The Midterm Elections

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More from Gosar siblings 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 Stay classy, crazy uncle, 

 

[Cartmann99]

Thanksgiving at the Gosar house is going to be fun this year.

[AmazonGrace]

Mother Gosar wants  you to know that she too is a racist.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

If you're in Alaska, consider voting this judge out?

http://midnightsunak.com/2018/09/21/the-judge-who-approved-no-jail-deal-in-shocking-assault-will-be-on-this-years-ballot/

He gave a man who kidnapped, strangled and sexually assaulted a woman a pass without any jail and without even having to register as a sex offender.

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Learning to do a double flip: From red to blue and from reporter to politician"

Spoiler

Knocking on door after door in Charlottesville, Va., Leslie Cockburn, making the pivot from journalist to politician at age 66, peppers people with questions: What about health care? Do you have insurance? Would you ban assault weapons?

Finally, a man on Bing Lane interrupts the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. “Tell me something you’re passionate about,” he says.

“Well,” Cockburn says, “people care about health care and the environment and racial justice.”

Two doors down, Kelly Dye also stops Cockburn’s questioning. “Tell me about you,” she says. “Why you?”

“I covered the world for ‘60 Minutes’ and ‘Frontline,’  ” Cockburn says. “Then we bought a beautiful farm in Rappahannock 20 years ago. It’s really unusual for a journalist to jump over the wall, but I did it because I feel like we’re really in trouble.”

This was never what she wanted to do. “I had no ambitions to be in politics, ever,” she said. ­Indeed, before the caucus in April in which Virginia Democrats chose their candidate in a generally Republican district that is larger than New Jersey, sprawling from the D.C. exurbs to the North Carolina border, Cockburn had booked tickets to spend this summer at her husband’s family homestead in Ireland.

“But then we won,” she said.

Cockburn was writing a novel, spending time with her grandchildren, learning Arabic and studying viticulture, thinking she might start a vineyard.

“She’s done everything: She’s written books, written scripts for movies,” said Steve Kroft, a “60 Minutes” correspondent who worked with Cockburn for many years. “I think she’s running out of things to do.”

What got her into this business was Donald Trump, specifically his coarse boasts about abusing women, as revealed on the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape that became publicshortly before the 2016 election. Cockburn felt compelled to drop her journalistic neutrality and attend the Women’s March in January 2017. Then, after she gave a talk about fake news, friends nudged her to jump into the race against Rep. Thomas Garrett (R), whom she called “a mini-Trump.”

Garrett abruptly dropped his bid for reelection in May to seek treatment for alcoholism. Cockburn’s Republican opponent now is a fellow political novice, Denver Riggleman, who owns a distillery in Nelson County.

And now she has knocked on more than 5,000 doors. In a district Trump won by 11 points, she goes everywhere.

She has always been drawn to conflict. She covered six wars and a revolution for the big TV networks, “Frontline” and Vanity Fair magazine. She chased after arms merchants and scored interviews with dictators and drug dealers.

“People become journalists because they cannot decide what to be when they grow up,” Cockburn wrote in her memoir, “Looking for Trouble: One Woman, Six Wars and a Revolution.” “I started down this road as a traveler with a taste for danger.”

“With Leslie, you never know what she’ll do next,” said her husband, journalist Andrew Cockburn. “Up for any ad­ven­ture. But this is really the same thing she’s always done — satisfying her intense curiosity. Going to Cambodia to find out what’s really going on isn’t really different from going to Mecklenburg to find out what’s really going on.”

She still thinks of herself as a journalist. “I like being a critic and observer,” Cockburn said, but the times call for a new role. “As a journalist, you can expose wrongs, but you need Congress to take the next step.”

So she went to an Emerge America candidate training program in which Democratic women learn fundraising, speechmaking and networking — with a hefty dose of assertiveness training.

Cockburn had never been keen on politicians. “I certainly had an attitude that a lot of politicians weren’t thinking for themselves, that there was a blow-dried aspect to how they worked,” she said. “There were a lot of them I didn’t have time for.”

Now she’s one of them.

“It’s utter heresy for a journalist to become a politician,” said Mary-Sherman Willis, a friend of Cockburn for several decades. “She’s going to have to rein it in. This is going to be very different.”

