The New Republic

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?"

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