Crashing the Governor’s Mansion: Former Reality TV Star Waging Independent Bid for Governor of Virginia

While Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling of Virginia ponders a possible independent bid for governor, another independent candidate — one who is arguably better known than the lieutenant governor — is already busy collecting the 10,000 valid signatures necessary to appear on the November ballot against presumptive Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli, the state’s current attorney general, and veteran campaign strategist and former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, who will head the Democratic ticket in the fall.

Tareq Salahi, the controversial reality TV personality best known for famously crashing a White House state dinner in 2009, announced his candidacy as an independent candidate for governor of Virginia last month, some nine months after initially launching a bid for the Republican nomination.

Like Bolling, Salahi, who claims that he was prepared to pay the $25,000 qualifying fee to gain entry into the GOP contest, realized that the May 18^th Republican nominating convention in Richmond was shaping up as little more than a conservative-dominated Cuccinelli coronation.

“That’s the best way I can win this race, not going to the convention,” Salahi told the Washington Post in announcing that he was dropping out of the Republican race and would run as an independent.  “I can’t agree with anything that Cuccinelli believes in.”

From the outset, the 43-year-old Salahi has insisted that his candidacy for Virginia’s highest elective office isn’t some sort of political prank.  “Its not part of reality TV.  It’s not a stunt,” he said in an interview last spring, shortly after announcing his intentions.  “It’s real.”

Salahi, who appeared on the Bravo reality television show “The Real Housewives of D.C.” with his now ex-wife Michaele during the 2010 season, said that his candidacy was motivated in large part by a lawsuit brought against him by the tea-partying Cuccinelli, who alleged that Salahi’s wine tour business canceled tours without notice, failed to make promised stops on the tours and refused to provide refunds to clients.

The celebrity-turned-politician countered by suggesting that Cuccinelli’s policies have damaged local businesses in Virginia, including his own winery, through unnecessary and unwarranted litigation.  He’s also harshly critical of the attorney general’s widely publicized far-right positions on a wide range of social issues, including his controversial stances on abortion, women’s health and Medicare — the latter of which Cuccinelli has described as “despicable.”

To Salahi, who has long considered himself a moderate Republican, Cuccinelli must seem like a creature from what the perspicaciously astute William F. Buckley, Jr., once described as the “fever swamp of the berserk right.”  The bottom of the murky swamp, at that.

Appealing to Democratic, Republican and independent voters while campaigning on the slogan “Crash the Vote,” Salahi said that he has a record of working closely with both major parties, a claim bolstered by the fact that he was appointed to a couple of state boards by Republican and Democratic governors alike — serving on both the Virginia Wine Growers Advisory Board and the Virginia Tourism Authority during the administrations of Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore and Democratic Govs. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine.

“My record shows I’ve successfully worked with both parties, Republicans and Democrats together to create legislation and create policy for Virginia businesses — small or large,” Salahi said during a recent campaign appearance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg.   That included helping to shape legislation enabling previously struggling farms and wineries to thrive and prosper in the state, he added.

Salahi, who lives near Front Royal where he operates a small winery, appears by all accounts to be waging an active — if not unorthodox — campaign while striving to obtain the 10,000 valid signatures needed to appear on the ballot by the state’s June 11 filing deadline.

In announcing his independent candidacy last month, Salahi said that he hopes to double the minimum number of signatures required on his nominating petitions to thwart any attempt by Cuccinelli’s forces to knock him off the ballot.