Speaker Plum?

This article appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on December 9.

Speaker Plum? Longest-serving member of Virginia House eyes top job if Democrats win majority

Del. Kenneth R. Plum has been around long enough to remember how loud things got the last time an almost evenly divided Virginia House of Delegates tried to pick a speaker.

"You could not hear yourself think," Plum, a Fairfax County Democrat and the House's longest-serving member, said of the raucous day in 1998 when Democrats rammed through the re-election of then-Speaker Thomas W. Moss, Jr. of Norfolk as Republicans pounded their desks and yelled objections.

With Republicans on track for a 51-49 majority in the House heading into a handful of electoral recounts later this month, it's not yet clear if Democrats will have a shot at electing one of their own to lead the House. But Plum, a 76-year-old retired educator who has served in the House for more than three decades, has already begun making the case to colleagues that he's the right man for the job, setting up a potential challenge to current House Minority Leader David. J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville.

"I think with me as speaker and with Toscano as majority floor leader, we can get some things done," Plum said Friday, listing Medicaid expansion, education and mental health funding and nonpartisan redistricting as top priorities.

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