Virginia Tomorrow

It’s been a Democratic buzz this week.

The best line had Tim Kaine and Terry McAuliffe passing each other on I-95, Kaine going North on 95 to take the DNC job while McAuliffe was traveling South to compete for Kaine’s position. Neither, of course, moving very fast on the state’s clogged transportation grid.

Barack Obama made yet another appearance in the state, coming to George Mason University to warn that the economy will get much worse if his stimulus program isn’t passed very rapidly.

State legislators from both parties seem to be hopeful that Obama’s spending package will funnel significant dollars to overdue yet unfunded infrastructure projects in the Commonwealth.  In a meeting convened between state legislators and local officials in the Hampton Roads area, the region was described as a “target rich” environment for a stimulus program.

Apparently, there’s nothing like a severe recession to restore the good name and reputation of federal pork.

In the next few weeks, attention will turn to another Virginian, Eric Cantor, the second ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and, increasingly, the House’s GOP spokesperson on fiscal and budget issues.

Cantor’s response to Obama’s stimulus program will be his first major test since his election to his new leadership post.  

He’s not being tossed a softball.

The decibel level on talk radio is getting higher and higher in opposition to the spending components of Obama’s likely proposal. The President-Elect is being portrayed as a socialist whose ideas will undermine the basic principles of the free enterprise system.

At the same, Cantor knows that the GOP cannot simply oppose Obama and once again become merely the Party of No. For whatever talk radio may think of Obama’s stimulus package, there are economists of all ideological stripes who will argue that, overall,  he is making the right kind of moves.  State legislators across the country from both parties are vying to have stimulus money directed to their states.

Most importantly, the public is surely going to give President Obama a chance to solve the problem that he was just elected to address. They’ll have little patience for obstructionism. Nor do they care very much about the ideological labels that Limbaugh and Hannity may be attaching to Obama.

What’s a new GOP Leader to do?

Cantor’s task in responding to the stimulus package is a microcosm of the larger challenge facing conservatives today. How do they develop a positive, forward looking agenda that can inspire Americans to believe that they have sensible plans to address our problems? 

I think that one Virginian, Bob McDonnell, will be watching Cantor and the reaction to what he says especially closely. McDonnell’s challenge inthe 2009 gubernatorial election is the same one that Cantor will be facing in the next two weeks.

How does the GOP regain its appeal as  a party that actually has solutions to the issues that Virginians care about?

Cantor may be assisted, in part, by Democratic overreach. Nancy Pelosi is already contending that Obama should impose higher taxes on the wealthy and rethink the tax cuts that are included in his preliminary outlines.

But waiting for the Democrats to implode is unlikely to work, either in D.C. or in the Commonwealth. Cantor’s answer in the next few weeks will tell us a lot about the GOP’s capacity to reverse the trajectory that they’ve been on.