Darrell McGraw is the attorney general for West Virginia. He is running for reelection in 2008 against Republican Hiram Lewis. In 2004 McGraw beat Lewis in the same race by only 5,000 votes. McGraw grew up in the “McGraws,” in northern Wyoming County. His parents were both school teachers. McGraw joined the Army in Germany in the chemical corps, then enrolled at West Virginia University, where he studied law. In 1976 he became Supreme Court Justice for West Virginia and served there for 12 years.

OBSERVER: Why did you leave the court?

MCGRAW: I lost the election to Margaret Workman. The establishment was very much after me. Their mantra was, “If you can get McGraw, the others will fall in line.”

OBSERVER: What had you done to make them so mad?

MCGRAW: The establishment was unhappy with me because of our rulings in the economic sphere. Workers compensation was always an issue when I was on the Supreme Court: injured coal miners, chemical workers, steel workers. One of the things that made them very unhappy was that we started giving lots of hearings to these appeals.

OBSERVER: On the insurance company Brick Street’s website, they are still unhappy about the Supreme Court holding so many workers compensation hearings.

MCGRAW: There is no way for them to ever be happy. I’m going out on a limb, anything I say here will be picked up and turned around. I will be wallered like crazy by the National Chamber of Commerce. They had me before the Chamber of Commerce once. After my presentation, one guy from US Steel says, “In these compensation cases you ruled 92 percent in favor of injured workmen.” To which I responded, “Oh my God, did I let the other 8 percent down!”

OBSERVER: Let’s go to the 2004 election. Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, spent millions of dollars on attack ads going after you and your brother, Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. Your brother lost his election. You won your race by a narrow margin. What was all this like?

MCGRAW: The methodology is contrary to all the value systems that we are taught to internalize as responsible people. With unlimited money you can unethically turn the whole process upside down. You are allowed to say anything. That millions of dollars of unregulated money—`no limit to it now—is spent to destroy a person’s character. It was crazy.

OBSERVER: Somebody told me that Blankenship has done very well out of it.

MCGRAW: He had lost a lawsuit in Boone County where he was accused of stiffing one of his colleagues in the coal business, buying a company and then stealing their market. And the Boone County jury returned what the plaintiffs claimed was the value of the damage: $56 million dollars.

OBSERVER: And that was then overturned by the Supreme Court?

MCGRAW: Yes, it was thrown out.

OBSERVER: So, Blankenship put around three million dollars into going after you and your brother in the election, and then made back around $56 million as a result of the Supreme Court decision?

MCGRAW: Yes.

OBSERVER: Isn’t that an incentive for him and other people to do the same?

MCGRAW: Yes.

OBSERVER: Hiram Lewis has announced he will run against you in this year. He ran against you in 2004 and came within 5,000 votes of beating you with almost no organization or political experience. How did he get so close?

MCGRAW: He had two things going for him. He had George Bush and he had Don Blankenship going for him.

OBSERVER: Why should people vote for you? Hiram Lewis has a younger pair of legs, a fresh set of eyes and lots of energy.

MCGRAW: Mr Lewis is not dedicated to the values and principles I’m dedicated to.

OBSERVER: Which are?

MCGRAW: To give you an example: we were at a newspaper interview with the Charleston Gazette. He attacked me for attacking the oil companies for their [high] gasoline prices. He pointed out that my attack had cost someone in his family $75,000 for a lawyer, as someone had accused one of his family members of price gouging. My point is that Hiram is on the side of Mammon, he is a money man. Hiram is not a serious human being, except we accord dignity to all human beings. He is a frivolous kind of a guy.

OBSERVER: Some people say that you like to hand out largess, that you like to get money from your office’s prosecutions, then hand this money around the state in return for patronage and favor.

MCGRAW: Let’s take a round figure, two billion dollars. When I became attorney general, some people talked with me about a lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

I decided tobaccos’ time has come, and we are going to join in. These guys came to see me and said we need to get the governor on board. Governor Caperton said we are not going to do that. When this kind of thing happens it raises questions in people’s minds, like when Caperton became governor. People said that when he ran his father’s insurance company he expanded it from Charleston to Raleigh. And of course guess who had all sorts of insurance business with him—they claimed—the tobacco industry. Are you with me?

OBSERVER: You are saying that Governor Caperton was in the pocket of the tobacco industry.

MCGRAW: I didn’t say that he was in the pocket of the tobacco industry. I said he had an interest because he had an insurance company that did business with the tobacco industry.

OBSERVER: He had a pecuniary interest?

MCGRAW: He had a pecuniary interest. [Pauses] But why do I want to make him mad now?

OBSERVER: You were the one who brought it up.

MCGRAW: [laughs] You were the one asking all the piercing questions. They are designed just to piss everyone in the countryside off!

OBSERVER: How did you change the governor’s mind?

