Trash Talk About a Twang

COULD ANYTHING be less central to this year's gubernatorial election in Virginia than the twang and timbre of one of the candidate's voices? Yet, somehow, the race between the two major contenders has degenerated into a venomous little exchange over the accent of former attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore, a Republican from the hill country of southwest Virginia, and his campaign's insistence (despite slim evidence) that Democratic Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is impugning it. If the two candidates sorely wish to encourage a protest vote for a maverick third-party challenger -- in this case state Sen. H. Russell Potts Jr. (R-Winchester), who is likely to appear on the ballot as an independent -- they need only persist in this vein for a few more months.

The current contretemps, amplified and inflamed in the blogosphere, has its origins partly in Mr. Kaine's frustration that he cannot goad Mr. Kilgore into early, immediate and numerous debates, which the Kaine campaign is confident it would win; never mind that the election is six months away. Instead, Mr. Kilgore has fired away in radio ads in which an announcer accuses the Democrat of being a liberal. In a statement, Mr. Kaine accused his opponent of "making things up about me and letting slick radio announcers do his dirty work," and challenged Mr. Kilgore to say "what he believes himself." At that, the Kilgore campaign assumed a tone of high moral dudgeon, insisting that Mr. Kaine was subtly denigrating southwestern Virginia and its indigenous regional twang.

The political subtext here concerns the swing vote in rural southwest Virginia, where Gov. Mark R. Warner made inroads for the Democrats by courting moderate Republicans four years ago. But the phony debate about Mr. Kilgore's accent is a sideshow to most, including the voters of that region, compared with the major challenges facing the state. Instead of a tough-minded debate about the future of transportation funding; or the rising challenge of violent Hispanic gangs; or public school standards; or imperiled federal aid and the resulting pressure on the state's coffers, Virginians are being subjected to trash talk about a twang.

Maybe every campaign has its silly season and this is Virginia's. But in struggling to define each other, rather than the state's most glaring problems, Mr. Kaine and Mr. Kilgore have taken a detour down the road of irrelevance. Wouldn't it be nice if they turned back now?