'You need a huge tent'

Although Cockburn has worked for NBC, ABC and CBS, she was never entirely comfortable with the networks’ dispassionate style of journalism.

Rather, her most powerful work made its point of view clear. In her memoir, she blasted Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s “virulent hatred” of the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua. In her documentary on the 2008 financial collapse, she places the blame on Wall Street gamblers and their enablers in Congress.

“She’s always been a committed person, with a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong,” Kroft said.

Her friend Willis said the pre-politics Cockburn was “a little to the left of what the Democratic campaign committee would be comfortable with.”

But now, in a new role, Cockburn’s watching her words, navigating among young progressives who want her to embrace democratic socialism and moderates who want her to win back Obama-Trump voters. She’s relaxed and funny when she tells war stories about reporting in Africa and the Middle East. But her voice grows tighter, her word choices more cautious, when she speaks to voters.

At a Democratic Party crab fest in Nelson County, a young man tells Cockburn that this is the first party event he has attended and that he is disappointed. “I thought you’d be talking about how socialism is the only answer,” he says.

Cockburn is silent for a long time, then decides that however much she appreciates the young man’s passion, her campaign must, as she put it, “reach a very broad base.” Finally, she replies, “If you want to be successful as Democrats, you need a huge tent.”

Another day, asked whether she can prevail without winning back some of the president’s voters, she said, “I’m not going to woo those Trump supporters in the evangelical churches where people feel Democrats are satanic.”

Cockburn paused, then added, “We do need Republicans.”

'Going to dangerous places'

Leslie Redlich grew up in a home of Rockefeller Republicans — a lost tribe now, but one that was marked by liberal social views and a thrifty approach to budget matters.

This was San Francisco in the late 1960s, and although her parents stuck with their party — as a young girl, Leslie met Ronald Reagan — the ferment of the times called to her. She dived into the counterculture in music, politics and academics.

“Really, my politics have not changed since I was 12 years old,” she said.

She grew up rich. When she was 11, her parents took her to Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. She was in the second class of women at Yale Univesity. She loved arguing with her father, who made a fortune as chairman of one of the country’s largest container-handling companies.

It was, she said, “a fairly cosseted youth,” and she decided early on to break from it. “I’m not really a country club person,” she said. She moved east; her siblings stayed in San Francisco. Her brother took over the family business. She chose a different field. Not that she had a choice.

“I wasn’t asked,” she said. “I was a girl.”

She was a freshman at Yale when she signed up for her first ad­ven­ture, in Africa. Later, living in London and studying African colonial history and epic poetry, she pronounced herself “bored” and found work at the NBC bureau, where she says she “fought long and hard for the privilege of being shot at.”

Cockburn savored ad­ven­ture and had a flair for the dramatic. In her memoir, she sometimes sounds like Lauren Bacall in a 1940s noir classic: When she first met her future husband, she invited him to visit her boat on the Thames, saying, “Just go to World’s End and head for the river.”

As a reporter, Cockburn would travel for weeks at a time. After her children were born, when friends asked whether she really wanted to be so far from home, she turned the tables on them: “While people often ask me if I am worried about leaving my family, no one has ever asked Andrew that question,” she wrote.

“I knew she was going to dangerous places,” said her eldest child, Chloe Cockburn, now 39 and a lawyer and criminal justice reform advocate in New York. “Whenever my mom was home, she always made time to read us bedtime stories. But she didn’t hide from us that she might not come home from one of those trips.”

Once, during one of those readings from a Roald Dahl novel or a Curious George book, Chloe asked her mother, “What happens if you both get killed?”

The practical answer was that the Cockburns had a plan in place — and a will in the hands of their lawyer.

“We’ll be fine,” Cockburn told her daughter.

'We dressed for dinner'

She has hosted Georgetown dinner parties where the diplomat Richard Holbrooke sat on one side of her and Mick Jagger on the other. She’s had dinner with Saddam Hussein’s sons and tea with Moammar Gaddafi. She wrote a screenplay with the daughter of novelist William Styron.

Although Cockburn has had a house in the Rappahannock horse country for 19 years and made it her primary residence 11 years ago, it’s her Georgetown home that her critics tend to focus on. (She also bought an $800,000 apartment in Brooklyn when her daughter Chloe was trying her hand at being an artist in New York.)