MCGRAW: I didn’t. I went ahead without him. It was my duty. We prevailed and we received in the final settlement $1.6 billion dollars to be paid over 24 years. And $196 million dollars of this was supposed to go directly to the attorney general’s office.

OBSERVER: The idea was that most of the settlement would go to the legislature, and part of it, $196 million, would go to Attorney general’s office?

MCGRAW: Yes, but the governor just took the money, he didn’t even ask me.

OBSERVER: Do you feel you should have gotten it?

MCGRAW: Oh yes.

OBSERVER: How would you have spent it?

MCGRAW: They all agreed at one stage they would build a building.

OBSERVER: You want a shrine, the McGraw Shrine?

MCGRAW: No, I don’t want a shrine. I want a lawyer’s office for the lawyers, but I’m not promoting that now.

OBSERVER: So what would you do with $196 million?

MCGRAW: Create a trust for the Attorney General’s office so that the people of West Virginia would not have to support the attorney general’s office, it would support itself. This would give you an independent attorney general’s office, away from all the political influence.

OBSERVER: Have any of the other attorneys general around the country gotten control of the tobacco settlement money?

MCGRAW: None that I know of.

OBSERVER: The tobacco settlement money started coming to West Virginia in 2002. A large part of this was meant to be used for educational campaigns. Have tobacco education campaigns significantly increased in West Virginia?

MCGRAW: No. They [the legislature] take the tobacco money that they have been appropriating, then they substitute this for it [education programs]. You don’t make any progress.

OBSERVER: They have not significantly improved the tobacco educational program?

MCGRAW: That‘s right.

OBSERVER: Do you think that is disappointing?

MCGRAW: Yes it is.

OBSERVER: In 2004 you won a $10 million settlement against Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the prescription drug OxyContin. People have attacked you saying that your office kept the money and distributed it yourself, rather than handing it over to the legislature.

MCGRAW: The judge said—I cannot use the exact language as it was said in chambers—that he wanted the money to go to the places where they had suffered from the damage from the drugs, to be used in rehab programs.

OBSERVER: The judge said you should be the agent handing out the money?

MCGRAW: Yes, but I can’t talk about that.

OBSERVER: The judge said it should not go to the legislature?

MCGRAW: The judge said where he didn’t want it to go.

OBSERVER: And can you say where that was?

MCGRAW: I shouldn’t.

OBSERVER: Why are people attacking you over this?

MCGRAW: Because they are against me. They are using it as an excuse. The National Chamber of Commerce is attacking me because of its members—insurance, coal, pharma, credit, energy. And Don Blankenship is on its board of directors. You are going to have all sorts of selfish people who are highly motivated by self interest and they just want to argue and fight if things don’t go their way.

OBSERVER: Is there any accountability for how the $10 million from the OxyContin settlement has been spent?

MCGRAW: We give money to Boys and Girls Clubs. They are held out as effective vehicles for preventing kids getting into drugs. How do you measure whether or not you keep this kid or that kid from taking dope?

OBSERVER: One of the criticisms that people raise is that you are not accountable for the money. If the settlement money had gone to the social services department they would be able to monitor the impact of these programs. That is a reasonable question isn’t it?

MCGRAW: No, it is not.

OBSERVER: There is a very simple solution to these attacks, just show other states where other attorneys general have kept settlement money for these types of programs. Can you do this?

MCGRAW: I don’t know the answer to that. It might be helpful. But what do you do when you take the lead? As the National Chamber of Commerce says: “If you get McGraw you will get the rest of them.” I’m the fly in the soup.

OBSERVER: So you see yourself as the fly in the soup?

MCGRAW: I don’t see myself like that. I’m just a hillbilly boy who grew up and does the best he can.

OBSERVER: You seem angry about this.

MCGRAW: I’m angry because I’m mistreated, by the people who are supposed to know better: the policy makers, the legislators, and all of those people. They mistreat us.

OBSERVER: How are you mistreated?

MCGRAW: They mistreat us. They make issues with these kinds of things. The people who object the most are the ones who are most greedy about the money we bring in .  .  . I fight the good fight. I strive to remain remote from it. I do get personally involved in things that I get interested in, but I try and keep distance from it.

OBSERVER: You are running for your fifth term. You are 71 years old. At what stage do you become too old to be attorney general, and when do you know when enough is enough?

MCGRAW: It is probably when I don’t want anymore of this grief.

OBSERVER: If you lose the election what would you do?

MCGRAW: [long pause]. I would go right on. When I lost the election to the Supreme Court I still lived. I persevered.

OBSERVER: If you lose the election, would you take up fishing?

MCGRAW: [laughs]. I hope not. I would read.

OBSERvER: Will 2008 be your last election?

MCGRAW: [Pause]. I would not care to predict it. But, my wife would hope that is the case.