A number of years ago I had the opportunity to speak to a national gathering of communication directors for state Attorney Generals.
I asked the attendees what was the biggest issue they faced in their jobs.
Almost to a person, they told me that their greatest challenge was getting any publicity at all for their boss.
Local television, they said, had stopped covering politics altogether.
And the capital press corps seemed far more interested in what the Governors and General Assemblys were doing, in almost every state.
No one cared about what the Attorney General had to say.
Well that was then.
This is now.
AGs are hot.
Democratis are suing corporations.
Republicans are suing the feds.
And with the possible exception of Andrew Cuomo, no one is hotter than Ken Cuccinelli.
Litigating the the feds over health care and climate change, becoming a pen pal of Nancy Pelosi, starting a prairie fire over public policy toward gays and lesbians.
Today he was in Newport News working on economic development, trying to convince Northrop Grumman to locate its headquarters in NOVA.
Next Tuesday he’ll be hosting a town hall at Liberty U.
In Virginia, we’ve never seen an Attorney General with this kind of agenda, one who makes national news a couple times a week.
I’m surprised that Intrade’s not taking bets on the outcome.
Is Cuccinelli moving too fast, headed for an inevitable crash or burn?
Or is he Virginia’s Andrew Cuomo, building an unassailable base among the GOP rank and file?
Whatever Cuccinelli’s future, he is unlikely to crash and burn in the manner of Eliot Spitzer, the former AG and Governor of New York, who came to grief over a high-class prostitute.
An expectation of the AG is that they assess threats to our communities and act accordingly. Maybe nowadays child porn is not perceived as major a destructive aspect of our modern life as the federal government. The larger the threat, the more oxygen natrually drawn to thwart it.
I think the R-AGs have properly assessed the threat to our quality of life and are acting with appropriate tools to combat the threat.
The D-AGs have assessed job-creating big corporations as a threat to our quality of life. Hopefully those corporations will leave there and come here.