Chris Graham | Who I’m Voting For

I don’t like – scratch that, I hate – doing endorsements.

I don’t feel qualified to tell you who you should vote for. You know what motivates you better than I do.

OK, so with that out of the way …

I still hear from people who say, Chris, who are you voting for?

I can get comfortable telling you as long as it’s couched in that frame of reference.

So … here goes.

Governor: I’m pushing the button for Creigh Deeds, but it’s sort of a dual-protest vote. I think Bob McDonnell has run the kind of campaign that deserves to win and win big, and that Deeds has run the kind of campaign that should make the likes of Walter Mondale wince. I agree more with Deeds on the issues, but his campaign doesn’t inspire me into believing that he’d be an effective governor. Here’s to hoping that McDonnell isn’t the kind of governor he said he’d be in his 1989 grad-school thesis.

Lieutenant Governor: I like Bill Bolling personally, and the Jody Wagner campaign seemed to shut me out after I wrote a piece on the AFP a few months back correcting a campaign misstatement on Bolling’s record on funding for the Governor’s Opportunity Fund. I guess they assumed I’d vote for her just because she’s a Democrat. They assumed incorrectly. I was ready to push the button for Bolling until his campaign began running TV spots blaming Wagner for Virginia’s fiscal crisis. This is a misrepresentation, and the Bolling people know it. I’ll be passing on this race.

Attorney General: Steve Shannon gets my vote, but like with Deeds, I don’t know that he’s done everything I would want him to have done to have earned it. I think Shannon waited until way, way, way too late to get his campaign ramped up in earnest. Like Deeds, by the time his campaign was hitting its stride, it was down 15 points in the polls. Our payment for that is Ken Cuccinelli as our attorney general. Yikes!

 

– Column by Chris Graham