RALEIGH, N.C. – Democratic National Committee chairman and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine will speak at the annual spring dinner for North Carolina Democrats.

Kaine will give the keynote address at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on May 2 at a Durham hotel. The state Democratic Party announced Kaine’s visit Monday as dinner tickets went on sale.

Kaine served as national co-chairman of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Like North Carolina, Virginia’s electoral votes went to the Democratic presidentia candidate for the first time in a generation.

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia’s Republican chairman said Tuesday that his remark tying Democrat Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden during the presidential campaign was stupid, but he refused to apologize.

During the campaign, GOP head Jeff Frederick told a small group of Republican volunteers that “both Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have friends that have bombed the Pentagon.”

The remark, a reference to Obama’s ties years ago to 1960s-era radical William Ayers, was condemned by Democrats and Republicans after it was published in Time magazine.

Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground, a radical, Vietnam War-era group that claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

Frederick was asked about the remark Tuesday during a discussion of the 2008 Virginia presidential campaign with a group of newspaper editors. Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in 44 years.
 
“It was a stupid joke I gave to somebody in a small crowd of people and that’s what happens,” Frederick said. “But you know, it’s really unfortunate. We live in a `gotcha’ society.”

Frederick said he got hate mail, angry phone calls and vicious e-mails for weeks.
 
Even so, he stood by the comment Tuesday, defending it as true and saying he was taking cues from Republican John McCain’s campaign after running mate Sarah Palin said Obama had been “palling around with terrorists.”
 
“The McCain campaign, for quite a while, was getting on me about not being on message, about not delivering their talking points,” Frederick said. “And in an effort to do more of what they wanted … I was doing that, and the Ayers talking point came out.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Republican U.S. Rep. Virgil H. Goode has made it official: He wants a recount in his narrow loss to Democrat Tom Perriello.

Attorneys for the six-term incumbent filed a petition Tuesday in Albermarle County Circuit Court requesting the recount.

The filling came a day after the State Board of Elections certified Democrat Tom Perriello as the winner by 745 votes out of more than 316,000 cast in the 5th District race. The margin of 0.24 percentage points entitles Goode to a recount at taxpayer expense. Perriello has said he doesn’t believe there’s any serious chance of the result changing.

A one-seat partisan advantage in Virginia’s congressional delegation is at stake.

LEESBURG, Va. – GOP Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is meeting with the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. as part of a three-city tour in Virginia designed to upend Democrat Barack Obama’s lead over Republican John McCain in a state that hasn’t backed a Democratic White House hopeful since 1964.
 
Palin greeted ambassador Sallai Meridor and apologized for not being able to meet with him sooner. She told the ambassador: “We look forward to … working with your Jewish agency.”

From her first event in historic Leesburg through Fredericksburg and Salem in the conservative southwestern part of the state, Palin is trying to make McCain’s closing argument that electing Obama would give Democrats control of the White House and Congress when checks and balances are most needed.

It’s a tough sell for Republicans eight days out from the Nov. 4 election. Recent polls show Obama ahead in Virginia, home to the Confederate capital during the Civil War, and Democrats are on track to add to their congressional majorities.

Distractions, from Palin’s high-priced wardrobe to the increasing difficulty Republicans face in trying to overcome Obama’s lead in polls and money, dogged McCain and Palin through their tour of battleground states in the last week of the campaign.

Palin tried to dismissed days of criticism about her expensive outfits from upscale stores by saying that she and her family live frugally. She even wore jeans to an event Sunday night in Asheville, N.C.

“This whole thing with the wardrobe, I try to just ignore it because it’s so ridiculous,” Palin told a Florida crowd earlier in the day.

“Those clothes, they are not my property, just like the lighting and the staging and everything else the RNC purchased,” she said. “I’m not taking them with me. I’m back to wearing my old clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska.”

Republicans acknowledged the uphill fight for McCain and Palin.

“Unfortunately, I think John McCain might be added to that long list of Arizonans who ran for president but were never elected,” McCain’s fellow senator from the state, Jon Kyl, told the Arizona Daily Star editorial board in an interview published Sunday.