Fifth District Congressional challenger Tom Perriello hasn’t swept the endorsements from district papers, but he picked up one notable pick this morning from the Danville Register & Bee, which opted for Perriello over six-term incumbent Virgil Goode.
“Since Goode’s first campaign for Congress in 1996, we have backed him in every election, defended him from what we thought was unfair criticism by challengers and wished for him a long career in Washington,” said the Register & Bee’s editorial board in its Perriello endorsement. “We haven’t left Virgil Goode. Virgil Goode has left us.”
The Register & Bee cited Goode’s ineffectiveness, pointing out that it was only going to increase with an increasingly Democratic Congress, but it also went after Goode’s bigoted remarks on the Mexican flag and Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison (which were originally published in C-VILLE.)
“We expect to receive great criticism for endorsing Perriello over Goode,” wrote the board. “But our decision was born out of frustration with a career politician who has already told us he expects to be ineffective as Democrats gain more power in Congress.” (To the chagrin of many Charlottesville area residents, the endorsement comes with a call for Perriello to break the “political logjam” over the Route 29 Bypass.)
Perriello has also been endorsed by the Roanoke Times, which came as no surprise, but failed to get the endorsement from Lynchburg’s News & Advance. The Charlottesville Daily Progress has yet to issue its endorsement in the Fifth District race, but, considering that today it backed Jim Gilmore for U.S. Senate over Mark Warner, it seems unlikely that the conservative board will be moved by Perriello.