It’s a heck of thing to see your name on the front page of the local paper. This is last Saturday’s Charlottesville Daily Progress, and it’s a profile of your truly, under the title “Who Is Rob Tracinski?”
Well, if you live in Charlottesville, and you didn’t know the answer to that question, there’s a better chance you know it now.
This profile is actually pretty good—with one big reservation—and I’d like to offer a few comments.
To begin with, they say it’s good publicity if they spell your name right, and that’s not something I can always take for granted, so I’m pretty happy with that. And it’s even better publicity if they mention my book, which they do. The very first step of my campaign is just name recognition—especially this early in the process. So this is exactly what the campaign needed right now.
And look, my advantage as a candidate is thirty years as a writer and speaker. I’m good at just sitting down and talking to a reporter.
And that’s the best thing about this profile. The reporter, David Valazquez, uses a lot of my best lines. So you get me saying, “I think the U.S. Congress is a good idea, and it would be nice if we had one.” Here’s an important one: “Part of the reason I ran is I didn’t see anybody else who was prepared for the kind of constitutional knife fight Congress needs to be fighting right now.” I describe our fifth district incumbent, John McGuire, as a “rubber stamp” without “even the slightest glimmer of independence,” and boy is that true.
And it quotes my basic case for my campaign: I can offer “a reasonable alternative for disgruntled independents and Republicans, while still offering Democrats the thing I think is actually most important, which is: We’re going to restore the power of Congress; we’re going to rein in an out-of-control president.”
But I’m afraid that led to a misunderstanding. I’ve done a lot of interviews, from both sides—asking the questions and being the guy who answers the question. And you never know what’s going to be misinterpreted. So I mentioned, just as a historical example, a previous Democratic representative from this district, Virgil Goode—as an example of how partisan loyalties sometimes shift. There are people who thought they could never vote for a Republican who know think they could never vote for a Democrat, and maybe they can switch back again. But then I find the reporter describing me as an “admirer” of Virgil Goode who takes him as my “role model.”
I never said any of that, and I didn’t mean to imply it, and I guess my lesson from this is to never mention the name Virgil Goode ever again. Because the downside is that Goode was elected as a Democrat and after a couple of terms ratted out on the Dems and switched to be a Republican, and I don’t want anyone thinking this is what I’m going to do.
The Republican Party is dead to me now, and even if they did their best to reform themselves and try to become something reasonable—well, you tell me how likely that is. You can’t turn back the clock, and we’re not gonna get, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan’s party back again. We’ve got the party that likes colonels from the KGB, not the one that hated them. It’s a shame, but there it is.
Last of all, the framing of this profile in the Daily Progress is that I’m the upstart candidate compared to the Tom Perriello, who I guess is more of the establishment Democrat in this district, and his one term in Congress sixteen years ago is the best Democrats have done so far this century. So fair enough, I know I’m the scrappy underdog in the Democratic primary.
But the first step is just to be getting better known to the community—and getting on the front page of the local paper, well, that’s a pretty good beginning.
The important thing is that this gets across my message about restoring our constitutional system, because that’s why I’m running, and it’s what I’m asking you to vote for.
Please consider a donation to support my campaign.
Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.
Donors must be US citizens and spending their own money. Campaign finance laws limit donations to $3500 per person per election.
