We just had an election here in Virginia, and I hear
pundits all over the news babbling about the meaning of it all. So far, everything I've heard is wrong.
Democrat Creigh Deeds was not properly supported by the Democratic Party. It is possible that Mr. Deeds does not know how to run a statewide campaign. If that is so, the party should have provided him with advisors who could show him.
The fact is that most voters today make up their minds by watching television. Newspapers are a dying media. The internet and Twitter is not a good news source for state campaigns. One has to dig too much to find real news. And only the faithful read the candidate's web sites.
Republican McDonnell had at least three times the television ads that Deeds had. And they were better. McDonnell looked right into the camera surrounded by his family and said what a fine fellow he was. Deeds had a couple anti-McDonnell ads, and one that showed newspaper editorials endorsing him. Deeds never looked the voters in the eye. He never talked about his vision for Virginia.
He may have done that in stump speeches or in the debate, but I didn’t see those, and most other voters didn’t either.
I suspect that either during his long career of public service, or during the primary, Mr. Deeds ran afoul of some powerful Democrats. The outgoing governor, Tim Kaine is Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and surely in a position to steer money toward one of the only two governors races that were held this year. He should have matched the Republicans and seen to it that the standard bearer had at least an even chance. He didn’t.
Or else, the same idiots who planned Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidential nomination are now designing Democratic strategy. Clinton lost because her campaign targeted major states and skipped over the smaller ones. Obama won because he executed a full-on charge to get every vote he could, everywhere he could. Maybe the general urban prejudice against someone from western, rural Virginia convinced the powers that be that Deeds couldn’t win, so they held on to their money and let him go down.
That is cynical and unworthy of a party that is supposed to be big-tent inclusive. By not providing a strong campaign, they’ve let down the voters. And by letting McDonnell sweep the election, they’ve screwed over all of us here in Virginia and given the Republicans momentum for 2010. Kaine and the rest of the Democratic leadership should be ashamed of themselves.