As the local manufacturing economy heaves and hope splinters, loaded inference stretches from here to Zurich: “Frust in der Kleinstadt Waynesboro: Obama ist ein Greenhorn.” That was the headline in the major Swiss daily, Tages-Anzeiger. Interpretations vary.

This week’s opinion marketplace

Meet Nancy Dowdy, contortionist. Risking pulled muscles where she didn’t know she had them, the Waynesboro councilwoman says she supports a stormwater project in perennially soaked Wayne Hills – an area she represents – but opposes spending money on that now because she wants the city to build a West End fire station later. Understand? That’s OK. Nobody else gets it either.

Index nips now, chomps later

A fireplug of a fellow, Tracy Pyles is accustomed to playing the part of a yapping hound on a tight leash. Having ignored his barks about a bureaucratic bedevilment known as the composite index, Augusta County supervisors now are feeling the bite of the thing at their backsides, and so the people’s.

President Barack Obama stumbles on health care, spending and terrorism. It’s time for him to reconsider and recalibrate.

Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell supports charter schools. So does President Barack Obama, who discussed them with McDonnell during a brief chat the day after McDonnell’s victory.

Among his ideological brethren, many of whom reside in this town, Frank Lucente’s rasp is coated with cordiality as a safeguard against giving offense and taking it in response to criticism. These contrasts in tones frequently are heard here from Waynesboro’s vice mayor in the aftermath of this space being occupied with an assessment of the city’s shortcomings. And so rise conundrums.

Demonstrating the kind of dexterity one finds only in politicians and yoga masters, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine ventured Monday to Harrisonburg to administer pats, to his back principally and others’ perfunctorily. Ensuring the bipartisan nature of the ritual, Del. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, joined Kaine at the event marking the grand opening of SRI International, the research and development institute and presumed provider of economic salvation to the Valley.

Strange, sad events cross paths

History is filled with strange juxtapositions, none significantly greater than events crossing paths this Veterans Day.

Election payoffs can be startlingly swift, especially in the case of Tom Perriello. A year ago, the current Fifth District U.S. House representative laboriously rolled to the curb the inaptly named Virgil Goode, an incumbent whose habitation of a seat in the Capitol was mostly spectral. Mostly but not entirely. Goode’s absence was haunting Saturday.

Having stepped with precision across the ideological divide and resuscitated in the process an ostensibly broken conservative movement, Robert F. McDonnell pledges fealty to the pragmatism that swept him to Richmond. If that fares him so well as it did on election night, the governor-elect will have provided a formula that others in his party surely will replicate.

3 up 3 down for the week

Readying to slink off into the night, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine continues to bustle about the business of securing future employment. He has signed on for a part-time teaching gig at the University of Richmond to be coupled with his work as Democratic National Committee chairman.

Dispensing with the obvious, that being the necessity of replacing Waynesboro’s treasurer, Stephanie Beverage soon must begin with something ostensibly more complex: figuring out how to keep the state auditor off her back. As she attempts this, the City Council might consider how to right the office permanently.

Having initiated his campaign for governor shortly after authoring a famous 1989 thesis, Robert F. McDonnell has concluded the facile phase of his quest. Now he learns whether he’ll suffer the torment of Gilgamesh, watching the plant of life swallowed by the devilish details of running a state stuck in a mire of red and sinking deeper.

Meteorologists, correct on occasion, say conditions will be favorable today for voters to venture from their homes and select mostly from guys with perfect hair as representatives to serve for the next four years. Here in the central Shenandoah Valley, it will be partly cloudy with highs near 60. For President Barack Obama looking on from the capital, it might be decidedly chillier. If it’s fall, leaves and the electorate’s mood must be changing.

Lovers of politics are rare souls in an era when politicians in the mind’s eye of the public lurk somewhere near the river bottom with old tires, lawyers, mercury, journalists and other foul stuff. Still, the election in two days ought at least to get points – and, hopefully, turnout — for intrigue.

This week’s opinion marketplace

Virginians with health insurance who review their statements often look at the bottom line and ask, “How much?”

James Madison University’s leveling of charges against two student journalists raises troubling concerns over press freedom.

Few of the choices on ballots next week will be more clear-cut than the one for Staunton sheriff. Something of an authority on this is the fellow challenging incumbent Alex Caldwell Jr. for the job.

Ben Cline was born on the plains, in Stillwater, Okla., where strong values are as rich as the crude that pulses underground in that part of the world, and he was raised in Rockbridge County, where tradition runs as thick as the woods in Jefferson National Forest.

None of the options especially appeals, but write-in Jim Serba is the best of the four candidates for treasurer.

An unfortunate son, either of Philadelphia or Richmond, will stride into Timothy M. Kaine’s shortening shadow in January and perhaps thereafter wonder who won in November. Rumblings emanating from the capital, previously and painfully accurate, are that Virginia will begin the year staring across a budget canyon of $3 billion. Hell to the chief.

Seizing lines to which her party sticks, Jody M. Wagner embodies a lost year for Democrats. The transportation plan championed by gubernatorial frontman Robert F. McDonnell and his pal Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling won’t work, she says, and worse (horrors!), it will steal money from classrooms and force teachers into soup kitchens.

Only Dostoevsky’s Karmazovs and middle-aged married couples know how to fight like this. To hear Ken Cuccinelli tell it, Steve Shannon is too doltish to be attorney general. To hear Shannon tell it, Cuccinelli is too rabidly red for the job. Pass the pestle, Mitya, and take out the trash.

Green is a delightful color, so much so that Democrats are positively blinded by it. Mantras have shifted slightly with the winds, but not the hues of beloved modifiers. Green energy was the thing when gas prices gushed past $4 a gallon. Now that job losses persist amid talk of recovery, the words “green jobs” jump from Democrats’ lips with reflexive regularity.  Tap a Democrat’s knee and he or she involuntarily shouts, “Green jobs!”

The preternaturally bland Steve Landes views his political career as that of a slogger trudging through legislative thickets whittling away tax and regulatory weeds. Accountants and morticians are peppier. Regardless then of the results of next month’s election, Greg Marrow has accomplished something: The state House District 25 incumbent is riled and ready to rumble. This is Landes as few have seen him.

So the deal with the frog in the cauldron is that the poor fellow doesn’t notice the water getting warmer because the change is gradual rather than sudden. This does not explain why some in Waynesboro can feel the temperature rising but sit contentedly while the water bubbles.

Another campaign, mercifully, is edging toward fruition only to give way to another, a process less like the changing of the seasons, which are a delight, and more like modern multimedia, which are edging toward delirium, like a maze of slot machines in some cheap Vegas casino, all flashing lights and buttons but no winners. One campaign ends and another begins, the lines fade to nonexistence, so the ends and beginnings are lost and forgotten, and power passes from one party to the next and back again, and the people who still play do so in the role of suckers, pulling levers in vain hope of hitting a jackpot on a machine rigged never to pay a dime.