Published: September 21, 2008 02:23 am      

Kaine makes pitch for Obama

CHARLESTON — It’s a sign of how strange this election year is when a Virginia politician is sent to get West Virginia Democrats fired up for their party’s presidential nominee.

The commonwealth has not given its electoral votes to a Democrat since 1964, while West Virginia voted for Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter (twice) and Michael Dukakis, among others.

Yet this year, Virginia, once rock-solid Republican, is teetering between Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, while West Virginia is seen as a sure thing for the Republicans.

At the annual Jefferson-Jackson fundraiser in Charleston Saturday night, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, came to try and help sell his candidate to a state once taken for granted by Democrats.

“Democrats have to show we know how to solve problems, and we have to stick together,” he told the crowd of politicians and party regulars.

Kaine stressed the importance of a unified ticket from the county level to the presidential race as the key to his party’s recent successes in Virginia: successive Democratic governors, one Democratic U.S. Senator and a Democratic takeover of the state Senate.

“The reason we’re winning seats in Virginia is that we’re showing people we know how to solve problems,” he said. “Democrats know how to govern, folks.”

Obama and McCain are running neck and neck in Virginia. The state’s importance to the Obama campaign is underlined by the three visits there since June by either Obama or his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden.

Biden, in fact, visited Virginia earlier on Saturday.

By contrast, Obama has not come to West Virginia since the May 13, which he lost by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

Kaine, along with high-ranking West Virginia Democrats, exhorted the crowd to embrace the party’s nominee in a kind of reverse coattail effect: by voting Democratic down the line, they’re hoping those votes will trickle up to the top of the ticket.

“We have been the party that basically the whole state puts its hopes in,” Gov. Joe Manchin, who is running for re-election this year against Republican Russ Weeks, told the crowd in Charleston. “And we have been the party that’s delivered.”

Democrats enjoy a large advantage in voter registration and political representation in West Virginia. Both legislative houses are controlled by Democrats, as is the state Supreme Court and the governor’s mansion. Of the five West Virginians in Congress, one is a Republican.

Yet partly because of Obama’s crushing defeat in May, and partly because he’s struggled to win over white, blue-collar voters in other states, McCain is seen as the clear favorite in West Virginia.