Virginia Tomorrow

A friend of mine who was in the middle of the gubernatorial campaign in 2001 wrote me this week and said that he feels for the staffers in the campaigns.

They’re sleep-deprived to the point of near exhaustion.

They’re anxious and perpetually worried, even if they think they’re ahead.

And they’re testy and cranky about the unfair and deceptive tactics that the candidate on the other side is employing.

I think that he has it just about right.

But the level of personal antipathy this year between the candidates and their staffs appears to be deeper and more pronounced than we’ve seen in recent gubernatorial elections.

The Deeds’ folks believe that the entire McDonnell campaign is grounded in a fundamentally deceptive strategem- Hide the Ideologue- that disguises his hard edged social conservatism and redefines the former AG as a pragmatic, consensus seeking, economically-oriented moderate.

McDonnell’s people believe that the Deeds campaign has become completely unmoored from the truth, running attack ads on McDonnell’s supposed positions on electricity rate hikes and breast cancer prevention that they know are false, but are designed to scare the voters.

When things get so personal, however, it’s easy to lose perspective and miss the big picture.

We may be seeing a bit of this on each side.

Both Tim Kaine and Jim Moran this week reminded Deeds of the importance of making an affirmative case for his candidacy and resisting the temptation to think that, if you just run a few more negative ads, people will eventually see the “true Bob McDonnell” and reject him.

When the Governor of your own party and the head of the DNC makes this kind of suggestion about your strategy and tactics, it’s probably best to listen.

Sheila Johnson this week apologized for making fun of Creigh Deeds’ speech patterns, understanding that it was not the right thing to do and that it could be seen as making fun of people who have struggled with speech impediments.

But the McDonnell campaign had trouble seconding the apology and instead observed that Johnson was really expressing a basic truth about the Deeds’ campaign lack of policy specificity.

The McDonnell campaign will have plenty of opportunity to express their views about Deeds.

Why defend a comment that the person who made it has apologized for?

With less than 30 days left in the race, everyone’s fatigued, cranky and ticked off at the other side.

Inside a campaign’s endgame may be one of the easiest place in the world to lose perspective.

It’s up to the candidates to keep their eyes on the big picture.