That’s Amit Singh, a candidate for the Republican nomination in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District. The 8th is colorful Democrat Jim Moran’s district — also the district in which TAC is headquartered and where I live. The Republican primary race between Singh and Mark Ellmore has already been described in some quarters as Ron Paul vs. Mike Huckabee, which isn’t entirely accurate since — although Singh is a Ron Paul-inspired candidate and Ellmore calls himself a “compassionate conservative” — neither Singh nor Ellmore is a mirror image of those presidential contenders. But there are distinct philosophies in the race for the Virginia 8 nomination. While Ellmore ran for the nomination once before, two years ago (losing to Tom O’Donoghue, 30 percent to 70 percent), Singh is a first-time candidate with quite a young campaign team — not an inexperienced campaign team, however, since it includes veterans of the Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan presidential campaigns, as well as several young people with experience in local Virginia politics.

I won’t say too much more about the race in the 8th here, since I’ll be writing about it in print for TAC, but for now I thought I’d flag up what looks to be a most interesting primary, and an intriguing candidate, in the Old Dominion. (You can read interviews with Singh and Ellmore on the Virginia politics blog Crystal Clear Conservative.)