HEDGESVILLE, W.Va. -- This is a little town on Route 9, almost directly south of where the Potomac loops around in the mountains and begins its run toward the Chesapeake Bay. There is a big Food Lion grocery store and a 7-11 that sells liquor. Cornfields and apple orchards ripple out from the middle of town. To the west, Back and Sleepy creeks provide comfortable stretches of good fishing.
But when George W. Bush visited here last week, he drew a crowd, depending on whom you believe, of either 10,000 or 7,500. Either way, they had to hold the rally in the football stadium at the high school. Democrats promise that John Kerry will be here soon, and, in fact, two days after the Bush visit, the local paper ran a front-page story under the banner headline “Dems Plan for Kerry Visit.”
And while the Kerry dates are not nailed down, Teresa Heinz Kerry met this week with a group of women at the local hospital in nearby Martinsburg to talk about the rising cost of health care.
This is life in a battleground state, a constant barrage of attention, advertising, and spin. It has been reported that the two presidential campaigns and their respective semi-autonomous message militias have amassed more than a billion dollars for this campaign. But the Bush visit to Hedgesville is a reminder that much of the crucial decision making this election season is going to be based on what people see on local television and read in the local paper, on what their friends tell them, on how bad the traffic was when the president came though. As has been noted, all politics is local.
Set aside all that sophisticated polling, all those strategic media buys and voter-targeting models going on in Washington. Here is what campaign money can't buy.
The day after Bush came to town, The (Martinsburg) Journal ran a front-page headline reading “Exceeds Expectations,” followed by a check mark. It was about the visit, but it could be read as a comment on the administration.
And when local school honchos gave the president a high-school football jersey with No. 43 stitched on the back, Bush thanked Principal Don Dellinger and offered to sign it so that it could be displayed at the school.
Reporter Diana Bell of The Journal wrote, “Dellinger and Superintendent Manny Arvon both appreciated the gesture, but agreed that the chance to host the president was gift enough.”
Bell reports that Superintendent Arvon described the president as personable and “highly complimentary of Hedgesville.”
You can't pay enough for this kind of coverage.
And that was not the same front-page story about local volunteer Marge Ruth, who stands in a photograph with Bush, her hand over her heart as the president, wearing no tie and no jacket, holds her hand and bows his head so as to hear her better.
Ruth later told Journal reporter Misty Higgins: “As far as I am concerned, President Bush is pretty close to being the beginning and the end of the world. … He is pretty close to God. He is the first president in a long time that has tried to bring God back into the world.”
For a candidate whose re-election prospects are tied to the level of enthusiasm he can generate among evangelicals, this kind of coverage is like manna from heaven. But while this part of the state may be solidly Republican, West Virginia is a true battleground. It is one of the states where the anti-Kerry “Swift” boat ads are running, and the most recent polling, from the end of June, shows Kerry ahead by 6 points statewide. He was up by an identical margin in the 2nd Congressional District, which includes Hedgesville and much of the eastern panhandle.
There has been some Kerry pushback. The front of the newspaper's local section last week featured a story about state teachers' union officials challenging Bush on education issues. There was a picture of Tom Lange, president of the West Virginia National Education Association. He was standing next to former Clinton White House aide and longtime Democratic National Committee operative Ann Lewis, surrounded by Kerry-Edwards signs outside the Berkeley County school-board office in downtown Martinsburg.
Patti Rice owns Southwood Books, “the largest used bookstore in all of West Virginia,” on South Queen Street in Martinsburg. She is just a few doors down from the local GOP headquarters, and a lot of people walked into her store looking for tickets to the Bush event last week.
“We saw a lot of Republicans,” she said. “I think everybody should vote for Kerry,” she confessed, before retreating to a less combative place. “No, I think everybody should vote their conscience. That is, if they have a conscience.”
Rice has a Kerry sign in her store window and wears a Kerry-Edwards button. When she went into the local bank wearing this week, another customer found the button so offensive that she accosted Rice and demanded that she remove it.
Yeah, it's getting ugly out there.
Just ask Glenn Hiller of Berkeley Springs, who was at the Bush rally and decided it was a good opportunity to yell a question at the president. Hiller wanted to know if the commander in chief would be willing to sacrifice one of his daughters for the war in Iraq. A security official threatened to arrest Hiller and then kicked him out of the event. The next day, Hiller found out that he had sacrificed his job for asking the question. He was fired from a local advertising agency where he worked as a graphic designer. His employer said his remarks were an embarrassment to the firm and to the client who provided the tickets to the Bush event.
One local columnist, who referred to Hiller as a “jackass,” also demanded an apology from the Kerry supporters who protested Bush, particularly the woman wearing a T-shirt that had turned “Bush” into “Bu(ll)sh(it).” “ … To make fun of someone's name just burns my beans,” inveighed John McVey, editorial-page editor of the Journal. “It is dishonorable, unforgivable. I don't know who the person was in the T-shirt, but she should be ashamed of herself and apologize for her blatant disrespect.”
McVey had better keep an eye on those beans, because it's only going to get worse. They don't call them battlegrounds for nothing.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
