’s successful bid to privatize the troubled, debt-ridden old state system.
“I’m doing this for the people,” he said.
“I don’t want to run workers’ compensation back to the old system. I just want to make sure BrickStreet is fair with companies. I want to see a better system. I don’t want it liberally construed. I want it fairly construed. I want to get cases heard. I don’t want five doctors to tell you that you need surgery and then one with dirt under his fingernails that specifically works for workers’ compensation and doesn’t open the case records, then tells you that you don’t need surgery. All that while BrickStreet is making $185 million profit a year.”
Kessler feels some have unfairly depicted him as anti-company.
Just the opposite, he says. In fact, he wants to a full accounting of why some 2,000 firms have been pushed out of business, unable to pay higher premiums.
“I’m not anti-company and I’m not pro-union,” he says. “Unions are half the problem. I’m pro-workers.”
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Kessler has this year left in his term as delegate, and says a loss to Manchin wouldn’t necessarily spell the end of his political career.
There’s the prospect of running for his 27th District seat again, or perhaps taking on Sen. Mike Green, D-Raleigh, the man who ousted Weeks, in the 9th District.
“I’m not going to count myself out,” he says. “I look forward to what the good Lord has for me. If somebody had told me six months ago I was going to run for governor, I’d have told them they were crazy.”
His margin of loss could be a telling theme for both Kessler and Manchin.
“I’d be tickled pink to get 40 percent,” he said. “I’d be proud.”
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Weeks says he jumped into the contest after it became apparent that no fellow Republicans were interesting in running.
There is more than just giving the GOP a standard bearer to hold aloft the banner in the governor’s race.
“I’ve seen what’s going on in Charleston and things need to be changed,” he said.
“Questions need to be answered. If anybody knows anything about me, and my stay in politics,” the one-term senator said, “they know I was for accountability.”
Weeks penned his first book upon leaving office, “No Strings Attached,” addressing what he saw as unbridled corruption in state government with power vested in the hands of a select few.
While campaigning, he passes out copies of the book.
“My campaign got a very large boost a couple of weeks ago when the Bresch report came out from WVU,” he said.
“It’s going to help. I don’t know how much. It points out the cronyism that’s going on and the just bad way of managing government. That’s the Manchin style of running government. He wants to be in direct control of every agency.”
Manchin’s campaign director says the governor is willing to debate Weeks, assuming he survives the primary with Kessler.
And Weeks, always quick to point out his stunning triumph over Wooton, remains confident.
“I feel very good about this,” he said. “Very good.”
— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com
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