Virginia Democrats' Cynical Formula: Waiting for 2009's 'Macaca Moment'

If the Democrats lose the governorship of Virginia, as public opinion polls suggest is likely, party professionals in the Old Dominion will undoubtedly point to their charisma-challenged nominee, Creigh Deeds, as the culprit. Some of them, including the current governor, might think of looking in the mirror as well.

The Democrats have opted, at least until this week, to run an unrelentingly negative campaign. Their strategy has been to try to divide the electorate demographically and geographically, all while demonizing the nominee of the other party in an effort to reprise their playbook from a previous campaign – specifically the one that unseated Sen. George Allen three years ago. In other words, they have done all the things Democrats usually accuse Republicans of doing.

There are two potential pitfalls to this approach. For starters, the Democrats are not running against George Allen -- he of the destructive "macaca" gaffe. They are running against Bob McDonnell, a respectful, buttoned-down lawyer whose every hair always seems to be in place and whose public pronouncements run the gamut from measured to cautious. Secondly, it seems not to have dawned on the Democrats that in so-called "purple" states -- swing states such as Virginia -- running a negative campaign aimed at the party's base can easily backfire.

"The consensus is that Creigh is running one of the most negative campaigns in Virginia history, [one that] bridges all regional, and even partisan, divides," McDonnell campaign spokesman Tucker Martin told Politics Daily this week. "So give Creigh credit for that at least: He found something all Virginians can agree on."

That remains to be seen. There are 10 days to go in this campaign, and that can be a long time for a front-running candidate who is sitting on a lead. Perhaps it's a long enough span for Creigh Deeds to turn things around and win his rematch with McDonnell from four years ago. But this much is certain: Deeds has not seemed comfortable in his skin this time around. He's conducting a new kind of campaign for him -- a nasty and pessimistic run that suits neither his natural temperament nor his record in public office.

Perhaps some of this was inevitable. Because Virginia governors are term-limited to serving just four years in office, the state never has an incumbent candidate. This reality pains champions of good government, as those of us who live in Virginia essentially always have a lame duck presiding over things in Richmond. But it is a fascinating laboratory for political writers and political scientists, because in Virginia -- much more than New Jersey, the other odd-year gubernatorial election state -- the mood of the electorate is a clean slate every four years. Thus, the current state of American politics is very much a factor in the race.

Virginia Democrats began this off-year cycle knowing they had their work cut out for them. They faced an electorate restive over the cascading federal budget deficit and buffeted by rising unemployment. True, the state's jobless rate is "only" 6.7 percent -- nearly three percentage points lower than the rest of the nation -- but it is much higher than the 4.1 percent of a year ago. In addition, the state's Democrats knew they were up against the so-called "Virginia presidential jinx." (In the last seven gubernatorial elections, the candidate from the party of the winning presidential campaign the year before has lost).

That was the lay of the land when Virginia Democrats nominated state Sen. Creigh Deeds, the most politically moderate candidate in their primary, and the only one not from liberal Northern Virginia. It seemed a pragmatic choice. Four years earlier, when Deeds had run and lost by a razor-thin margin against McDonnell for attorney general, Deeds had secured the backing of the National Rifle Association. The NRA cited two issues for this endorsement, the only one it made for a statewide Democrat that year. The first was Deeds' outspoken opposition in the legislature to the state's one-handgun-per-month statute. The second was his sponsorship of a symbolic and somewhat frivolous constitutional amendment that called for making it a right for all Virginians to hunt and fish. In addition, Deeds was a strict law-and-order man, tough on crime -- Virginia has all but eliminated parole -- and he was foursquare behind the death penalty.

In other words, he was the kind of centrist or even conservative Democrat who tends to succeed statewide in Virginia, where pragmatic common sense is a kind of civic value. When folk singer Schuyler Fisk first hit the big time, for instance, she was asked in an interview how she intended to keep it real. "The minute I forget to balance reality with the fantasy," she replied, "I'm going back to Virginia."

This is the vision of a sensible, grounded place that Mark Warner cultivated when he campaigned for governor in 2001. Warner stressed his pro-business background -- his business being cellular telephone technology -- which played well in both the sophisticated suburbs of Northern Virginia and the main streets of small-town Virginia. Warner opened his rallies with a bluegrass song written for his campaign by a down-home Democrat named Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, courted voters at NASCAR events, promised not to raise taxes, and in the wake of the 9/11 attacks told his campaign staff that he wanted them to rally around President Bush.

Warner, now the state's junior senator, won that year by a comfortable, but not lopsided, 52-47 percent margin, and went on to a successful four-year run. He showed the way for future campaigns, and was so popular that he helped get Tim Kaine, his little-known lieutenant governor, elected to succeed him. But judging by how the Deeds campaign has unfolded, Virginia's Democrats -- including Gov. Kaine, who now moonlights as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which has pumped millions into the race -- seem to have been inspired less by the 2001 Warner campaign (or the 2008 Warner senatorial campaign, for that matter), than by two other winning Democratic efforts. The first of these was Jim Webb's improbable 2006 victory over George Allen. The second was Barack Obama's 2008 victory over John McCain.

These two campaigns seem to have convinced Virginia's top Democrats that they could run the generic liberal campaign in Virginia -- one that would work, say, in neighboring Maryland -- and prevail. Mistaking the Obama victory as a sign of a seismic shift in the Virginia electorate may have been a mistake, but it's an understandable one. George W. Bush carried Virginia by eight points over John Kerry in 2004. Four years later, Obama nearly reversed those numbers, defeating McCain 53-46, a swing of some 15 points. Was this the new Virginia, where African-American voters showed up impressively, while young people at the state's many college campuses, and the potent Northern Virginia suburbs, broke heavily Democratic, turning Virginia into a reliably "blue" state? Moreover, didn't an under-funded Webb unseat the popular incumbent senator -- and former popular governor -- George Allen just two years earlier?

