Deserting the GOP

In the last year, Republicans have pulled out all the stops to buck up Drake's sagging numbers. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Laura Bush, House Whip Roy Blunt and Majority Leader John Boehner have all come down to raise money for her. The political cash is flowing so freely on both sides, in fact, that watching local television can be a slightly traumatic experience. In advertisements, Drake is accused of coddling oil companies and opposing stem cell research, thus hastening the deaths of telegenic actors who portray ill voters. Kellam is accused of saying, "Stop ... wait for the lawyers" in the war on terror. Then Drake is accused of failing to support military benefits. Thirty seconds later, in yet another ad, an ominous voice intones, "We can't afford Phil Kellam and we certainly can't trust him."

By all appearances, Drake is an unnatural and unlikely mudslinger. Soft spoken and immediately likable, she moved to Norfolk after getting pregnant in high school in Ohio and marrying her Navy-bound boyfriend. The marriage didn't last, but she successfully raised her child as a single mother and sold real estate, until launching a political career as a state delegate. She entered the congressional race in 2004 about 60 days before the election, after the incumbent, Republican Ed Schrock, resigned in a scandal that involved accusations of homosexual behavior. When she won, Drake was rewarded by the Republican leadership with a seat on the Armed Services Committee -- though it's proved a double-edged sword given that the latest round of base closings has affected local Navy installations.

Though only a congressional freshman who almost always voted with the GOP leadership, Drake presents herself as a politician who fights for her constituents. "If you send me a letter, you are going to get a letter back that deals with what you talked about, not 'Thank you for contacting me, we're glad to hear from you,'" Drake bragged after the parade. "I've told my staff, from day one, I ever see a letter like that, you are fired."

While Drake's personality calls to mind a soccer mom who fell into politics by accident, her Democratic opponent, Kellam, has politics coursing through his blood. A blow-dried blond with blue eyes and a firm handshake, Kellam has worked for nearly a decade as a Virginia Beach's revenue commissioner, a minor elected position where his major accomplishments involved changing the local system for car registration. But for much of the 20th century, the Kellam family name has been synonymous with political power in Virginia Beach. There is a Kellam Road, a Kellam High School, and a Kellam Bridge. His grandfather, who was the county clerk of the court in the early 1900s, sired 18 children, including Phil's uncle, Sidney Kellam, who became the Democratic Party's political boss through the 1950s and '60s, even running Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign in Virginia, the last time a Democratic nominee won the state. Phil's father, Richard Kellam, became a federal judge, and another uncle served in the state Senate.

There is no doubt that Kellam is running this race to return his family name to its historical place. "I really think the time is right for the Democrats to reemerge," Kellam said on Sunday afternoon, sitting in the wood-paneled dining room of his house, the same one that his grandmother lived in when she bore 17 of her children. "I was a Democrat when it wasn't cool," Kellam jokes, noting that his family fell out of power in the 1960s, in part because they supported Johnson's Civil Rights Act.

As if to prove his bona fides, he speaks and thinks like a political machine boss, listing off precinct-by-precinct voting trends, the infighting between the local Republican Party, and the unlikely local victory of Gov. Tim Kaine in 2005, which left Kellam with a successful get-out-the-vote operation. He lists a half-dozen reasons why the race is so close, but he can't dodge the most obvious to outside observers. "The military folks are just ambivalent about the way things are going," he says. "They are not going to diss the commander in chief, but privately they are very uncomfortable with the way things are going."

Like Drake, Kellam does not do much to advertise his party label, and it is hard to find areas of policy where Kellam has staked out a different position from Drake's. Like her, he is against amnesty for immigrants and refuses to support a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He promises to be a conservative Blue Dog Democrat in Congress. "There's going to be some things that my party will vote on that I just won't agree to," he says. But like dozens of other Democrats in this midterm season, he has focused his message less on policy stands than credibility as an effective leader who can succeed where Republicans have failed. At a city Democratic Party barbecue earlier in the day, Kellam did not directly mention his opponent when he addressed the crowd of hundreds. Instead, he spoke about the Republican Congress and the president. "The Congress has provided no oversight for this president," he told the crowd. "That's why we spent $449 billion last year on debt to countries like China and Japan."

It is a message that appears to be working, at least as far as John McCain's old shipmate, Hugh McCabe is concerned. He moved to the area in 1948 and knows the Kellam name well. "The Kellam family has been here a hundred goddamn years," he says at the VFW post as the night wears on. Now the Kellams will once again have McCabe's vote, if only because they are not directly responsible for the mess McCabe sees unfolding in Iraq, and in Washington. "Politics is all bullshit," he continues. "All those people up there ought to get their act together to solve our problems as a nation." For the moment, that's exactly the kind of complaint Democrats want to hear.

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