Republicans have sought to paint her as an elite outsider whose connection to Virginia is that of a weekend visitor.

“This is a culturally conservative district,” said John Findlay, executive director of the Virginia GOP. “She is not really in tune with the district culturally.”

Cockburn pushes back hard: “It’s not like I’m some lady on a horse farm,” she said. She says she has lived in the district far longer than her opponent has.

Cockburn’s D.C. connections have come in handy. This summer, she held a wine-tasting fundraiser in Georgetown, hosted by the renowned D.C. chef Nora Pouillon, where guests were invited to donate $2,700 a head. Cockburn has raised almost three times as much money as her opponent.

Her younger daughter, the actress Olivia Wilde, best known for her roles in TV’s “House” and the film “Tron: Legacy,” adds another dash of celebrity to a family that has long led an A-list social life.

In Georgetown, Cockburn has been a regular in the society pages. But Kevin Chaffee, the editor of Washington Life magazine and a longtime friend, has visited the Cockburns in Rappahannock frequently and said it’s been their primary home for many years.

“Her great grandpappy didn’t fight for the South in the Civil War,” he said, “but she’s spent more time there than Hillary ­Clinton or Bobby Kennedy did in New York.”

Cockburn’s writing has fueled her critics’ argument that she is a visitor from a different class. In her memoir, she described her son, Charlie, as being born “after the sorbet and blackberries at the end of a long, leisurely lunch party.” Even when she was covering conflicts in some of the globe’s roughest places, she carved out time for evenings with wealthy hosts where, as she wrote, “We dressed for dinner.”

The New York Times called Cockburn’s memoir “a troubled book” that was “tone-deaf” about her wealth.

Cockburn’s elder daughter rejected the idea that her mother is a dilettante. “What that question about elitism is really about is, ‘Do you have skin in the game?’ ” Chloe said. “Yes, she comes from a wealthy family, but we grew up on journalists’ salaries. She’s literally put her life on the line. She could have retired. She doesn’t need this.”

Criticism on Israel

As soon as Cockburn was nominated in May, Virginia’s Republican Party attacked her as a “virulent anti-Semite.” John Whitbeck, then the party chairman, called Cockburn “the inspiration for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists.” (Whitbeck, who has since resigned from his post, opened a GOP rally in 2013 with an anti-Semitic joke.)

The Republican argument is based entirely on their reading of “Dangerous Liaison,” a scathing 1991 book about ties between U.S. and Israeli policymakers that Leslie and Andrew wrote together.

The book was immediately ­controversial.

“It oozes sardonic anger that mutual interests often bring the United States and Israel together,” said a review in the Miami Herald. The New York Times deemed the book “largely dedicated to Israel-bashing for its own sake.”

“They stubbornly hear what they want to hear,” the Los Angeles Times’ critic wrote. “Still, there is no denying the Cockburns’ point that Israel has weakened its own moral case by longtime liaisons with brutal dictators and shady operators.”

“The book blames the Jews for everything,” said a top state GOP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the party. But when asked for examples of Cockburn’s anti-Jewish sentiment, the Republican said he had found nothing beyond the book.

After the allegations first received attention, Cockburn met for two hours with 40 Jews at the home of Rabbi Daniel Alexander, for many years the leader of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville.

He concluded that “the book insufficiently gets what Zionism is all about and why the mainstream of the Jewish community has an attachment to Israel despite the policies of its current government.”

But he said Cockburn clearly supports Israel as a Jewish state and would have no problem voting for aid for the embattled country. “The majority of the people at the meeting were satisfied,” Alexander said.

Cockburn finds the allegation exasperating. “In a whole year here, no one has asked me about a foreign policy issue,” she said.

Yet she still defends the book and remains critical of Israel’s ­government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We need to be allowed to say these things,” she said. “Whatever Netanyahu wants, he gets. That’s not good for Israel in the long run.”

The allegations, along with President Trump’s popularity in the district, have made some Democrats uncertain about investing in her campaign. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has decided to pump money into more than 100 House races this fall. Cockburn’s is not one of them.

“I’m arguing to them that they should really look at Leslie,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the state’s former governor. “The noise about anti-Semitism is the Republicans trying to distract attention from their own connection to extremists in Charlottesville. Writing a book critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy is not anti-Semitism.”

