State Senator Robert Hurt of Chatham is one of seven candidates seeking the Republican nomination to face incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District.

A lawyer first elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2001, Hurt joined the state Senate in 2008. According to an analysis done by Richmond Sunlight, he is the most partisan Republican in his chamber of the General Assembly.

Hurt spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the Fifth District GOP convention at Hampden-Sydney College (Hurt’s alma mater) on May 1.

He explained what his top issues will be in the general election, should he be his party’s nominee after the June 8 primary.

Core Values
“The biggest issues facing this country are, really, spending [and] debt,” he said. “That would be the top priority.”

He added that “limited government,” through reducing regulations on business, is another issue he would emphasize, as well as “getting back our core values in this country”

That, he said, “includes all sorts of issues,” such as “things like the Bill of Rights.

“The Bill of Rights means something,” Hurt said. “Our constitution would have failed without [it] and I think we have to get back to those individual liberties that have been a hallmark of this country for the last 234 years.”

How would Hurt unify his party after the seven-way primary next month?

Party Unity
“I will begin by pledging today, and have pledged in the past, that whoever the nominee is will get my full support and I will put all influence I have to making sure that that person beats Tom Perriello.”

Nothing, he said, “would be a greater gift to Tom Perriello than for us to be [dis]unified.”

As part of this effort, Hurt said he would continue to run a “positive campaign about my vision for the Fifth District” and that he expects his competitors “to do the same, because if we don’t, Tom Perriello will get re-elected.”

Hurt gave a similar response, focused on Perriello, when asked how he would lasso the various elements of the Republican party – libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives – into a common project after the primary.

“We need not look any further than at what’s going on in Congress right now and need not look any further than what Tom Perriello has done,” Hurt explained.

Send Perriello Home

Perriello, he said, “has gone around the Fifth District, in his town hall meetings back in August, and talked about health care and other issues.” Voters “spoke to him, they made it clear to him what the people in the Fifth District wanted and what they didn’t want, and he’s gone to Washington and he has danced every dance with Nancy Pelosi. Every dance he has danced with Nancy Pelosi.”

What was that dance? Perriello has “voted for the stimulus package, he’s voted for cap-and-trade, and he’s voted for this abomination of a health-care reform.”

As a consequence, Hurt said, “this will be a race on the issues, those are three of the most important examples of the fact that he’s not representing his people, he’s not listening to them, and he needs to be sent home.”

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