Webb's victory, in particular, may have given Virginia Democrats a sense of false security. It wasn't necessarily evidence the state was going Democratic -- more likely it was a fluke. On Aug. 11, 2006, Allen was cruising to certain victory -- and on his way to becoming one of the early favorites for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination -- when he went to a campaign rally in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, hard by the Kentucky border in a town called Breaks. Allen was distracted -- and evidently annoyed -- by the presence of a young man of Indian descent named S.R. Sidarth, a "tracker" for the Webb campaign, who was videotaping Allen in hopes of catching him in a blooper. And boy did he.

Suddenly, in the middle of his speech, Allen stopped and said, "This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. . . . Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Until that moment, it was the rare American who'd ever heard the word "macaca," which is a corruption of the word "monkey" and is a racial slur used in the French Congo. Reporters digging into it learned that Allen's mother is of French Tunisian descent and extrapolated that she had taught it to her son. The Washington Post, particularly, could not get enough of this story. It published some 115 articles, columns, and editorials about "macaca" between mid-August and Election Day, 15 of them on the front page. Although conservatives saw a conspiracy, The Post prides itself in ferreting out racism, a legacy of which it should be proud. And the story had interesting twists. Allen's mother turns out to have been half Jewish, which Allen apparently didn't know.

Moreover, reports then surfaced about Allen keeping a Confederate flag and, a couple of witnesses claimed, using the "n" word when talking about blacks when he was a younger man. In the end, George Allen lost by some 9,400 votes out of 2.3 million cast. Quite simply, "macaca" was the only reason this happened. Three years later, something weird is happening again, and this time the conservatives' complaints against The Washington Post are harder to dismiss.

On Aug. 30, 2009 the paper published an edgy article taking McDonnell to task for a master's thesis he submitted 20 years earlier to Regent University, an evangelical college founded by Pat Robertson, in which McDonnell characterized feminists as "detrimental" to the family. McDonnell also called for government policies that would favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators."

A legitimate news story, to be sure, and that word "fornicators" is simply irresistible. But in an example of the kind of coverage that has helped convince Republicans that much of the mainstream media has a partisan agenda, The Post went on during the coming weeks to beat the thesis theme relentlessly in news stories, columns, blogs, and editorials. The coverage consisted of the same tone and tenor, and all of it leading to the same conclusion: This was McDonnell's "macaca moment." That point was made explicitly in some of the paper's coverage and implicitly in others. The only problem was that the thesis angle, whatever one thinks of McDonnell's views back in 1989, was not remotely like George Allen's "macaca" outburst.

Yet the Deeds campaign picked up on the "fornication-macaca" angle and amplified on it -- and did so neither honestly nor prudently. In Deeds' ads, McDonnell wanted to take America back to "the dark ages." His thesis was written when he was "months away from serving in the Legislature" (actually, it was written more than three years before he served there). And the school in question was identified by neither its current name (Regent) nor the name when McDonnell attended (CBN University), but simply as "Pat Robertson's Law School."

The irony here is that it was the Democrats and their enablers who came across as intolerant. And though The Post kept the drumbeat going and endorsed Deeds enthusiastically, most of the newspapers in the state denounced Deeds for his tactics. The race did tighten after Deeds went negative, but only for a while. One prominent Virginia Democrat who is close to Mark Warner, but not to Tim Kaine, blames the current governor/ DNC chief for this turn of events. "This is what happens when your governor focuses for four years on politics, not policy," he told Politics Daily. "All you're left with is the caustic stuff."

With Deeds in trouble, the blame game has begun already, even before the votes are counted on Nov. 3. In Friday's editions of The Washington Post, White House sources worried that Deeds' presumed impending failure will reflect poorly on President Obama claimed that Kaine tried in vain to persuade Deeds to run a less negative campaign. Considering the millions of dollars spent on Deeds' behalf by the Democratic National Committee, such an assertion seems far-fetched on its face -- and it is one that the pro-Warner Democrat who spoke to PD simply does not believe.

Other Virginia Democrats are so frustrated with the Deeds-Kaine effort that they began quietly pining for Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton moneyman from McLean who lost to Deeds in the primary. Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia professor who remains the sage of the state's politics, terms the McAuliffe revisionism "hilarious," suggesting that McAuliffe fits Virginia worse than the current nominee on Deeds' worst day.

"This was going to be a very tough year for any Democrat to win Virginia," said Sabato in an e-mail. "When the thesis was discovered, suddenly the Democrats had something concrete to use. It actually closed up a big gap between Deeds and McDonnell for a while. But as McDonnell edged away from his earlier writings and put up ads appearing to repudiate some of his controversial views (voiced by women of all colors), the effect wore off."

But even the charitable Sabato is nonplussed to figure out why Deeds didn't run a more optimistic campaign. "The missed opportunity was in not developing a more positive message for Deeds to serve as the yang to the thesis yin," he said.

This message may finally have gotten through to the Deeds campaign, although it might not have except for ubiquitous presence of The Washington Post, which in its gushing endorsement of Deeds asserted that the Democrat "offers hope for a solution" to the state's problems. "Hope" was not a word heard much from the Democrats in this campaign, but the Deeds staff quickly took to the airwaves with a positive ad based on The Post editorial.

The state Republican Party pointed out puckishly in response that the Deeds ad showed the name of The Washington Post eight times in the 30-second spot while employing a larger font for the newspaper's name than for Deeds, "making it unclear to the viewer which entity is the actual candidate."

Which clears up the question some Virginia Democrats have been asking themselves for months.