Politics certainly have gone off the charts for unpredictability.
Who would have thought a year ago that the presidential election would pit the candidate with the highest unfavorable rating in the history of polling against the candidate with the second-highest unfavorable rating ever? Or that a gubernatorial race that many pundits had as "likely Republican" a year ago would turn into a horse race? Or unlikeliest of all, that Darrell McGraw could be poised to return to the state Supreme Court?
As I've said many times, all laws have at least one, and usually many unintended consequences. However, for Republicans who pushed for nonpartisan judicial elections during May primaries, the most unintended consequence of all would be the election of Judge McGraw.
I'm out of the predicting business, but if McGraw wins the Supreme Court race Tuesday, and Republicans still control the Legislature come February, you can be sure the first bill introduced (as Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper has surmised) will be for runoff elections in judicial races.
nnn
Meanwhile, one incongruity worth noting is that while all the candidates for governor are touting how they will bring jobs to the state, all but one are using out-of-state firms for their TV ad buys.
Jim Justice is using Bluewest Media out of Denver, while Booth Goodwin is using Buying Time and Katz out of Washington, D.C., and Bill Cole is using Millennium/DC out of Washington and Brabender Cox out of Pittsburgh.
That means the money (and most of the ad buys are on 15 percent commission) is going to out-of-state companies, when buying ad time is not rocket science, and there are plenty of in-state firms that could provide the service.
As one consultant noted, "These guys run on jobs, jobs, jobs, but they're the first to go outside the state's borders to employ people when there are perfectly well-qualified people working here in West Virginia for West Virginia companies, all paying taxes that will eventually fund their salaries."
Of the gubernatorial candidates, only Jeff Kessler is using a West Virginia company for ad buys: Tom Susman's TSG Consulting.
(The same thing is occurring in the Supreme Court race, with only McGraw and Brent Benjamin using in-state firms for ad buys. Bill Wooton is using Buying Time and Beth Walker is using the same companies as Cole. Then again, the judicial candidates aren't running on job creation.)
nnn
Meanwhile, with no legislative plan in sight to end the now 57-day budget impasse, it seems increasingly likely Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin will simply have to call the Legislature into session, and hope that having the $35,000-a-day meter running will help focus legislators' attention on getting a viable state budget passed.
Tomblin officials met last week with Senate Democrats in part, I'm told, over concerns that the Senate Democrats - who supported revenue measures including a $1 a pack cigarette tax to close the deficit and a 1 percent sales tax increase to fund highways - were close to going scorched earth and giving in to Republicans who want to close the budget shortfall entirely through spending cuts. Their assumption was that the Republicans would bear the public's wrath over the resulting discontinued or greatly scaled-back state programs and services.
Speaking of wrath, numbers in separate polls released last week would seem to suggest the ongoing budget impasse is hurting President Cole.
nnn
Speaking of, Republicans have played the Obama card in the 2010, '12 and '14 election cycles, but it borders on the absurd for candidates in 2016 races to claim they will stand up to Obama, as Cole does in his TV ad that talks about "sending a loud message to this president" about not taking away our freedoms. (We can assume one of the freedoms Obama is presumably trying to take away is the right to bear arms, since the accompanying video shows men in blaze orange holding rifles.)
Let's do the math: If Cole wins the governor's race, he'll take office at noon Jan. 16, 2017. President Obama will leave office at noon Jan. 20, 2017, so that gives Cole a total of four days to get that loud message to the president before he becomes Barack Obama, private citizen.
(The Daily Kos had an interesting take on the ad, noting: "Kind of eerily, not one person is actually watching Cole's speech, they all stare straight ahead at the audience.")
Perhaps an even more absurd example of using Obama as the boogeyman is in the circuit judge race in Nicholas County.
The opponent of longtime Circuit Judge Gary Johnson has put out a mailer with Johnson photoshopped into a picture of Obama holding a beer with the header, "Barack Obama and Gary Johnson party at the White House while Nicholas County loses hundreds of jobs."
Turns out, the party at the White House was a Conference on Children and Youth, where Johnson was one of 50 judges from across the country invited to participate because of his national reputation for his work in addressing child abuse and neglect. And Johnson couldn't have partied with Obama, since the president was not in Washington during the conference.
Certainly, it takes a world of twisting of reality to turn an invitation to a prestigious White House conference into a negative.
Sort of the same kind of twisted magical thinking that allows some to ignore the harsh realities of the global economy and believe that once Obama is out of office (and if Hillary Clinton isn't elected president), the coal industry will miraculously make a gangbusters comeback.
Reach Phil Kabler at
philk@wvgazettemail.com,
304 348-1220, or follow
@PhilKabler on Twitter.