Devil in the Old Dominion

If any state can claim to sit smack in the bull's-eye of American politics, it's Virginia. Practically everything screams "middle": a divided economy and culture, with thriving but anxious suburban haves and struggling rural have-nots; split partisan preferences, with growing ranks of independent swingers; demographics in flux, with swelling numbers of Asian-Americans and Latinos; and pendulous politics, with Republicans having dominated the 1990s and Democrats thriving in the 2000s. When Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee in forty-four years to carry the state, he did it with 53 percent of the vote--same as the country. So it's no wonder that everybody is looking to Virginia's off-year gubernatorial contest as a Middle American barometer for 2010. And the needle is pointing tentatively rightward.

With the president's approval ratings having plunged twenty points since January in this fiscally conservative state, and with outgoing Democratic Governor Tim Kaine's popularity sagging beneath the weight of budgetary woes, Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds has clawed uphill all the way against telegenic Republican Bob McDonnell. An ex-military graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University, McDonnell has run a lavishly funded campaign that could be a template--slick, deceptive and wickedly effective--for a GOP revival in other purple states.

Virginians have long prided themselves on being allergic to ideologues. Up against a moderate like Deeds, a longtime state legislator, a Christian-right champion like McDonnell is left with just one option: all-out obfuscation. This is the guy, after all, who in 1989 wrote a now-infamous master's thesis at Regent--intended as a governing playbook for Republicans--that called working women "detrimental" to the family; demanded that government "restrain, punish, and deter" homosexuality; and ridiculed "conventional folklore about the separation of church and state." It wasn't just talk: in the Statehouse and the AG's office, McDonnell's sole mission was enacting the agenda he outlined in that thesis. He introduced thirty-five measures to restrict abortion rights. He championed (to little avail) "covenant marriage," school vouchers and tax policies designed to bolster his view of the traditional family. The list goes on. But in this campaign, McDonnell has recast himself as a problem-solving, Chamber of Commerce-style Republican obsessed with jobs and transportation--the most pressing issues, respectively, in economically strapped Southern Virginia and traffic-choked Northern Virginia. McDonnell speaks no evil of Obama. But he has skillfully deployed national controversies to help distract voters' attention from his pre-modern social views.

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