Daily Rant | Deeds Downer

The Creigh Deeds campaign dismissed as “irresponsible” reporting in the AFP earlier this month that it was being criticized by senior Democrats in Virginia and D.C. for the way it was bungling its effort in the Virginia governor’s race. So now that the Washington Post has jumped on the bandwagon to say the same thing, well, AFP editor Chris Graham has a message for the Deeds team in today’s Daily Rant. AFP Video. Length: 3:14. Read more

Deeds TV ad touts Post endorsement

Today the Deeds campaign released a new ad highlighting the Washington Post’s strong endorsement of Creigh Deeds for governor.

The ad, “Longtime Champion,” highlights the Post’s selection of Deeds as “the better choice for governor,” calling Deeds “a longtime champion” of “enlightened, bipartisan” accomplishments. Read more

Chris Graham | Winners and Losers: Deeds, Al Groh, Balloon boy, The weather

PUSH: Creigh Deeds gets WaPo endorsement
It could be the push that Deeds needed to get over the hump in the Virginia governor’s race. Deeds had crept to within two points of Republican Bob McDonnell in a September Rasmussen poll before falling behind by nine in Rasmussen and the Washington Post and 14 points in a SurveyUSA poll in early October.
The latest poll, from Rasmussen, had the margin back at seven for McDonnell, who you might remember also had a healthy lead in the final days of his 2005 attorney-general race with Deeds before a late surge by the Democrat pushed the election into a recount.
Deeds, you might also remember, was down and out in his ’09 Democratic primary race with Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran before storming back on the strength of a Washington Post endorsement to win the primary going away.
How much influence does a Post endorsement carry? How many comebacks does Deeds have in his political life? Read more

Deeds gets endorsement of Washington Post

A Washington Post endorsement reversed Creigh Deeds’ fortunes in the ’09 Democratic Party primary. Can Deeds get another boost from another Post endorsement?

“If the current campaign for governor has clarified anything, it is that state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee, has the good sense and political courage to maintain the forward-looking policies of the past while addressing the looming challenge of fixing the state’s dangerously inadequate roads,” the Post offers in its Sunday editorial endorsement, which was released on the Post website Saturday night.

McDonnell, who has been running his NoVa campaign as “Fairfax’s own,” was clearly not even close to getting the endorsement from the Post. “The Republican candidate, former attorney general Robert F. McDonnell, offers something different: a blizzard of bogus, unworkable, chimerical proposals, repackaged as new ideas, that crumble on contact with reality. They would do little if anything to build a better transportation system,” the paper opined. Read more

The Pulse | Negative enough for ya?

Is the nine-point Bob McDonnell lead in Thursday’s Washington Post poll insurmountable? Yes and no.

And the yes and no both hinge on one factor. Looking at the poll internals, one thing jumps out at me. More than half the voters surveyed, 56 percent, feel that Creigh Deeds is running a negative campaign. (As I reported last week, a number of state and national Democratic Party leaders feel the same way. But that was “irresponsible” of me to put out there for public consumption.) Read more

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.  Read more

The attack machine

I guess I really “struck a nerve,” as one reader commented on Tuesday’s column about Steve Landes’ anti-Obama tirade at an Augusta County Republican picnic.

How I know is that I’ve become the target of the Republican attack machine.

“I think quite a few people would like to know what kind of journalist you really are,” a reader named Bill Alexander e-mailed me this morning after taking several potshots at me for raising issue with the Landes comments. Read more