Best-selling Roanoke author Beth Macy formally announced her bid for Congress on Tuesday.
It was a spectacle of a campaign launch: The crowd filled the bottom floor of Roanoke’s old downtown fire station and spilled out into Century Plaza across the street. Macy delivered a stem-winder of a speech that played up her working-class roots in Ohio — “I’ve eaten government cheese” — and she decried what she called a “crisis of opportunity” that is making it harder for people to get ahead while billionaires think they “never have enough.”
She repeatedly blistered Rep. Ben Cline, the Republican incumbent in the 6th District, as someone “who serves Trump” and “votes in lockstep with Trump” and vowed that “I will be a voice for the people he won’t lift a finger for.” She faulted Cline’s voting record — the One Big Beautiful Bill was mentioned a lot — as bad for working-class voters in the district and then went further. She spoke of “bought-off politicians like Ben Cline” and “useful idiots like Ben Cline” and said her husband urged her to run for Congress by telling her, “You do it, girl. Let’s take that m-effer down.” (That’s how she said it but suggested her husband was more, umm, direct.) The crowd roared. This was a more energetic campaign entry speech than any I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot. It was also possibly the most direct assault on an incumbent I’ve heard in a long time — if maybe ever. (Cline did not reply to an invitation to comment.)…