By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger
Nearly two weeks after the longest presidential campaign in history concluded, the results of this November’s elections in Virginia still leave questions about where this state is politically and where it might be going.
Virginia is a purple state—no longer solid red nor blue—in statewide elections and may still be trending a little blue toward the Democrats, but only slightly.
Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell is the front-running candidate of the four men vying for governor next year.
The other three—state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds of Bath County, Delegate Brian J. Moran of Alexandria and former Bill Clinton top political money man Terry McAuliffe—are raising gobs of cash to engage in the equivalent of a family feud: a June Democratic primary with few limits on excess.
After all, relatively low-turnout party primaries are dysfunctional family affairs in which participants try to convince their party’s regular base voters that the other guys on the primary ballots are the family’s too-rich, too-poor or too-weird uncles who can’t be trusted with the family’s fortunes.
Deeds, Moran and McAuliffe are likely to emerge from the primary poorer, bloodied and perhaps not too willing to kiss and make up.
Deeds and Moran should have little trouble painting rich-man McAuliffe as “the unVirginian” to whom they will each gladly and laughingly keep sending copies of the map of Virginia. McDonnell’s communications director, Tucker Martin, already has suggested sending McAuliffe a map.
McAuliffe is to Virginia politics what Deeds is to Alexandria and Moran is to Danville—slightly foreign sounding and mostly unknown.
McDonnell can sit and wait as the Republican nominee apparent, unchallenged as he tailors political rhetoric safely toward the middle and acts as attorney general, a post he won over Deeds three years ago by 360 votes statewide after a recount.
The only threat to McDonnell between now and June is President-elect Barack Obama, who might just pick his fellow Democrat and good friend Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for a post in Washington that Kaine would have a hard time saying “no” to, say U.S. Attorney General or Secretary of the Interior.
Kaine says he has told the president-elect not to pick him and to let him finish his term as governor in January of 2010, but Obama has not named a cabinet yet. When a president calls, people listen.
If Kaine were to leave office early for a federal appointment, Lt. Gov. William T. Bolling, a Hanover County Republican, would become governor.
Bolling already has a handshake deal with McDonnell in his pocket that guarantees the attorney general would support him for governor in 2009 just as Bolling has pledged to back McDonnell for governor next year if Kaine finishes out his term.
Unable to succeed himself as governor for a second straight term, Kaine would be free in two Januaries either to go to Washington or, more likely perhaps, to become president of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Virginia’s first Democratic presidential election victory in 44 years is no guarantee of a continuing trend.
Both parties are changing and the state’s electorate is changing even faster.
As Virginia’s population becomes more diverse, more foreign-born and full of new and expanding cultural identities, the politics of playing to the base becomes less and less a winning proposition.
The top five countries of birth for foreign-born Virginians are El Salvador, Mexico, Korea, Philippines and India. As the demographics people at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service like to point out, 40 percent of the 1 in 10 Virginians born abroad came from Asia, 36 percent from Latin America, 13 percent from Europe and 9 percent from Africa.
Four in 10 Virginians were born in other states, and many moved to Virginia from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina and Florida.
The parties and candidates seen by the five in 10 Virginians born outside the state as less than welcoming are failing to count the voters of the future.
Political leaders are, after all, supposed to be able to count.
By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger
Virginians are living in a state of change once again.
We are leaving a period of some stability and predictability for a period of more rapid and tumultuous change.
As a hopeless optimist, I would argue that the change we face, while unsettling, is good because we live in an age of opportunity.
Our politics, from New York to Florida and California, is broken. Our media are breaking apart and our economic system is cracking around us.
The opportunity comes about because Americans are fed up with a political system that they don’t see serving their interests as much as special interests.
We are squarely in an age of designer information. Anyone who wishes can design his or her own information sources to reflect their own likes and prejudices. You can pick your own networks and other sources of instant information to tell you what your kind of thinking, or feeling, individual thinks and feels he or she wants to hear.
Like Sarah Palin? Watch or listen to Fox News.
Like Barack Obama? MSNBC is the network for thee.
Our nation is pretty evenly divided in hard partisan camps that don’t often meet each other, and they don’t read and watch the same information sources.
They tend to demonize each other and each other’s political heroes and, often, their information sources.
Many in political life are divided into hunkered-down ideological camps. Candidates are playing on the most uneven fields thanks to a badly broken redistricting system. That system yields 70 percent of legislative districts so safely partisan for one party or the other that the biggest threat a Democrat faces is a nomination challenge from the left or a Republican faces is a nomination challenge from the party’s right.
When 70 percent of office holders fear most a challenge from the ideological partisans of their own party, it’s awfully hard for them or anyone else to meet in the middle.
But when politics is at its most divided, testy or negative, people are more open to demanding change.
Politics is pretty testy right now.
Campaigns these days are all too often run by hit-and-run consultants who know how to draw blood.
Campaigns have become nasty endurance events in which consultants and managers play hide the candidate more often than let him or her face the press in a free flow of questions. The idea is to not make mistakes and not to show too many cards. The press gets reduced to shouting questions and playing gotcha.
The winners have an opportunity via redistricting to draw less ideologically skewed, or partisan-based districts if the public really demands such change.
An appreciation of the potential of public service for all Americans, not just those on a base, can fix what is not so good about our politics today.
People are willing to embrace the mission of bringing more civility to the political process, infusing our politics with more bipartisan policy discussion and to teaching civics and ethics in an age of cynicism.
No matter how far apart people appear to be, they can find common ground if they look for it.
It’s a good time to hunt.
By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger
Democrats may not have figured out how to react to today’s surprise John McCain veep pick of Sarah Palin.
If they pillory Palin, they risk provoking a sympathetic backlash. Voters can figure out whether they like her. Many may as she is not a conventional choice.
Dems may want to cut the moose jokes. Most people couldn’t or wouldn’t drop a moose and find it a bit exotic that she can.
People may like her age, so calling her young and inexperienced may blunt the inevitable charge that her experience is thin. Obama knows that a lack of experience in Washington is seen by many outside the beltway as a positive.
She’s been a governor for about two years while Tim Kaine’s experience as governor is a year more. Sure Kaine was also mayor of a much larger city, but her approval ratings in Alaska are much higher than his in Virginia.
Finally, whether people argee with her or not on social issues, her life experience is interesting. Some voters may vote issues, others may decide based on experience but Dems may risk much by pounding away at her while promising a new and higher tone to politics.
McCain’s pick may help us climb to that higher level, if the political class is smart. Besides, she’s a better shot than the current veep.
