"If campaigns for Congress were won or lost on the amount and quality of effort put forth by the candidates themselves, then Nelson County Democrat Al Weed would stand a fighting chance of upsetting 5th District Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr., R-Rocky Mount.

Weed, at age 61, is traveling through the sprawling rural district from Greene County to Martinsville and Danville with the energy of a much younger candidate and meeting all sorts of folks who have never heard of him.

He talks a lot about a national health-care system based on expanding the best characteristics of Medicare to provide universal access to good medical care.

He talks a lot about Goode, saying Goode hasn’t done all that much for the largely Southside district, which has lost a ton of jobs since the congressman went to Washington in early 1997, first as a Democrat and then as an independent and finally as a Republican.

The fact that Goode has changed political colors nearly as defiantly as a giant tulip poplar changes leaf shades from mid-summer into late fall has hardly hurt the Franklin County lawyer, whose political career stretches back to include 23 years as a Democratic state senator known for his idiosyncratic independence.

Goode, who turns 58 on Oct. 17, remains a household name in a district about the size of the state of New Jersey, while Weed, a Lovingston-area vintner not nearly so well known, has some of his yard signs picked up and hauled away apparently by a few college students who see the name on a poster as a cute ad for medicinal marijuana.

No slouch in the effort department on the stump, Goode has been a largely independent campaign machine since age 27 when he rocketed out of the University of Virginia law school and into the Virginia Senate on the strength of his father’s good political name and the energy of his own rhetorical competence.

Unfortunately for Weed, candidate effort is only part of the story in a district dominated by rural Southside counties once known for their tobacco and textile plants but that now struggle to keep their young men and women from journeying away to where real jobs can be found.

Money, and lots of it, is a big part of any challenger’s very challenging effort to become known and sell a message that resonates.

Weed is doing fairly well in the money department but still trails Goode by at least the last two miles of a four-miler.

“We’ve raised something like $87,000 the last 20 days,” Weed said. “We are probably at about $340,000.”

Goode had about $585,000 in cash on hand for his campaign at the start of July and hasn’t slowed down in fund-raising, so Weed’s goal of eventually exceeding $500,000 in total funds raised leaves him unable to match the incumbent in frequency of message across the paid media. Weed had less than $70,000 in cash on hand June 30, when he had raised a total of $190,000.

Weed plans three weeks of television ads in his come-from-behind bid if his campaign can raise sufficient cash.

“We are making the progress we need to make,” the Democrat said. “We’ve got three weeks of television planned if we can afford it.”

As he travels around the 5th, Weed said he speaks often about “how Virgil has failed to represent the district even though he has been a professional politician for 30 years.”

Weed found some encouragement last week in a Mason-Dixon Virginia Poll that showed Gov. Mark Warner, an Alexandria Democrat who is his most prominent supporter, maintaining strong job performance ratings.

“Good for him,” Weed said of Warner’s job rating as “excellent” or “good” by 58 percent of Virginia voters, which is 1 percentage point better than it was last December, a month before Warner and the Republican-dominated General Assembly engaged in a prolonged battle over tax increases in which the governor and 34 more moderate Republicans prevailed with the minority Democrats.

The higher job rating Warner received “is good for me, too, because Warner won in the 5th District, so it’s not necessarily adverse to a Democrat,” Weed said.

Weed said that in his many travels across the district in recent months he is impressed with the unity and depth of enthusiasm he has found among Democrats.

“More and more people are coming out as Democrats,” even former Democrats who did not as openly wear the label in the past decade, Weed said.

“Warner’s leadership is contributing to that enthusiasm,” he said.

He even found a silver lining in the cloudy forecast that has kept Democrats from heavy political advertising in Virginia because, when push comes to shove with campaign funds, the Old Dominion is not really considered a battleground state in the presidential contest.

Because no President Bush ads and no ads from Sen. John Kerry’s campaign saturate the state’s airwaves, “we will be getting a lot more attention for our messages,” Weed said.

“We could have been drowned out if this was a battleground state,” he said.

Still, Weed’s name might become better known around Charlottesville, which has the largest concentration of his yard signs anywhere in the district, if the occasional student didn’t think the signs look like funny dorm room ads for pot." (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, October 3, 2004)

Contact Daily Progress political writer Bob Gibson at (434) 978-7243 or bgibson@dailyprogress.com.