This Saturday I took a little trip to the Hunt & Company Restaurant in Chatham where Dan Moy held a meet and greet for his campaign to become the Republican candidate for Congress in the 5th district of Virginia. In the past few weeks he has been campaigning in various counties in order to get people to become delegates to the Republican convention that will be held on May 21, 2022. All people have to do is fill out the form before the deadline in their county and attend to support him. Having high caliber people in Congress is important.
Moy is the chairman of the Republican Party in Charlottesville and a retired Air Force Colonel. After his 27 years of service he has been a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. In last year’s governors race he served as Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Regional Veteran’s Coalition Director. He is now running to provide a different type of leadership for the area in Congress, probably not seen since Robert Hurt was in Congress. I liked Riggleman, but I also got the feeling from watching interviews of him that he didn’t really enjoy being in Congress and may not have minded the way the last Republican convention turned out for him. I also feel that Bob Good hasn’t done a whole lot for the area and has been spending most of his time trying to turn himself into a media celebrity by drawing attention to himself with controversial tweets and sound bites instead of actually working to pass any meaningful legislation.
The legislation he has attached himself to seems to be more about creating controversy than anything else. For instance right before Russia invaded Ukraine he co-sponsored a doomed bill to pull all of the aid from Ukraine until a complete border wall between the US and Mexico is built. Such a bill was designed to only gin up emotions and sent an awful message to Putin, showing him weakness and division. A real legislator would have kept the two issues separate and worked for both. Once Russia invaded, Bob Good then did a Facebook post expressing support for the Ukrainians, pretending like his support of this bill never happened and blaming the entire event on President Biden.
To me that just shows someone not understanding what is going on in the world.
Last year, when the Bob Warren machine candidates lost in landslides in Pittsylvania County, Bob Good was the only elected official in the entire state of Virginia who had endorsed any of them, which was a sign that he is out of touch with what is happening here. However, you have to wonder if he cares, as Bob Good also shut down Congressional offices in Danville, Charlottesville, and Farmville, making it difficult for constituents to get help. The only offices he has now are one in Washington, DC and another near his home in Lynchburg. That says a lot about his priorities.
Good is good at getting attention on social media and making controversial statements on TV to draw attention to himself. He deliberately tries to polarize people, which does win him some fans, and has helped him get fundraising. To me this convention amounts to a choice of what type of person do you want in Congress for the Republican Party? Which to me, its either a guy that does soundbites and tries to build national celebrity for themselves or someone who will actually try to do something with legislation for the area and in their own areas of national concern, which for Moy is national defense, renewing the economy, and protecting civil liberties.
Mr. Moy didn’t have time to tell us his entire background, but I looked it up after I got home and found that towards the end of his military career he worked as the assistant to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as Deputy Military Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He has the experience and knowledge from that type of background few others have that he can bring to Congress, in a time in which the world situation is now impacting us all.
This is likely to be a key vote for the region. Bob Good became the district’s elected Republican representative after a bruising and controversial convention held in which his supporters ousted Denver Riggleman and then he continued to attack Riggleman afterwards. I have no doubt that some of Riggleman’s supporters are going to support Dan Moy at the convention, but this meet and greet showed me that there is more to him than that.
Perhaps another way to look at this – is that Bob Good was the right candidate for Republicans in 2020 and for a time in which Democrats hold the majority in Congress, but the Republicans are most likely to win the majority in Congress this November and a different skill set is preferable then. Bob Good beat Cameron Webb 52.4% to 47.3%. That’s a narrow margin for a deeply conservative district and suggests to me that Moy would be a much stronger candidate in the general election in November. There is no guarantee that Good would win again.
Here is Faceook post the Dan Moy Campaign made of their visits this Saturday.
Moy also stopped by Halifax County this weekend. The Gazette-Virginian has a story with more quotes from Moy and pictures from this visit. You can read it here.
-Mike
