Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the No. 1 issue in tight West Virginia House race

WHEELING, W. VA — Democrat Mike Oliverio was emphatic to the point of sounding indignant.

“I have never once said I would support Nancy Pelosi,” the House candidate in West Virginia’s 1st district insisted at a debate here on Wednesday.

{mosads}In the audience of about 100 people, supporters of Oliverio’s Republican opponent, David McKinley, groaned and chuckled. They held a large printout of the local newspaper, with the headline: “Oliverio Would Support Pelosi.”

“Someone’s lying,” whispered David Wilson, 65, a McKinley supporter.

Pelosi, the congresswoman from San Francisco and Speaker of the House, is front and center in this toss-up House race at the southern edge of the Rust Belt, where Republicans are hoping to grab a seat long held by Democrats. The results on Election Day will serve as a revealing test of whether the GOP’s relentless focus on Pelosi, together with President Obama, will be enough to power the party into the House majority.

Similar battles are being waged across the country in districts where Pelosi is sometimes an albatross for Democrats hoping to retain control of the House.

In West Virginia, McKinley, a 63-year-old engineering executive and former chairman of the state GOP, has invoked the Speaker at every turn.

“It’s all about Pelosi,” he told one potential voter while stumping in Clarksburg.

Indeed, McKinley used both his opening and closing statements in Wednesday’s debate, the second between the candidates, to hammer the Obama/Pelosi team.

“Throughout the district, voters are sending a very clear message: President Obama and Nancy Pelosi have our country headed down the wrong track,” McKinley said at the outset. “My opponent has already committed to supporting Nancy Pelosi. I will not. I am supporting a different leadership team in Congress,” he added, a line he repeated at the conclusion of the hourlong event, prompting Oliverio’s denial.

In an interview the next day, Oliverio declined to say whom he would support in a Speaker’s race between Pelosi and Rep. John Boehner (Ohio), the House Republican leader.

“That’s a hypothetical question, and we choose to answer questions that are based on current facts and current situations,” he said as he sat in his campaign headquarters in Morgantown, a college town about a 90-minute drive south from Wheeling. “We don’t know who the candidates for Speaker will be,” he added, adopting a stock answer for Democrats in his embattled position that is employed so frequent it appears to come with a tacit stamp of approval from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“I think it’s far more important who speaks for the people of northern West Virginia than who the Speaker is.”

As for the newspaper article reporting that Oliverio would back Pelosi over Boehner, the Oliverio campaign said it was based on a hypothetical statement from a spokesman, and not the candidate himself.

Oliverio sees irony in McKinley’s attacks on him, given that it was his own campaign from the right that ousted the district’s incumbent congressman, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D), in a May primary.

“David continues to say that he wants to send a message. This campaign … already sent a message, on May 11. That’s already been done,” Oliverio said. “Now it’s time to pick the best candidate.”

An Army veteran and a state senator since 1994, Oliverio, 47, launched his campaign in March standing outside the U.S. Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.Va. He ran against Mollohan, a 28-year incumbent whose standing in the district was undercut by an ethics cloud. Oliverio opposed healthcare and cap-and-trade — a virtual requirement in coal-rich West Virginia — and kept up the focus on excessive federal spending, even launching an iPhone application featuring a running national-debt clock.

But spending can be a complicated issue in West Virginia, where the many public tributes to former Sen. Robert Byrd (D) speak not only to the late senator’s iconic image in the state but also to the federal largesse he brought in.

Two blocks from Wednesday’s debate in Wheeling stood the Robert C. Byrd Intermodal Transportation Center, one of the more modern buildings in an old steel city whose population, now under 30,000, has never returned to its World War II-era peak. The debate itself was held at a local community college in a historic 19th-century building that once housed the B&O Railroad, which shuttered in 1963.

Oliverio has called for reform of the earmark process, but he said it would be “foolish” to swear off requesting federal funding for West Virginia, so long as the projects benefit both the state and the nation. McKinley says there should be a moratorium on earmarks until the budget is balanced, but once that happens, he pledged to fight for West Virginia’s share of the pot.

With Mollohan out of the race and largely out of sight, both candidates are trying to capitalize on voter anger at Washington, casting themselves as independent outsiders.

“I’m 63 years old. I’m not going to Washington for a career. I’m going to Washington to try to shake things up,” McKinley says — a favorite campaign line that implies that the younger Oliverio, a veteran legislator, is a career politician.

McKinley has called for term limits and promises not to stay in Washington too long. His wife, Mary, says she’ll hold him to that pledge. “I’m going to make him come home. I’ll tell you that much,” she told a coffee shop owner in Clarksburg during a campaign stop.

But though McKinley has been in the private sector for 16 years, he was a state legislator himself and head of the West Virginia Republican Party. “Nov. 2 will be the 17th time David’s name will be on the ballot in the last 30 years. I want you all to think about that,” Oliverio pointed out during the debate.

The Oliverio-McKinley race has been waged mostly under the national radar in West Virginia as the unexpectedly close Senate match-up between Gov. Joe Manchin (D) and John Raese (R) has dominated the public attention and the airwaves. A handful of ads for the Senate race appear on radio and television for every spot on the House campaign.

Polls have shown a tight race. The Hill’s poll last week had Oliverio ahead by three points, while McKinley has released internal surveys in recent days giving him a small lead.

Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in West Virginia for decades, but the Mountain State never caught on to the Obama juggernaut in 2008. Hillary Rodham Clinton won West Virginia in a landslide in the Democratic primary, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) easily carried the state in the general election.

Indeed, many Democrats here say they are registered with the party so they can vote in the primaries, which for many local and state campaigns are tantamount to the general election.

While anger at the federal government is palpable, it’s unclear whether the heavy focus on Obama and Pelosi can carry McKinley to victory.

Obama “is doing as good a job as he can, considering the mess he inherited,” an Oliverio supporter at the debate, Barbara LaRue, said. As for Pelosi, LaRue said: “She’s taken a hard rap. She has a hard job.”

But McKinley’s argument clearly resonates for some voters, like David and Joyce Wilson, both retirees. “She’s so power-hungry, so corrupt. It’s all about taking control of our lives,” said Joyce Wilson, who wore a red “Fire Pelosi” sticker to the debate.

David Wilson said Obama was “the worst thing that’s ever happened to this country,” and he said the national Democratic Party had become “the Communist Party of the United States.”

As for the 2010 election, Joyce Wilson welcomed the shifting political landscape in West Virginia, where Republicans appear to be ascendant. “We’ve been a Democratic state for 70 years. It’s time to change.”