Guns vs. health care

When Cockburn was growing up, her mother owned a ranch in California where Leslie and her parents hunted for ducks, pheasants, deer and moose.

“There were always guns in the house,” she said.

This comes up on the campaign trail often. Cockburn tells Virginians who are skeptical of her liberal views that where she lives in Rappahannock, “we have to shoot deer because otherwise they’d be in our bed.”

Still, the doubts are palpable. A girl at a 4-H Club meeting asks when Cockburn’s “going to take away our guns.”

Cockburn replies, “This is Virginia; we don’t do that.”

But she’s also quick to tell voters that “the idea of having assault weapons in the hands of untrained people is absurd.”

In Charlottesville, Cockburn knocks on the door of a man who is inclined to vote for her but is wary of her support for a federal ban on assault weapons.

“I am a gun owner and I don’t like to vote for people who want to take them away,” he says.

“Most people voting for me have guns,” Cockburn replies. “Obviously, we protect hunters. But let me ask you, how do you feel about assault weapons? Ban them?”

“No,” the man says. “But I’ll make you a deal: I would turn my guns in if we had universal health care. You get that, and you can have my guns.”

The man accepts a lawn sign. An hour later, at a Flip the Fifth rally, Cockburn tells the story of the man who would trade his guns for health care. The crowd loves it.

She’s learning.

 

[fraurosena]

LOL.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[Cartmann99]

21 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

 

Early voting in Texas starts Monday, October 22, 2018. Mr. Cartmann99 and I will go vote on the 26th, and then go get doughnuts to celebrate.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ex Virginia Sen. John Warner crosses party lines to endorse Democrat Tim Kaine"

Spoiler

Former Virginia Sen. John W. Warner, a dean of the state’s Republican Party, said Wednesday that he will cross party lines to support Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine in his re-election campaign.

The endorsement, announced by Kaine’s campaign, underscores the deep ambivalence Virginia Republicans feel over Corey A. Stewart, an acolyte of President Trump who is their party’s nominee in the Nov. 6 election.

Stewart, who last year championed efforts to preserve Confederate monuments in Virginia, has battled controversy over questionable ties to white supremacists, leading other Republicans to steer clear of his campaign.

In a statement, Warner, 91, cited Kaine’s leadership on the Senate Armed Services Committee as one of the reasons for supporting the Democrat. He also referred to the deep partisanship in Washington under Trump.

“Tim’s unquestioned integrity and moral character are sorely needed in the Senate at this most unusual time in our nation’s history,” said Warner, who also endorsed Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

During Kaine’s first run for the U.S. Senate in 2012, Warner endorsed his Republican opponent, George Allen. And before that, when Kaine ran for governor in 2005, Warner endorsed his Republican opponent, Terry Kilgore, serving as honorary co-chair of Kilgore’s campaign.

But in 2016, Warner cast his first vote for a Democrat in a presidential race, when he voted for Hillary Clinton and her runningmate, Kaine, against Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

A recent poll by the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg showed Kaine leading the race by nearly 20 points. The poll also showed that 73 percent of Republican respondents supported Stewart, while 15 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d vote for Kaine.

Stewart dismissed the Warner endorsment.

“Retired king of the establishment,” he said, in a text. “LOL.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Tim Kaine and Corey Stewart debated tonight. Sorry I didn't post it ahead, I thought it was scheduled for tomorrow. Stewart is a nutjob.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?451980-1/virginia-senate-debate

[AmazonGrace]

Defendant Duncan Hunter and his opponent had a debate too. Well, sort of. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Debate in Virginia Senate race turns ugly fast, with Corey Stewart making unfounded claims against Sen. Tim Kaine"

Spoiler

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and his Republican challenger, Corey A. Stewart, squared off Wednesday in a mostly hostile prime-time debate, sparring over immigration, transportation and health care on a night underscored by the rancor in Washington over Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.

Minutes into the event, their mutual disdain was evident as they talked over each other in a series of exchanges that included Stewart implying — without evidence — that Kaine has committed sexual assault.

“There have been 268 allegations of sexual harassment against you and others [in Congress],” Stewart said. He was referring to $17.2 million paid by Congress since 1990 for 264 settlements and awards to federal employees for violations of a wide variety of employment rules, ranging from the Americans With Disabilities Act to sexual harassment. It is not publicly known how many were due to sexual misconduct.

