A crowd of 450-500 people packed into the City Market Building to see and hear Terry McAuliffe, former President Bill Clinton, and Mark Herring, candidate for attorney general, as they continued their tour to get out the vote on November 5. As people waited outside to enter the venue, Mark Herring greeted them. Herring has been traveling with McAuliffe and Clinton as the campaign ticks down to its final days. Speaking later, he encouraged people to vote for moderation, not extremism and to bring others to the polls. Herring’s presence on this campaign swing is a vital part of a campaign plan to make sure voters know who he is and how he differs from his extremist Republican opponent.
When he took the podium, President Clinton told the audience that one party, the Republican, is driven by a sense of opposition and conflict that arouses intense emotion in its followers but just compounds problems by refusing to see any reality but its own, while the other, the Democratic, believes that only by cooperation and compromise will our serious problems be solved.
I personally was struck by the fact that former State Senator Brandon Bell, a Republican, took the stage to explain why he was endorsing Terry McAuliffe for governor. (Bell once represented the senate district I live in.) Bell noted that he sat near Ken Coccinelli in the State Senate and knows exactly what motivates Cooch. Cuccinelli, Bell said, only wants what will advance his career or what fits his extremist ideology. He is incapable of putting the interests of Virginia above his own extremist views or his own self-interest.
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