Is Bob McDonnell the Future of the GOP?

FALLS CHURCH, Va. - The Republican Party stands to gain a new A-lister this week in Virginia governor-elect Bob McDonnell, who ran his race here with near-perfect temperament, focus, discipline and hair.

It wasn't an interesting horse race, what with McDonnell ahead of Democrat Creigh Deeds by double digits in multiple polls leading up to the election. But Democrats and independents who've been busy, indifferent or worn out from last year's intensity shouldn't fool themselves into thinking that little was at stake. With his landslide victory, McDonnell has the opportunity to become a national player and a national candidate. Not to mention "a nice new shining image for the party," in the words of Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member from California.

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Obviously, everything will hinge on McDonnell's performance in Richmond, and there are governing challenges ahead. But the former state legislator and attorney general, whose resume also includes managerial stints in the military and the private sector, sure has the feel of an up-and-comer.

Virginia's new status as a presidential swing state, having gone Democratic last year after a 44-year GOP run, means its governor will now assume a key role in national elections. At the very least a 2012 GOP nominee would rely on a Gov. McDonnell to help him or her carry the state.

John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican aide on Capitol Hill, went further in an e-mail to me -- calling McDonnell "as plausible as anyone else" for president or vice president in 2012. A more likely scenario might be 2016. Virginia has a one-term limit, so McDonnell would be a former governor as of January 2014 -- just in time to make some money and ponder his future.

McDonnell looks like a casting director's notion of a politician. His positions are uncompromising in some respects -- no new taxes, no abortions in cases of rape or incest. But he is affable and smooth and usually equipped with soothing answers for those who disagree with him. The man doesn't flail or flounder in public. Often that's because he is falling back on boilerplate. You might not like or believe his answer to any given question, but that's his story and he's sticking to it -- and you have to admire that in a candidate.

The centerpiece of McDonnell's campaign was a plan to solve Virginia's job-crushing traffic and transportation problems. It involves selling off state liquor stores, charging tolls at the North Carolina border and drilling offshore. Much of it is not currently allowed by federal law, and many questions were raised about the permanent loss of $100 million a year that the state gets from liquor sales. The Washington Post editorial board memorably called the whole thing "phony baloney." But it was a plan, it didn't rely on new taxes and it allowed him to run as "Mister Goodwrench," as Pitney put it.

The professionalism of McDonnell's campaign, and his money advantage over Deeds, was much in evidence during a brief visit last week to the Eden Center, a strip mall bustling with Vietnamese shops, restaurants and bakeries. McDonnell arrived at a restaurant with Louisiana Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-La., who is the only Vietnamese member of Congress and well known to leaders of Northern Virginia's large Vietnamese community. The walls were hung with printed campaign signs that said "I support Bob McDonnell" in Vietnamese. The national Vietnamese cable network -- yes there is one, the Saigon Broadcasting Television Network, with 1.6 million viewers concentrated mainly in Virginia and California -- readied for what producer Nhan Vo called its first ever roundtable with a candidate.

It didn't quite work out like that. McDonnell didn't sit down at the table that had been readied, nor did anyone else. And he and Cao spoke for about half the allotted 20 minutes -- leaving time for a mere three questions from two people. But the camera was on, he answered the questions and he did it while wearing a yellow and red scarf signifying the pre-1975 Vietnamese flag, draped around his neck by Cao. Then the pair shook hands throughout the rest of the shopping center. It was, McDonnell said, his third visit.

It's a standard part of election lore here that since the 1970s, Virginia has been rejecting the president's party in favor of a governor from the opposite party. Still, McDonnell is an interesting test of Virginia's changing demographics and election of two Democratic governors and two Democratic senators in the last decade. A major issue this year was the masters thesis he wrote at age 34 while studying at Regent University, the evangelical Christian school founded by Pat Robertson. Among other things, McDonnell wrote that government policy should try to discourage working women, homosexuality, abortion and contraception. Backed by the Christian Coalition, he was soon elected to the Legislature and went to work on that agenda.

Not surprisingly, Democrats tried to define McDonnell by that thesis. It didn't work.

Why? Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University who wrote a book on the Christian right, says McDonnell's views on social issues are no different from those of candidates Virginians have rejected in the recent past as too extreme. "What's different about this guy is that he's as capable talking the secular language of politics as he is talking the language of evangelicals. He can sound equally credible with both communities. He's a very polished candidate," Rozell told me.

It's not that McDonnell doesn't know how to stoke the conservative base. I'm guessing he never made an appearance all year that didn't include a string of catch-phrases -- "card-check, cap-and-trade, unfunded mandates on business, major new deficit spending" -- designed to exploit unease and anger with President Obama and his party. But he was able to defuse controversies, in some cases because his positions had evolved and in others because he knew how to couch his answers.

On questions about the thesis, McDonnell invariably said he had hired many mothers in his attorney general and campaign offices and pointed to his daughter -- a former platoon commander in Iraq -- as "the ultimate working woman." Often there were few or no follow-up questions about other goals of the thesis, although McDonnell pursued those goals. In just a couple of examples, he sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of bills to restrict abortion and supported a 2004 bill that would have banned health clinics at state colleges from distributing the morning-after pill. He did get asked about an opinion he issued as attorney general that said Gov. Tim Kaine did not have the authority to ban job discrimination against gay people in state hiring. McDonnell said it was a constitutional issue -- that he always had and always would hire strictly on merit.

When Deeds and others accused him of being partisan, McDonnell would note that 90 percent of his bills were passed in the Legislature with bipartisan support. However, he often left out that these were crime bills and other measures he proposed as attorney general. He was not an aisle-crosser in his 14 years as a legislator and in fact opposed what's considered a major bipartisan achievement -- a 2004 restructuring of the state tax code that brought in more revenue and staved off a drop in the state's bond rating.

I asked McDonnell last week what he'd do if forced to choose between higher taxes or a lower bond rating, and his answer sounded a bit like wishful thinking. "I'm going to look for ways to expand the pie so that I don't have to make that choice," McDonnell told me. "Between the economic incentives that we've proposed and the goals that I've got to help to streamline and make government more effective, I don't look at having to make that choice."

There are many in Virginia who look at the transportation crunch and conclude that a new, continuing source of money is badly needed. They include analysts, editorial observers and people who have to drive in Northern Virginia or Hampton Roads. Republican V. Thanh Nguyen, president of NVT Technologies Inc., a McDonnell supporter awaiting him at the Eden Center, told me he had to relocate his business because of severe traffic. When I asked if he'd be willing to pay higher taxes for better roads, his instant response was "Yes, I would."

Looking ahead, the inevitable clash looms between the practical demands of being a governor and the ideological demands of perhaps someday competing in Republican primaries. We'll see in the next four years if McDonnell has the skills to keep his options open.

(Editor's note: This story has been revised slightly to reflect McDonnell's victory)


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