“You just tried to slip in that there were complaints against me, and that is completely false,” Kaine said.

“How do we know that?” Stewart shot back.

“Oh, so you just think you can make it up,” Kaine said.

The hour-long debate, moderated by NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, was the second of three before the Nov. 6 election.

Kaine (D), who is leading Stewart by nearly 20 points in most polls, has cast the race as a referendum against President Trump’s unsteady leadership.

He characterized Stewart as a Trump loyalist who will do the president’s bidding at any cost, while demonizing immigrants and minimizing the allegations against Kavanaugh.

“It comes down to our very campaign themes,” Kaine said, addressing a crowd of about 200 people inside the Capital One bank headquarters in Tysons. “I’m running on an upbeat theme: ‘A Virginia that works for all.’ My opponent is running on an angry and divisive theme: ‘Take Virginia back.’ ”

Stewart, who pledged “the most vicious, ruthless campaign” to unseat Kaine, called the former Virginia governor and lieutenant governor ineffective in Washington and a “bitter” partisan who wants to undermine the president because he hasn’t gotten over 2016, when he was Hillary Clinton’s running mate and they lost the presidential election to Trump.

“You’re bitter about 2016; you’re voting against every single thing,” Stewart said. Kaine noted that he has written 17 pieces of legislation that have been signed into law by Trump as evidence that he can work with the president.

The Senate race has long been considered Kaine’s to lose in a state that Clinton carried by five points in 2016 and where Trump remains deeply unpopular.

Kaine — who raised $19.3 million this summer — has unleashed a steady flow of TV and social media ads saying that Stewart would “hurt Virginia.” He has also trekked across the state to try to help Democrats running for the House in what his party hopes will be a blue wave.

Stewart, meanwhile, has been marred by controversy over ties to white supremacists while running a bare-bones campaign that has raised just $1.3 million.

While Stewart has attacked Kaine relentlessly — including a tweet this month about immigrant-related crimes that showed a doctored image of Kaine with blood on his hands — his party has been split over his candidacy.

That challenge was highlighted earlier Wednesday when former Republican senator John Warner announced that he is endorsing Kaine — a fact Kaine celebrated Wednesday night by acknowledging Warner in the audience.

In recent weeks, Stewart has tried to soften his image. He fired a top consultant last month, whom he blamed for setting an angry tone for the campaign that alienated potential voters, and for encouraging Stewart to align with right-wing extremists such as Paul Nehlen.

At Wednesday’s debate, he highlighted his role as chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, saying he has worked to build roads and schools in that diverse community.

“I’ve had to twist a few arms, maybe even break a few, to get things done in Prince William County,” Stewart said.

But then he slammed Kaine for voting against a budget bill in January to fund 355 Navy ships — a proposal important to the state’s shipbuilding industry.

Kaine actually co-sponsored the legislation that commits the Navy to acquire 355 ships but voted against it when it was part of a short-term continuing resolution that he felt was irresponsible. Three months later, Kaine voted for a $1.3 billion spending bill that included his legislation requiring the 355 ships; Trump quickly signed it.

“Corey may think it’s nothing to build a 355-ship Navy, or battle opioids,” Kaine said. “He thinks it’s nothing to expand career education and technical education and medical research, but Virginians think it’s something.”

Some of Stewart’s accusations were so well worn, they were on a list the Kaine campaign sent to reporters ahead of the debate that was titled “10 Lies You Will Hear Corey Stewart Say At Tonight’s Senate Debate.”

In one exchange, Stewart bashed Kaine’s proposal to provide Medicare as an option on the health exchanges created through the Affordable Care Act.

“You know what that means? He wants to take it all — from your pockets,” Stewart said to the audience, arguing that the idea would raise insurance costs.

Kaine accused Stewart of “smearing” undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers,” after Stewart said he would not allow those who were brought into the country as children to remain in the United States out of worry that some would commit murder.

In response to a question about whether Virginia should become the final state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection for women as part of the Constitution, Stewart said it would lead to men suing to get into women’s athletic programs. He said the idea was good only for “litigators and lawyers” who would profit from lawsuits.

“Good for litigators and lawyers? How about good for women?” Kaine said, calling the response indicative of a dismissive attitude toward women that includes Stewart characterizing the allegations against Kavanaugh as “a bunch of crap.” “These actions do not suggest respect for women, and it makes your opposition to the ERA pretty easy to understand,” Kaine said.

