Fimian at Less Than Finest in Springfield

Bryan Scafford, over at Left of the Hill, has done an incredible job of covering the 11 CD race between Gerry Connolly and Keith Fimian. For various reasons, I was not able to attend candidate debates. But Bryan provided great coverage of them. And at yesterday's Springfield forum between candidates from both the 11th and 8th CDs, Bryan continued to inform readers about the differences between the candidate.

He also reported on the attempts of one of Fimian's supporters to ignore the moderator's request that candidates focus on the actual issues relevant to voters rather than raise questions about negative campaigning. According to Bryan, the Republican Fimian supporter grew rude and started screaming an obscenity when he was blocked from raising what he thought was a more important issue than where the candidates stood on policy questions and what they would do in Congress to implement their policies.

There was a candidate forum this afternoon in Springfield that featured the Congressional candidates from both the 8th and 11th District. During the debate the moderator decided that the discussion would focus on issues that the candidates could address in Congress instead of a question about negative campaigning. This was accepted by most of the bipartisan crowd even with some applause, but one of the Republicans in the audiences started screaming bull**** until he was called out of order by the moderator. After the debate I asked Keith Fimian what he thought of the situation and this is the response I got from him followed by the rants of the Republican who caused all the commotion.

Below is Bryan's video of his attempt to question Fimian about the incident.



There's also an interesting discussion among commenters, including one disillusioned Republican, who said the following:

The sad thing is that this video represents Fimian's entire campaign. If he doesn't know the answer to something, he'll avoid details and launch an attack.

As a conservative Republican who has donated a lot of money to local candidates I am ashamed to say he is the candidate my wonderful party put forward. We used to pride ourselves on having smart candidates who know how to govern. Now we're stuck with Fimian who has no idea what he's doing.

October 8, 2008 7:09 PM

Bryan's response to the comments, with a fuller explanation of what happened at the event is also important reading.

It's interesting that Keith Fimian, at the beginning of the campaign, insisted that he wanted to discuss the issues pertinent to the voters of the 11th CD. I guess he thought he'd get to decide what was important to us and it would be only what he told us it is. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't work that way. We get to decide and candidates have to answer to us. Fortunately, Gerry Connolly is pretty good at that. Do you think 23 years of public service (13 years in elective office in Fairfax plus 10 years on the staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee) helped him to understand that basic fact?