Heckuva Job

Sandbridge was once a sleepy patch of coastline tucked between Virginia Beach and the North Carolina border. Until about 50 years ago, no one but the odd duck hunter or fisherman ever set foot here. That's when Phil Kellam's dad brokered the deal that brought development to the area. Today, a mix of modest bungalows, high-rise condos, and multimillion dollar homes lines the coast.Kellam, the Democrat hoping to represent this southern corner of Virginia in Congress, is telling me this as we head north along the main local artery in a Ford SUV. But, just before we get to his father's old beach house--"the first permanent foundation house down here"--the aide who's driving hits the brakes. "Why are you stopping?" Kellam asks. "I'm not going to make it through that water," comes the response. He would seem to have a point. In front of us looms a 50-foot long puddle, and there's an orange sign in the middle that reads, "High water." Somewhat ominously, the puddle has obscured the bottom of the word "water." But Kellam is having none of it. The following debate ensues: Kellam: Yeah, you can get through there. I promise you can get through that water. Aide [to me]: You heard that now? You've got the recorder. I don't know. I don't like the looks of this. Kellam: It's fine. Trust me. It's fine. Aide: Great--there's another one I don't like. `Trust me.' ... The driver presses ahead sheepishly, though without incident. Then, maybe 100 yards up the road, he stops at a similar puddle. "This gets a little deeper right there," says Kellam. "You don't want to go through that." As we're turning around, I ask Kellam how he could he possibly tell one puddle from the other. "There's a dip right there," he shrugs. "I can remember coming down here as a kid, eating tomatoes all the time." Before long Kellam is remarking on how this road has a nasty habit of washing out during storms, which prompts a longer discussion about how local infrastructure isn't keeping up with the pace of modern development. Phil Kellam, it turns out, is that rare breed of Southern politician: the good-ole-boy technocrat. Like any selfrespecting good ole boy, he boasts local roots that date back several generations. He is quick with the anecdote--they usually involve multiple characters, all with a different variation on his Southern Virginia lilt--and even quicker with a full-throated laugh. But, like any technocrat worth his slide rule, the things that get him most riled up are waste, mismanagement, and poor execution. Earlier that day in his office, Kellam can't stop telling me about his manifold achievements as Virginia Beach commissioner of the revenue. He has saved 2,500 square feet of office space by digitizing files; he has cut his staff size 25 percent; he has eliminated vehicle registration stickers, saving car owners an hours-long wait at City Hall and, paradoxically, yielding a massive increase in revenue. "Most people think we're sitting around scratching ourselves," he says, with an impish grin. As it happens, a good-ole-boy technocrat may be what it takes to move Virginia Beach into the Democratic column this year. In a typical election cycle, knocking off Thelma Drake, the district's incumbent Republican representative, would be a long shot, to say the least. The city--Virginia's largest--is home to Pat Robertson's conservative evangelical empire and to one of the highest concentrations of military retirees anywhere in the United States. George W. Bush carried this district by nearly 20 points in 2004. Since winning reelection, Bush has steadily lost ground in places like Virginia Beach, just like he has across most of the country. But, unlike in more moderate areas, Bush's problem here isn't so much any ideological issue or policy aim--a significant number of voters here still share his goals--as it is a more fundamental question about his ability to do the job. This is a wrinkle not lost on national Democrats, who have, in turn, dispatched a complement of nonideological candidates into reliably conservative districts, armed with a message of quiet competence. "A lot of voters believe ... competence is an argument about why [Republicans] need oversight," says Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democrats' House campaign committee. And few Democrats epitomize the promise of this strategy better than Phil Kellam. My tour of Virginia Beach begins, fittingly enough, with a tour of the commissioner of the revenue complex, a warren of cubicles on the first floor of the brown-brick City Hall building. Kellam has spent roughly half his 50 years working in this office. He started as a property inspector two years out of college, then gradually worked his way up to the top job, to which he was elected in 1997. Along the way, Kellam made copious mental notes about what he would change if he were ever in charge, which explains why he beams with pride as he points out one example: the motor vehicle administrative facilities he recently installed (so residents don't have to wait in line at the DMV). Kellam has blue eyes, short blond hair, and a healthy surfer's tan--all in all, he looks more like a car salesman than a tax assessor. But he bubbles over with so much nerdy enthusiasm when he talks about the need to "implement process change" that he gives himself away. Kellam can trace his fascination with the machinery of local government back to his great grandfather, a onetime commissioner of revenue for nearby Norfolk County. Grandfather Abel, the paterfamilias, served two terms as the local clerk of court in the early twentieth century before losing his third race by an 18-vote margin. But Abe Kellam had the last laugh, leaving behind a brood of 17 children who would dominate Virginia Beach politics for the next two generations. The Kellam family consolidated control over local politics in the early 1930s, when Phil's uncle Sidney defeated the head of a rival organization in the race for county treasurer. The Kellams were Democrats--in those days there was no place in Virginia politics for anyone who wasn't--but their worldview mostly amounted to a vision of themselves in power. Years later, a Washington Post reporter asked Sidney to name the major issue in that first election. "They were in and I was out," Sidney reflected. "Then I was in." Whatever their motives, the Kellams were highly effective at delivering for constituents. Every Virginia Beach resident who paid his poll tax would be visited by a solicitous Kellam lieutenant at some point during the election cycle. New residents were given a tour of City Hall and told the organization was at their disposal. At times, the organization was even a force for social change. When