The dominate question for any Democrat in the general election for Prince William Board of County Supervisors chairman is how to beat incumbent Corey Stewart (R), assuming he prevails in his own primary.

Babur Lateef, M.D., thinks he has the answer: drive out the same voter demographics that turned out for Pres. Barack Obama in 2008, tap his own well-connected fundraising base of fellow doctors and past-patients and actively campaign in a fashion that generates grassroots excitement among activist Democrats.

Actually achieving that outcome in an off-year election is going to be Lateef's biggest challenge. For example, in 2007, Stewart defeated former county attorney Sharon Pandak (D) by a vote margin of 30,334 to 24,341. The next year, Obama carried the county with 93,435 votes. That suggests significant disinterest among county voters in local, non-statewide elections.

"The reality is, I have a lot of votes to make up," said Lateef.

Prince William County Democratic Committee Chairman Bruce Roemmelt said he thinks Lateef has the edge in the Democratic primary against planning commissioner Gary Friedman (D) due in part to his willingness to fundraise from external sources.

Friedman's last filing report showed he loaned over $100,000 to his campaign from his own coffers, something he said he did to prove his seriousness and commitment to the race. He did not tally other donations, however.

County Democrats have yet to decide whether to have a convention or primary to determine their nominee. Republicans are set to nominate their candidate on Aug 23. Lateef did not say he supports one nominating method over the other but suggested that a primary would be more reflective of the type of campaign he would have to run in a general election.

Lateef sat down for a late-night interview on Feb. 14 over coffee at an IHOP off of Hoadly Road in the Coles magisterial district. The 38-year-old is a board-certified eye physician and surgeon who opened his Woodbridge practice about nine years ago, giving him an insight to how health care is administered in a diverse county featuring rich, poor and middle-class from all sorts of backgrounds.

He supports the federal health care reform law, dubbed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, that passed last Congress amid controversy and a national debate that sparked protest rallies and helped give rise to the conservative Tea Party movement.

While such an issue is more aligned with the federal government, Stewart led the board in passing a resolution that deemed the new law will have a "significant new financial burden on localities in the near future." It particularly cited increased Medicaid eligibility which is paid for as a joint venture between the federal and state governments.

According to Lateef, the major issue the county has to deal with regarding the new health care law deals with benefits for county employees. Otherwise, he said he would like the chairman to use the position to advocate for more private-sector competition with hospitals.

"I think the system is near-broke when it comes to health care," said Lateef.

Lateef said he owns stock in the Manassas hospital and would certainly stand to benefit from relaxed rules about being able to perform outpatient surgeries if he could set up more practices, such as in Stafford County. He countered though that allowing doctors to provide a less-expensive option to hospitals would drive up competition and could also factor into his plans to encourage more public-private partnerships in the health care field.

He praised the Greater Prince William Community Health Center and drew on experiences offering free care to about 200 people last year to assess how the county should work with poorer people. He added that he sees "folks who are too proud to go on Medicaid" and that, in his assessment, "the economy is much worse than surrounding communities."

"We don't ever ask someone if they're legal or illegal," said Lateef, who criticized Stewart's championing of the county's illegal immigration policies but did not offer to rescind them. He questioned why the federal government is not doing more enforcement of its own and said that the county's policies go "over and above" the 287 (g) program that allows local officers to begin the deportation process for criminal illegal immigrants in custody.

"The law is the law. It's there. I'm not interested in opening old wounds," Lateef said about the county’s policy. He explained that he wants to promote himself as being "inclusive of all people."

Lateef only mentioned his Freidman once during the interview, just to say that he thinks he could be a better candidate than his Democratic opponent.

Instead, he reserved his differences for Stewart, especially regarding the Republican's refusal to take federal stimulus dollars for education, something Roemmelt said in a separate interview he thinks is a winning issue for Democrats.

Stewart has previously argued that he would have preferred the money went to one-time infrastructure projects instead of recurring expenses, such as teacher salaries. Lateef pointed out that the county has to hire more teachers annually anyway, so money coming out of the county coffers would be there to retain those teachers even after stimulus dollars expire and the county has to front the entirety of the bill.

He recommended that, in that case, the county could simply opt not to hire extra teachers for the following school year instead of layoff current employees.

"That's a great spin of nonsense," he said about Stewart's argument. "(Costs) would have been absorbed in new hires anyway... He made a big noise about it when we could have hired teachers now."

Stewart, who faces Haymarket Town Council member Bob Weir for the GOP nomination, benefits from county-wide name recognition, a superior fund-raising infrastructure compared to any competitor in the race and the incentive that a resounding victory would likely strengthen his standing in a U.S. Senate race.

Another X factor in the race is independent John Gray, who is seeking the chairmanship without a party label. His candidacy likely means that the anti-Stewart vote will be split at a time when the winner only needs a plurality of the vote to declare victory. Virginia, unlike some other southern states, does not have a run-off.