Why are they throwing in the towel?
Interesting piece in the Washington Post from the weekend containing more of the gnashing of the teeth from the summer from the NoVans about the apparent rudderless nature of the Creigh Deeds campaign.
Among the observations in the piece, filed by reporter Roz Helderman, but which otherwise read as a feature column: Deeds is not well known outside of rural Virginia, he’s focusing too much on McDonnell’s social-engineering underpinnings, he’s trying too hard to be like Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and not running his own campaign.
“The problem with Deeds is that he hasn’t defined himself,” said former governor Doug Wilder, the first problem point in the story, quoting Wilder an any kind of reasonable observer on the modern-day Virginia politics scene after his disastrous tenure as the mayor in Richmond, not to mention the train wreck that was his governorship, which was so embattled that it ushered in eight years of Republican rule.
So we have as a starting point the thought that Deeds hasn’t defined himself. Then Helderman takes us to the analysis that actually the problem is that Deeds has defined himself, as the political heir to Warner and Kaine.
To buttress this point, Helderman pulls a quote from Republican opponent Bob McDonnell’s stump speech at the Labor Day Parade in Buena Vista – “He talks a lot about former presidents and former governors. I want to talk about the future of Virginia,” she quotes McDonnell – and then dredges up the oft-quoted political commentator Bob Holsworth, whose contribution to the piece sounds like it was scripted by the McDonnell team. “The dilemma for the Democrats is that it doesn’t seem very responsive to the mood of the moment. It’s as if they’re running the same campaign as in 2001 and 2005 without responding directly to the anxiety out there,” Holsworth tells us.
You’d think that this Deeds guy was a political novice and not an 18-year veteran of the Virginia General Assembly who fell 300 or so votes short of beating McDonnell in their 2005 attorney-general race in spite of being vastly outspent and down 10 points in the polls the weekend before the election – and who surged past well-funded Democratic opponents Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran to win the party nomination for governor this year with more than 50 percent of the vote in the three-way race.
No question about it – Deeds is behind in the polls right now. Just as Kaine was in his race with Jerry Kilgore four years ago. Anybody remember what Kaine did to turn things around in that ’05 governor’s race? He reminded voters that Democrats had been running the state well under Mark Warner. Which is what Deeds is doing now, only that he has a successful four-year run from Kaine to add to his message to voters.
Deeds is a rightful political heir to Warner and Kaine. A solid pragmatist on fiscal issues, Deeds has been on the right side of the battle to keep Virginia moving forward while McDonnell has been one of the cheerleaders for the Party of No, and continues to offer nothing of substance when it comes to his many and varied policy proposals as to how to pay for it all, a typical Republican mistake that Virginia voters have been seeing through since the failed Jim Gilmore administration.
Further, Deeds would be an idiot to run from Warner and Kaine, same as it was about as foolish as you can be for Al Gore to run kicking and screaming from Bill Clinton in 2000 even considering everything the GOP had done to smear Clinton. Warner and Kaine are Clinton without the stains, literally.
It’s still summer for another week. Keep that in mind. Keep in mind as well that most people won’t be paying any attention to the November election until probably mid-October. This isn’t Obama-McCain or Bush-Kerry. We’ll be lucky to have half the electorate knowing who these guys are when the polls open on Nov. 3. The polls today, as we saw in ’05, and ’06, when George Allen was well ahead of Jim Webb in that year’s Senate race on his way to a come-from-ahead defeat, are about as meaningless as Top 25 rankings before the first weekend of the college-football season.
Everything being done by the two campaigns – from McDonnell’s bio pieces offering a vision of him as a family man, to Deeds’ shots at the Achilles heel of the McDonnell effort on social issues – are about setting the stage for the last two weeks of the campaign when folks start looking at the two men and what they would do to lead Virginia for the next four years.
When they did that four years ago, Deeds virtually erased McDonnell’s 10-point lead in the final days and just ran out of time before he could pull off the upset.
We’re at 50 days and counting as of this writing. That’s forever in politics.
Deeds doesn’t need to win the election today or tomorrow. He needs to win it in the two weeks leading up to Nov. 3. The best way to do so is to follow the very strategy that Helderman belittles in her piece: Keep it simple. We’re doing a good job, Warner, Kaine and me, elect me, and we’ll continue doing a good job.
- Column by Chris Graham
Related posts:
- Virginia Politics: Dems, Kaine fight back against GOP flame-throwing on prayer policy The Top Story by Chris Graham freepress2@ntelos.net House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith and Grayson Republican Del. Bill Carrico are promising a pitched legislative fight in...
- Poll: McDonnell leads Deeds by three Republican Bob McDonnell has a three-point lead on Democrat Creigh Deeds in the 2009 Virginia governor’s race, according to a poll out today from Rasmussen...
