Content area
Full Text
West Virginia US. Senate Race
Jay Wolfe occupies a unique niche in the history of West Virginia politics: In 1988, the youthful (32) state senator and 'Harrison County insurance man rolled up the best-ever showing of a Republican against Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd in Byrd's seven re-elections since he unseated the last Republican senator from the Mountaineer State, Chapman Revercomb, back in 1958. Wolfe's performance-35% of the vote-is actually more impressive than it seems at first, when one considers that Wolfe was outspent by the then-Senate majority leader and Appropriations Committee chairman by 10 to 1.
But exceeding expectations by deploying shoe leather and take-it-or-leave-it conservative views are Jay Wolfe's stock-in-trade. In 1986, with a campaign that consisted in large part of Wolfe and his wife going door to-door, he unseated 14-year Democratic State Sen. Gino Columbo to become the first Republican to represent Harrison County in the West Virginia senate. In 1992, outraged by the elder George Bush's violation of his "no new taxes" pledge, Wolfe supported Pat Buchanan for President and became his state's lone Buchanan delegate to the GOP convention in Houston.
"I had a lot of respect for...