Virginia primary.

Not that it's especially news to anyone, but there's a primary in Virginia on Tuesday. And with the change in the primary's date - from April or May, long after almost every nomination race has been decided in recent memory - this year's primary may actually mean something. Primaries are relatively new to Virginia: although there was one in 1988, the results were odd enough - Pat Robertson won on the Republican side and Jesse Jackson won on the Democratic side - that the state went back to caucuses. The next primary was in 2000, won by Bush.

We've been getting plenty of TV ads for Clark (his ads started between Christmas and New Year's), Edwards and Kerry. They're mostly "here's the candidate" ads, telling of the candidate's path to the candidacy and touching on issues without really addressing them, and don't mention their Democratic opponents either directly or indirectly.

Saturday night was the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, a fundraiser for the state Democratic party, and the leading candidates showed up to make their cases: Kerry, Edwards, and Clark. For comic relief, Sharpton was there, too. Dean was scheduled to attend, but blew the event off just as his candidacy is being blown off by the voters.

Before the J-J Dinner, each candidate had a rally. I went to the Kerry rally, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sure, it was his stump campaign speech which I'd already seen a half-dozen times on CNN, but it's energizing to see it in person. And to be close to the candidate: I was within 10 feet of him, as close as I've been to a politician of national scope since I saw President Carter at the National Air & Space Museum back around 1978. (It occurred to me that this will be one of the last times for a while that one will be able to get to be close to Kerry without running Secret Service protection - I'd guess he'll have their protection by the end of the month.) Kerry actually had to vary his speech a bit - near the end of it, someone in the crowd had some medical problem (chest pains, I think), so he cut his speech off fairly abruptly and implored the crowd to make way for medical personnel to approach (and then to go vote for him). Luckily, there was a fair-sized cadre of firemen with paramedic training at the rally, so the affected person got attention pretty quickly.

Although they urged people to stick around and listen to Kerry give another speech in an hour or so, I decided to take off. On my way back to the car, I saw a surprisingly quiet knot of people with a mixture of signs for different candidates on the corner beside the building where the J-J Dinner was to take place. As I got closer, I realized that Gen. Clark was speaking, so I stopped to listen to him. Nice enough guy, I suppose, but his speech wasn't compelling or especially polished - he repeated a couple of his personal factoids (his mother was a secretary, he was career military) three times in eight minutes, at least two times more than was necessary - and he seemed tired, like he knew he wasn't going to be doing this much longer. And about the time that he started to repeat himself yet again, I decided to wander off to get a beer.