The upcoming primary election face-off between State Senators L. Louise Lucas and Lionel Spruill, Sr., for the honor of carrying the Democratic Party flag in the November 7 General Election will undoubtedly rank in the top tier of acrimonious VA contests for this year. Although Senator Lucas is no shrinking violet, her campaign literature to date has emphasized her prior accomplishments and upcoming agenda rather than attacks on the record and character of her opponent. Her colleague, though, has gone in the other direction, questioning both her character and allegiance to party priorities. We have been around politics too long to pretend to be “shocked” by this type of campaigning, and we feel no obligation to intervene on behalf of the woman depicted in her own advertisement with boxing gloves on asserting that she “Fights for Us”.

Yet, when we saw this Spruill campaign ad, it felt like the quintessential “bridge too far.

Citing two Virginian-Pilot articles as the basis for its assertions, it nonetheless doesn’t provide the reader either a longer form summation of their content or a way to access the reporting itself. In the interests of making the facts available to our own readers and letting you draw your own conclusions, here are the links to the articles in question: December 22, 2007 and October 14, 2008. In our view, the perspectives conveyed in the advertisement do not align fully and, perhaps, not to a major extent with the newspaper accounts. At any rate, you have what you need to call it as you see it.