The Virginia Governor's Race

Jim Geraghty attended Creigh Deeds final campaign rally and brings up a great point regarding the his campaign in Virginia for Governor...

I know Deeds has mentioned this anecdote once or twice on the trail, but it was new to me last night, and was far and away the most gripping and compelling thing he’s said all campaign. He mentioned that when he was growing up in rural Bath County, he didn’t have much “stuff”, but that they always had enough to eat, because they lived on a farm. He said that as a teenager, he worked as a counselor at a summer camp run by his uncle, and on one of the first days, encountered a young boy bewildered when everyone sat down for lunch.

"This little boy looked me in the eye and said, 'You mean we eat more than once a day here?'" Deeds recalled. The crowd was silent.

Deeds said that the moment punctured the bubble of his bucolic existence, as he recognized that there were children who went to bed hungry, not living too far from him; Deeds said that was what motivated him to go into public life.

Now, when I looked at Deeds’ legislative career, a tireless effort to feed the hungry wasn’t what jumped out at me; mostly the candidates’ appetite for making deals and raw ambition. But let’s give Deeds the benefit of the doubt and say that yes, the hunger of a small boy was what drove him to try to make a difference in this world.

Then where was this in Deeds’ campaign? Where was that in any of his ads? Why did the Deeds campaign seem to have an obsessive-compulsive disorder about McDonnell’s thesis from 20 years ago?

Picture Creigh Deeds saying, “I first ran for office because there are people out there who are dirt poor, who are vulnerable, who have caught some bad breaks and they don’t have much power, or influence, or any clear way to improve their lives. There are a bunch of Virginians from one year to one hundred years who are too weak, too vulnerable, too easily overlooked, and not enough folks are speaking up for them. I know it’s an uphill battle, but I’m running for governor because I want to be the voice for all of those folks out there who can’t speak for themselves.” (Put aside, for a moment, Deeds’ sad flip-flop on abortion.)

Would that win Deeds this race? Maybe, maybe not, but I think he would at least be likeable; right now, Deeds is at 34 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable. Never mind voting for him; he can’t get Virginans to think well of him; he’s just the jerk who keeps clogging up prime time television and drive-time radio with over-the-top negative ads.

Sometime soon, I hope we get the story on how the Deeds campaign shaped its strategy, and who insisted that tying Bob McDonnell to the Spanish Inquisition was the right approach. It turned a challenging race into, most likely, the worst political disaster for Virginia Democrats in 16 years.

Beyond that, the night offered a cavalcade of unintentionally funny moments: Maybe 200 overwhelmingly white Alexandria Democrats kinda-sorta halfheartedly grooving to Black-Eyed Peas "Let's Get It Started."

That last moment should be on Youtube, dammit. But the greater point of this post is why Deeds looks like he's failed.

He did employ an attack strategy on Bob McDonnell's socially conservative views as expressed in McDonnell's postgraduate thesis, but never told the voters why they should vote for Deeds (and unlike in the primary, not being Terry McAulliffe or Brian Moran wasn't going to be enough). And his attacks on McDonnell were laughably over-the-top -- there's a radio ad that he had running where people are talking about "McDonnell's plan to take Virginia back to the Dark Ages." Was McDonnell going to force us to go back to using whale oil for lamps? Hyperbole is fine, but not if it goes so far that people think you're being absurd -- that's when they tune you out completely. "Deeds not Words" is a catchy slogan, but that's all the campaign had -- slogans with no substance.

To be fair, Deeds had to run a contested primary, while McDonnell enjoyed the united support of the state GOP. And Deeds also had to deal with the fact that Obama's popularity in Virginia is not what it is elsewhere (leading to the uncomfortable moment where Deeds said. in response to a question as to whether he was an Obama Democrat, "I'm a Creigh Deeds Democrat."). But his campaign was uniformly bad, only gaining limited traction after the Washington Post's now traditional Election Special hit piece on a Virginia Republican brought the thesis to light. The fact that his campaign talked incessantly about the thesis and little more showed them to be empty of any real reasons to vote for them.

Now, you can win an election without giving people a reason to vote for you, if your attacks on your opponent are effective, you enjoy a huge edge in party voter ID, and a third-party candidate siphons off votes (see New Jersey for a possibility). But Deeds had none of those things. Which makes his strategy even more questionable.