A few times, Todd tried to get the candidates to find common ground, asking at one point how they might avoid “the national train wreck” that is sure to come from Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, his first public accuser.

Kaine argued that the accusers should be treated with respect.

“Remember, our children are watching,” he said.

Stewart ignored the question and, again, accused Kaine of helping to cover up sexual assault allegations against lawmakers in Congress.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't know how he's going to rebrand himself, since he's a complete jerk, just like he's acted all along: "Trailing in cash and polls, Republican Corey Stewart tries to rebrand in Virginia Senate race"

Spoiler

As a Senate candidate in Virginia, Republican Corey A. Stewart promised to run “the most vicious, ruthless” campaign, a pledge he has largely kept with a steady stream of caustic social media postings aimed at his opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine (D).

But with fewer than 40 days before the Nov. 6 election — with money scarce, his poll numbers low and little support among the GOP establishment — Stewart is struggling to reboot.

Aiming to blunt his bombastic image, he is blaming the abrasive campaign he has run for more than a year on bad advice from a top consultant he recently fired.

At a debate Wednesday, Stewart presented himself as a pragmatic leader able to bridge differences to get things done in Prince William County, where he chairs the Board of County Supervisors.

But Stewart didn’t seem able to resist his caustic ways, implying without evidence during the debate that Kaine has been accused of sexual harassment.

“Who is the real Corey Stewart?” Mark Rozell, a George Mason University professor who was on the debate panel, asked Stewart.

Stewart responded with another attack on Kaine.

No matter the answer, Stewart is trying any way he can to gain ground on Kaine, who leads by nearly 20 points in most polls. After outraising Stewart $19.3 million to $1.3 million, Kaine has an advertising budget and logistics operation that have dwarfed the Republican’s bare-bones campaign.

Stewart said his firing last month of Noel Fritsch — a political consultant who also worked on his unsuccessful 2017 bid for governor — was an effort to steer his campaign away from an angry tone that alienated potential supporters as it curried favor from the extreme right, including white supremacists such as Paul Nehlen.

Since then, Stewart has woven into his speeches sober topics such as the gross domestic product and unemployment rates.

At a Richmond forum before a predominantly black audience, Stewart didn’t mention his previous pledges to preserve Confederate monuments, his past associations with white nationalists or his decision to attack the Rev. Al Sharpton last month as a “race hustler.”

The audience had warmly greeted Kaine just an hour before.

Stewart told the group that his staff questioned his decision to attend. “My advisers were like, ‘Never go into a forum unless it’s a friendly forum, unless you’re absolutely certain people are going to be with you,’ ” he said. “And I think that that’s the problem in America. I think it’s the problem in Washington. I think that we have two sides that aren’t talking to one another.”

Earlier in the week, Stewart appeared before environmentalists at a Fairfax County forum that also featured Kaine.

The audience nodded in agreement as Kaine argued for cultivating green energy jobs and making it harder to win federal approval for oil and natural gas pipelines.

Stewart, who has called the idea of man-made climate change “a hoax” and told the audience that he didn’t believe humans caused global warming, prefaced his remarks with an appeal for more bipartisan discussion.

“So far, we’re just yelling,” he said of national politics.

Then he said that flooding in Virginia’s coastal communities is a function of sinking land — not rising sea levels — an assertion that prompted sarcastic laughs from the crowd.

Still, Eric Seibold, 44, was impressed that Stewart even showed up.

“To come into a lion’s den like this?” he said. “I’ve got to give him at least a little respect.”

Yet even as he tries to moderate his message, Stewart repeatedly drifts toward the inflammatory approach that helped him win his party’s nomination in June, warning about the menace of Latino gangs or ridiculing the allegations of sexual misconduct facing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh as “a bunch of crap.”

Stewart fired Fritsch, whom he has paid $52,000 since early 2017, after the consultant tweeted, under Stewart’s name, that a Michigan Democrat who is Muslim is an “ISIS commie.” Stewart’s constituents in Prince William County include a large Muslim population.

“I was having people come up to me saying: ‘Your tweets and Facebook posts are angry,’ ” Stewart said. “I didn’t like what the campaign looked like, and it was in my name. And so we made that change and so you’re seeing the real guy now.”

