Here in Virginia, the governor’s race seems to be about over. Republican candidate Bob McDonnell is ahead of Creigh Deeds by double digits in polls, which means that even if the samples are way off, McDonnell is still likely to win the race. I personally do not trust polls, but I do not get a strong sense of pro-Deeds support here in Virginia.
But do not trust talk radio when they say that this race is a referendum on Obama and his policies. The problem is that there have been several factors in the race that have caused Deeds to trail behind:
- First of all, Deeds came out swinging, only it was below the belt. You do not resort to such tactics when you are just starting your campaign out. Deeds produced McDonnell’s thesis which was a very social conservative and would have easily earned him the ire of feminists and several other progressive groups. But seeing as how McDonnell was a Republican, that already had happened, so there really was no point. Did Deeds and his campaign staff honestly believe that we would think a Governor would take away women’s equality? (I personally do not believe in any notions of equality since such a thing is not quantifiable, which is a requirement if it is to mandated by the government)
- Despite the obvious flop on the attack ads, Deeds has not really campaigned on a single idea. Eleanor Roosevelt said that great people talk about ideas, average people talk about current events, and stupid people talk about other people. Well, I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea (incidentally, by that standard this blog is above average, but not great). By that measurement, McDonnell has run a great campaign and Deeds has run a stupid campaign. Not a single idea has come out of his campaign for this state. He has, at best, merely echoed what McDonnell has proposed and not even added his own flavor to it.
- Deeds has now gone from below the belt attacks to the standard Democrat playbook of campaigning, which is at this tiresome to many I believe. I now see campaign signs for Deeds attacking McDonnell’s stances on education. Apparently McDonnell is now bad for education in Virginia. Frankly, if that was true, and it really is not, I would take that as a good sign of things to come. Can you honestly think that after decades of dumping money into our children, that they are any smarter, better, or much more responsible than they were when we first started investing in the little crumb crunchers? Who are the ones who always say that more money will fix it and yet the quality of education only gets worse as teachers become more concerned with putting condoms on bananas in front of children rather than showing them how to balance a checkbook? Last I checked, condoms come with instructions, checkbooks usually do not.
Deeds is a great example of what not to do in Virginia in order to get voted for. Many Virginians do not like negative attack ads and they do not respond well to them. During the 2005 race, Jerry Kilgore ran a campaign where he attack Democrat Tim Kaine on his death penalty stances. Instead of going through Kaine’s history as mayor of Richmond and maybe citing that, he just pushed an entire campaign towards what Kaine might do when faced with ordering someone’s execution.
Naturally, Kilgore lost and Tim Kaine went on to embarrass our state in the 2006 State of the Union Address rebuttal. The fact is, Kilgore did not sell himself to the voters as a great potential governor. Instead, he just ran attack ads and assumed that the people of the state of Virginia would vote for him because he will put murderers to death.
When George Allen lost to Jim Webb, it was largely due to his off-hand comment about one of Webb’s campaign monkeys following him around. It was stupid and that the media made a big deal out of it and it really demonstrated how much of a hack Larry Sabato is. Still, Allen lost because in the final weeks of the campaign, he produced a negative attack by citing one of Webb’s fictional books where a man molests his son out in the open in Thailand. If George Allen had just thrown together an ad where he demonstrated his lack of racism and how the attacks were unfounded, then he might have actually won.
The lesson in all this is that here in Virginia, negative campaigns do not work anymore. People want solutions and they want to vote for someone who has sold himself and his ideas to the average voter. Creigh Deeds has not done this and that is why he is behind so much in the polls. Still, I would rather have another choice when I go vote besides Deeds or McDonnell. Neither one suits my tastes, but if there are no other options, I may just go with McDonnell only because he is the better choice.