Kilgore, Kaine Both Running On Empty

Mike Haley, who sells honey, beckoned to Jerry Kilgore, who wants to be governor of Virginia. Haley offered a deal: "I swear, if you tell me how you're going to solve these gas prices, I'll vote for you."

Kilgore was game. "I'm the one candidate who won't raise your gas taxes," he told Haley at the Chesterfield County Fair, south of Richmond, over the weekend. "Take that to the bank."

Haley nodded and said nothing, and the Republican candidate continued on, shaking hands. The honey man's vote is still up for grabs. "I want to hear what's being done, because this is ridiculous," he told me. "At least in the '70s, they did something, those odd-even days" when motorists could buy gas only on certain days, depending on their license plate numbers.

By tradition, Labor Day is when voters finally pay attention to candidates who've been selling themselves to the politics-obsessed for eons. But right now, if people are thinking beyond the fact that summer is ending and school is starting and traffic will be awful again, they're focused on Katrina and gas, not on the race between Kilgore and Tim Kaine, his Democratic opponent.

Both K-men are saying obvious and right things about the flooding. The feds should have reacted faster. Existing evacuation plans aren't enough.

But that's not what people want to hear about. Three-dollar gas has a way of getting complacent people to tune in. Dead bodies floating in a magical tourism city tend to raise questions about how we're doing as a society.

There are only two possible explanations for the shame of the past week: incompetence or a lesser regard for poor people than our leaders have for people like them. Take your pick; either way, you get angry questions.

Renee Conner of Chesterfield jogged over to catch Kilgore's ear: "What would you do if it happened here?"

"I'd be right in the middle of it," Kilgore said. "You just got to be on the ground immediately, with all your emergency response people."

What more could you want him to say? But no, Conner said, "I was hoping he would say more about if we had a tragedy like that, we should be doing more to help those people."

(Kaine was also disappointing: He responded to the surge in gas prices by asking oil companies to voluntarily freeze their prices. Right.)

Kilgore heard it over and over: What went wrong? What would you do if the next one hit here?