- The politics of payday lending The Creigh Deeds campaign says Terry McAuliffe has taken aim at “Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly” on payday lending...
- Kaine in the DNC crosshairs Tim Kaine famously wears two hats as governor of Virginia and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Wearing either hat Kaine is going to have...
- Dueling cross-party endorsements Republicans for Deeds. A prominent Democrat for McDonnell. The fight for the center is on. “Eighteen years ago, I came to Richmond as a freshman...
As a Republican, I watched Bob Dole lose in 1996. I watched John McCain lose last year. I think the Creigh Deeds campaign has the same vibe – working hard but still sinking.
I watched Dole say “Where’s the Outrage?” I remember thinking, if only everyone got to hear him debate Clinton, that would change things. It didn’t.
You and other bloggers have been writing for months “wait until the people see the real Bob McDonnell. That will change things.” And McDonnell stays in the lead.
Sure, Deeds has come back in the past. Doesn’t mean it’s over, but also doesn’t mean he comes back this time.
I think we agree generally on one point – it’s not over. That’s the point of my column. That the WaPo columnist is throwing in the towel for Deeds when it’s the second round and McDonnell is ahead on the scorecards 10-9 after a good first round, and this one is guaranteed to go 12.
I’m not suggesting that I think Deeds has it wrapped up, by any means. But recent history suggests that people on both sides who think the dynamic of this race has been established with McDonnell way out in front and Deeds flailing hopelessly behind are ignoring recent Virginia political history.
The question is does Deeds think it’s over?
I was trying to be nice at the end, but I think it’s over. Done. No chance for Deeds. 55-45 win for McDonnell when it’s all over. (up from my 52-48 prediction of the spring).
Some teams know how to hold onto the lead, some (like the Bills Monday night) don’t. McDonnell, like Obama last year, has run a good campaign and caught the wind at his back. We’ll see about the governing soon enough.
Thanks for “trying to be nice.” Call up Joe Abbey and tell him to ramp down. It’s over, written in stone. Mike has spoken!
What is your obsession with Gilmore? You’re constantly bringing him into stories. It’s bordering on creepy anymore. Just saying. By the way, Deeds will lose. We all know it.
“Constantly”? Hardly. Seems like somebody has a sore spot. The Gilmore administration was a failed administration. Accept it and move on.
I was more surprised by the swipe at Gov. Wilder. I don’t remember the tenure being that bad. (I was in West Virginia, but in border city Bluefield so we followed both states).
But if all three Republicans win, does that make Kaine’s a failed administration?
It’s not that the Republicans swept the ’93 elections. It’s why. The budget mess, the internal divisions – it gave Democrats a bad brand name.
Fairly or unfairly, Kaine’s administration probably won’t be remembered fondly. Governors or presidents who have to preside over lean economic times and thus have to cut budgets and cut jobs and services to the core never end up being remembered that well.
So lots of 20-20 hindsight. Losing will probably bring out divisions that are papered over now (I told you we should have nominated …)
The 20-20 hindsight very well could be – why did we nominate the ultraconservative McDonnell instead of the mainstream Bill Bolling?
New poll out last night, from the Clarus Research Group – McDonnell 42, Deeds 37, 20 percent undecided. Still a tossup.
McDonnell and Bolling must have done rock, paper, scissors to decide you would run for governor this time.
I’m waiting for pollsters that have already done a poll in state this year for comparison.
I’ve posted a roundup of reactions to the poll at Strictlyva.blogspot.com
My reaction – both the 5-point margin and the 20 percent undecided in this poll are a lot closer to reality than what we’ve seen in other polls. The Rasmussen, PPP and Survey USA polls are too jumpy, one, in assigning undecideds, and two, trying to determine “likely voters.”
On point one, I remember my boy T-Mac being at 40 percent in the polls in the spring, but then the same poll that had him there also suggesting that as much as 60 percent of the primary electorate could still change their minds before the primary.
Seems that most of those who said they could change their minds ended up doing so. T-Mac in particular lost 40 percent of his base from his best showing in the polls, while Deeds doubled where he was at that same time.
On point two, the numbers in this new poll are actually not much different than what we’ve seen from recent polls when you look at what they found to be the preferences among all registered voters surveyed. There is a 2- to 3-point swing in Deeds’ favor, but not the apparent 10-point swing that you’d assume to be the case given that McDonnell appeared to have a 15-point lead in one poll a couple of weeks ago.
Designating “likely voters” several months out is an art, not a science, and as such polling organizations really should stay away from employing the arts in what they’re passing off otherwise as hard data.
The apparent volatility in polls isn’t so much actual volatility as it is problems with methodology.