Virginia Tomorrow

1. Speeding Up

You could barely keep with all the campaign news this week. Endorsements by the FOP and the Fairfax Chamber. A bigger non-endorsement by Doug Wilder. An op-ed by Deeds in the Post that reframed the tax for transportation issue. And an increasingly bitter LG race. A few weeks earlier the entire news cycle would have dominated by the story of “YouLie” Wilson’s fund raising appeal on behalf of Virginia’s House Republicans. This week it was barely an afterthought.

2. Raising the National Stakes

It is remarkable how high the national stakes associated with the Virginia race are becoming. Obama’s reputation; Kaine’s position as DNC Chair; and GOP efforts for an electoral rehabilitation are now all caught up in McDonnell-Deeds. The efforts (unsuccessful as they were) by the President and his surrogates to persuade Doug Wilder to endorse Deeds indicated how important the president personally feels that this race is.

3. Courage or Suicide?

It’s not often that a candidate’s decision to reframe an election has both sides celebrating. Many Democrats believe that Deeds’ op-ed clearly indicating that he’ll sign a tax increase for transportation is a sign of genuine political courage, one likely to be rewarded by a public disgusted by politicans unwilling to seriously address the real problems facing the state. Republicans, on the other hand, are ecstatic, believing that Deeds was baited into a “Mondale moment.”  They can’t wait to trot out the contrast articulated by the Gipper- “I believe that every day should be July 4th and he thinks it should be April 15th”- and apply it to McDonnell-Deeds. Republicans love to fight campaigns on taxes- can it work again this year?

4.  The Post’s  Role

As a player inVirginia politics has grown exponentially this year. Kaine’s DNC travels. The Deeds endorsement in the primary. The Thesis. Deeds’ op-ed recasting the tax for transportation issue. Using a blog to maintain a running commentary on events. WAPO has been in the middle of it. Years ago, my friend Don Baker told my students that when he was first sent down from D.C. to cover Richmond for the Post, he asked an editor what he should do and was told to “cover Virginia like it was a foreign country.”  It was a view of the reporter as an anthropologist whose job was to explain the peculiar folkways of Homo Virginius. No more. The era of ironic detachment is over. The Post is invested in Virginia (especially NOVA) and will occupy a major role in whatever retrospective is ultimately written about the 2009 election cycle.

5. Will Demographics Determine Virginia’s Political Destiny?

I think that the Democrats are hoping that it’ll happen. With a relatively recent advantage in party identification that came about in 2008, the Democratic campaign is working hard to capitalize on this. Watch for October visits from President Obama as the Democrats try to recapture some of last year’s magic.

6.  “You Lie” - We Contribute

Talk about Freakonomics! Joe Wilson calls the President a liar on national television and goes from someone we never heard of to a GOP fundraising star (at least for the next 15 minutes). The Virginia GOP tried to exploit Wilson’s notoriety and had featured him on a fundraising appeal to put some dollars in their own campaign coffers. The Democrats and the state editorial writers call it disgusting. But I won’t be surprised if the Democrats discover that pointing to YouLie Wilson will elicit some money for Democratic coffers also.

7. Jim Webb

hasn’t received much attention this week, but he’s preparing to become a major voice on U.S. policy in Afghanistan. In one significant respect, Webb is very much like Doug Wilder. He marches to his own drummer and will ultimately express whatever position his own beliefs and research lead him to take. If you believe that Afghanistan is likely to become a far more  central issue, expect to be hearing much more from Webb over the next few years.