local black leaders threatened to picket Virginia Beach's segregated restaurants and hotels in 1963, Sidney summoned all the local managers to a meeting and informed them that they now ran integrated facilities. The Kellam machine finally lost its grip on power during the late 1960s, thanks partly to its relative progressivism on race and partly to its backing of the losing side in a statewide intra-party fight. (Ironically, the candidate the Kellams backed was then-Virginia Senator Willis Robertson, Pat's father.) At that point, Virginia Beach became reliably Republican on the presidential level. White flight from Norfolk and the rapid influx of military retirees during the following decade only made it more so. Then, in the early 1980s, conservative Christians began organizing themselves politically and seizing control of the local Republican apparatus. In 1991, the Republicans finally swept six of the city's eight seats in the state legislature, the same number Democrats had held until then. The day after my visit to Kellam-land, I meet Gene Campbell at Mary's, a small diner near the ocean. Campbell is a lanky 72-year-old with youthful green eyes and lightly graying hair. A former captain in the Navy, he tells me he proudly supported Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. He is, in fact, precisely who you imagine the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had in mind when they roughed up a certain Massachusetts senator. "I would have voted for a monkey before I voted for John Kerry," Campbell grouses. "I think he basically was a traitor." Campbell still believes deposing Saddam was the right thing to do, but he broods that the Bush administration didn't ask enough hard questions beforehand about what post-war Iraq would look like. He also worries that the president is more concerned with bolstering his public image than actually doing his job. "Bush is upsetting me," he says. "He's turned into a real politician." And he absolutely detests the frequency with which Drake votes the GOP line--some 98 percent of the time. He says he'll support Kellam. The GOP's problem with loyal Bush supporters like Gene Campbell dates back roughly to this time last year, when Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into an uninhabitable muck. At the time, Tim Kaine was waging his ultimately successful campaign for governor, in the course of which he became the first statewide Democrat in over a decade to carry Virginia Beach. His pollster, Peter Brodnitz, attributes this showing largely to Hurricane Katrina. "At the beginning of the race, we'd do focus groups with conservative voters," Brodnitz recalls. "They'd say, `I like [outgoing Virginia Governor Mark] Warner, but I'm a conservative kind of guy. I like to vote conservative.' Post-Katrina, they'd say, `I'm really conservative, I like to vote for conservatives, but things are going well in Virginia. I don't want to mess them up.'" It's not hard to imagine why military retirees would be particularly susceptible to this change of heart: Incompetence is something they've been conditioned to measure in lost lives. Since then, the continued failures in Iraq and various mini-scandals, such as the outsourcing of port management, have kept perceptions of Bush's abilities low. "[T]he broader issue of `competence' ... has combined with high gasoline prices to take a real toll on his standing," congressional race- tracker Charlie Cook wrote this spring. Bush has been unable to bounce back even in conservative areas like Virginia Beach, where a recent poll by two firms, one of them affiliated with Cook's nonpartisan Political Report, puts his approval rating below 40 percent. (The same poll shows Kellam up 51-43.) Though the Drake camp denies that Bush has been a drag on its prospects, citing internal polling to back up the claim, some of the campaign's own decisions belie its confidence. Drake was conspicuously absent from a fund- raiser Bush headlined for her back in May. More recently, she's begun omitting the word "Republican" from her campaign advertisements, pronouncing herself an "independent" voice instead. When pressed on this by a local reporter last week, Drake claimed she didn't have time to explain she was a Republican: "We have 30 seconds with [the voters]," she observed. Kellam has also presented the Drake campaign with a dilemma. Under normal circumstances, the GOP playbook would call for painting him as too liberal for the district. But the already-moderate Kellam has avoided pretty much anything that could be construed as a position, much less an ideological pronouncement. On Iraq, for example, he has only ventured to say he will "ask the tough questions of the administration that have not been asked by this Congress." Waiting for Laura Bush to appear at a recent fund-raiser, Drake campaign manager Tim Murtaugh griped to me about Kellam's substance-free campaign and said he'd heard Kellam was under strict orders from national Democrats not to talk any more than he has to. If Drake can't make Kellam out to be a stealth liberal, plan B is apparently to energize her conservative base. That seems to be the thinking behind Drake's suggestion, during a recent meeting with editors of a local newspaper, that we may have to stay in Iraq for decades if that's what it takes to win. "Her goal is to ... send a surge of Republicans back into the electorate," says one Kellam adviser. "That's why you hear language like that." This gambit could certainly work. And, at times, Kellam's approach too closely resembles the Democrats' disastrous 2002 midterm strategy of taking national security "off the table" rather than engaging Bush on the subject. On the other hand, Bush hadn't yet been tainted by Iraq and Katrina in 2002; back then, his approval rating topped 60 percent. Later in the day, after meeting Gene Campbell, I follow Kellam as he canvasses the mostly blue-collar Edwin neighborhood of Virginia Beach. ("You know who Edwin's named for?" Kellam asks, alluding to another uncle.) At one house, a middle-aged man answers the door wearing black denim shorts and a red t-shirt that reads, kempsville all-stars. The man says he likes the fact that Bush makes a decision and sticks with it, even if he doesn't always agree with him. Kellam stammers for a moment, then recovers to note that we're spending $6.5 billion to $8 billion a month in Iraq with little to show for it. This leads to a cordial, if not quite friendly, back and forth, and Kellam makes little headway. Finally, he points to the two cars in the driveway and says, "We got rid of that [sticker] for you." "Oh, I liked that sticker thing," the man says, suddenly brightening. "That was you?"