RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — For Democrat Adam Cook, challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman in a conservative Virginia district is an uphill climb that just got a little steeper.
Cook, a 34-year-old major in the Air Force Reserves, faces two weeks of active duty starting next week, so he is suspending his longshot campaign in eastern Virginia’s 1st Congressional District during that time.
Military rules forbid active-duty personnel from public political activity.
“I would have been within my rights to ask for a waiver for this year, but I thought it was important and that I can still run the kind of campaign I want to run,” Cook said in an Associated Press telephone interview Monday. “I wanted to find a way to do both.”
Cook said he could have been excused from his active-duty commitment this year because of his deployment to Afghanistan last year.
The Fredericksburg lawyer, running his first campaign, will halt all fundraising, campaign advertising, voter outreach and organizing and put his young staff on a two-week paid vacation until his hitch in Dover, Del., is up about Aug. 6.
Wittman, 53, is seeking a third full term. He won a 2007 special election to fill the unexpired term of the late Rep. JoAnn Davis.
In the 1st District, redrawn in a legislative redistricting fight that didn’t end until January, Republicans won 66 percent of the vote in the 2009 gubernatorial race and 53 percent in the 2008 presidential contest.
Cook is running a campaign that distances itself from President Barack Obama on several issues. He said he supports using coal and other carbon fuels while the nation transitions to cleaner energy, and supports gun rights. He also said Obama’s health reforms are preferable to Republican efforts to repeal them, but that they fail to restrain cost increases, particularly for prescription drugs.
