Scott and Sears battle over searing differences in 3rd District
RICHMOND – U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott is a Democrat who has voted against banning gay marriage, against U.S. involvement in the Iraq war and against President Bush’s tax cuts. And he’d gladly do it again.
In the conservative, evangelical world of Winsome Sears, that’s your dream opponent: the kind of guy Republicans go all out to defeat.
RICHMOND – U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott is a Democrat who has voted against banning gay marriage, against U.S. involvement in the Iraq war and against President Bush’s tax cuts. And he’d gladly do it again.
In the conservative, evangelical world of Winsome Sears, that’s your dream opponent: the kind of guy Republicans go all out to defeat.
Her campaign, however, is being fought against a popular, entrenched congressman in Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, a maze that meanders along the James River from Richmond to Norfolk and has a 57 percent black majority.
The candidates, both black, are in a campaign of raw invective, hard feelings and political contrasts even sharper than those of Bush and Democrat John Kerry, and it’s likely to intensify by Election Day.
“I have run in tough campaigns,” said Scott, who’s 57 and is seeking his seventh term. “But the tone of this race is a tone that is divisive. They pick issues that tear people apart.”
Sears, who upset longtime Democratic Del. William P. Robinson three years ago to win single two-year term in the General Assembly, said Scott is angry because her aggressive challenge forces him for the first time to explain his voting record to a black constituency.
“They just believe that whatever he did, people would support him. They felt they could vote to send them to hell in a handbasket and people would just go along because they’re black and they’re Democrats,” she said in an interview.
In a Richmond debate, one of five between the candidates, she voiced frustration that Scott “keeps trying to hang the Republican Party around my neck.”
“Our forefathers did not die in the fields so we could be beholden to one political party,” said Sears, who immigrated in 1970, at age 6, to the United States from Jamaica.
The differences are deep, fundamental and heartfelt.
Scott, Virginia’s first black member of Congress since Reconstruction, says Sears backs a failed Republican fiscal approach that squandered the strongest economy in U.S. history and a $236 billion federal budget surplus. Four years later, he says, the GOP has only a net loss of jobs and a $500 billion federal deficit to show for Bush’s tenure.
“They ran up that debt and lost jobs. First time anybody’s pulled that off since Herbert Hoover,” Scott said, borrowing one of Kerry’s favorite jabs. “And they say they inherited a recession. That’s a lie. The recession started in March of 2001.”
For Sears, the issues that energize her conservative base most are the war and social issues.
Scott, she notes, opposed the use of force in Iraq and an $87 billion budget authorization to pay the war’s soaring costs. Both candidates oppose reinstating a military draft.
Sears, 40, doesn’t shy from a fight.
Some of the campaign’s fiercest rhetoric has been over abortion, embryonic stem cell research, tax-supported private school vouchers and gay marriage. Sears supports vouchers but opposes the others except for emergency abortions to save a woman’s life. Scott’s positions are largely the opposite.
Scott is proud of his vote last month against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He likens it the struggle for desegregation and voting rights by an earlier generation of blacks.
“Bigotry is not a Christian value,” Scott said in the Richmond debate. Sears, who speaks openly and passionately about her faith, scowled at him.
“The fact is homosexuals were never declared property under the law,” she shot back. “They were never considered less than human under the law. They were never denied the right to vote under the law. Their children were never stripped from them under the law. They were never forced to work the fields.”
“It looks like we’re playing the blacker-than-thou game at every turn,” she said.