He said Fritsch also encouraged him to forge a relationship with Nehlen, the onetime Wisconsin congressional candidate whom Stewart praised as “one of my personal heroes” in a video made in January 2017, before Nehlen’s anti-Semitic views made him an outcast within the Republican Party.

Fritsch, who briefly worked for Nehlen, was “out of touch with my voice,” Stewart said.

But Fritsch, in a telephone interview, characterized Stewart’s campaign as “dysfunctional” and called Stewart “erratic.”

“He’s untethered from the claims he had to being a hard-line conservative and warrior for freedom of speech,” Fritsch said, accusing Stewart of being lax with fundraising. “He’s moderating.”

With time running out, Stewart is caught between the need to appeal to moderate voters while remaining provocative enough to capture free media attention that helps him reach potential supporters he doesn’t have funds to court otherwise, political analysts say.

Stewart’s dilemma is shared by Republicans in swing districts and states across the country as they navigate a polarized electorate in midterm elections where President Trump’s unpopularity could give Democrats control of at least the House, analysts say.

“Trying to define yourself, much less redefine yourself, is a real challenge when President Trump dominates the news cycle virtually every minute of every day,” said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a political-science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg.

For Stewart, that problem is particularly acute, Farnsworth said.

Stewart rose to prominence last year when he almost won the GOP nod for governor by championing Confederate monuments, railing against illegal immigrants, raffling off an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and attacking moderate Republicans for failing to fully back Trump. In the Senate race, he has shown unyielding support for Trump, boasting that his hard-line approach to illegal immigration in Prince William made him “Trump before Trump was Trump.”

“If Corey Stewart had presented himself as a more conventional Republican when he first entered statewide politics, he probably wouldn’t have been noticed in the way he has as a more aggressive figure,” Farnsworth said. “But getting known doesn’t mean getting elected statewide. Those are two very different things.”

Stewart said the image he now wants to cast — “conservative, strong and stern” — can appeal to more moderate voters.

At times, that has meant avoiding the kinds of controversies he once sought.

This month, Stewart backed out of speaking at a Washington rally to support Trump after learning that several other scheduled speakers harbored white nationalist views. One — YouTuber Vincent James Foxx — has argued that the Trump administration should not hire African Americans.

“During the primary and the gubernatorial primary, we weren’t as careful as we should have been with regard to the people who we were associating with,” Stewart said. “I’m going to take responsibility for everything that happens in my campaign. The buck stops here. But it really angered me because I was getting in trouble for stuff that members of my campaign were doing.”

It is hard for voters to know which Corey Stewart is authentic and which is manufactured, said Quentin Kidd, director of Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Public Policy.

Although he fired Fritsch, Stewart has not severed ties with Rick Shaftan, another adviser, who in his social media posts has used a profanity to describe majority-black cities while bemoaning that the South lost the Civil War.

“It doesn’t say anything that voters should feel comfortable with,” Kidd said. “I don’t know how a moderated Corey Stewart would make amends for all of the things that the Corey Stewart that you and I know has said and done.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

I don't believe a word of it. If Nazis had taken over your campaign and you were not a Nazi you'd fire them right away and not a month before the election when you're losing.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Yet even as he tries to moderate his message, Stewart repeatedly drifts toward the inflammatory approach that helped him win his party’s nomination in June, warning about the menace of Latino gangs or ridiculing the allegations of sexual misconduct facing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh as “a bunch of crap.”

I have an idea to help Corey's campaign. He should invite Kavanaugh to come do some rallies with him this week. They can yap about conspiracy theories,  hump the flag, pretend to cry, insult Kavanaugh's accusers, and then throw giant hissy fits at the end of each rally.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

I have an idea to help Corey's campaign. He should invite Kavanaugh to come do some rallies with him this week. They can yap about conspiracy theories,  hump the flag, pretend to cry, insult Kavanaugh's accusers, and then throw giant hissy fits at the end of each rally.

Then go out for a case or two (or fifty) of Bud Lite

[GreyhoundFan]

53 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Then go out for a case or two (or fifty) of Bud Lite

Maybe "Bart O'Kavanaugh" could go for the 200 keg club.

[fraurosena]

 

[AmazonGrace]

This seems like a hopeful sign.

[fraurosena]