Kudos to Congressman Jim Moran for calling it as it is.

From the Washington Post:

At a get-out-the-vote rally in Fairfax County, Moran said: "I mean, if the Republicans were running in Afghanistan, they'd be running on the Taliban ticket as far as I can see."

Moran was talking about Republicans Robert F. McDonnell for governor, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and state Sen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who is running for attorney general. By some accounts, the three represent the most conservative Republican ticket to run in Virginia in many years. Moran's comments clearly were aimed to motivate Democratic voters to turn out on Tuesday and vote blue.

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Iman Bob McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to Regents University, an evangelical school in Virginia Beach, in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

According to Post, this isn't the first time McDonnell has been compared to the Taliban; in 2003, a liberal columnist for the Daily Press of Newport News dubbed him "Taliban Bob" for his role in ousting a female Circuit Court judge who had been accused by another woman of sexual harassment. I am sure it won't be the last either.

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Creigh Deeds

Bob McDonnell

Here are four ads currently running in Virginia. Each is a 30 second spot. The top two are from the Creigh Deeds campaign and the bottom two are from Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate. The Deeds campaign continues to trail in the race by near double-digits. It is thus not terribly surprising that the Deeds campaign is focusing on attacking Bob McDonnell in his ad campaign while McDonnell avoids mentioning Creigh Deeds altogther in his ads. Which ads work for you?

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Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has been leading all of the recent polls out of Virginia, but this Washington Post story on his master's thesis has him on the defensive:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

Blue Virginia has more analysis, while Twitter user @FakeVirginia has posted a page-by-page analysis of the McDonnell thesis. You can download the pdf file of the thesis on this page at the Washington Post site.

McDonnell responds,

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

McDonnell added: "Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." He said that his views on family policy were best represented by his 1995 welfare reform legislation and that he "worked to include child day care in the bill so women would have greater freedom to work." What he wrote in the thesis on women in the workplace, he said, "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views."

Will voters in purple Virginia buy this explanation? Your guess is as good as mine.

If he was planning a political career, McDonnell should have followed the example of 99.9 percent of grad students: write a master's thesis on some obscure topic of no interest to a wider audience.

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Right out of the gate, Rasmussen Reports has released a poll taken Wednesday night showing newly-minted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds leading Republican Bob McDonnell 47-41.  No doubt, these numbers may be a bit inflated in Deeds' favor, it being a one-day poll taken as Deeds enjoyed glowing press following his come-from-behind primary victory.  Nevertheless, given that the last Ras poll matching up Deeds and McDonnell showed McDonnell leading 45-30, these are welcomed numbers.  Deeds also enjoys a slight favorability edge over McDonnell according to the poll, with Deeds at 59-27, compared with McDonnell's 52-28.

Deeds and McDonnell have, of course, tangled before, with McDonnell barely edging Deeds by a hair in the 2005 Attorney General race, the difference being 323 votes out of over 1.94 million votes counted (yes, just 323 - no, that's not a typo with zeroes missing).  So this will be very close.  This first poll, though, refutes the inevitability meme that McDonnell was hoping to spread.

After losing the NY-20 special House election and losing a Senator to a Party switch, the GOP is reeling.  Losing VA-Gov, which they are expecting to win comfortably, would be a major body blow heading into the 2010 calendar year.  So get on the Deeds bus!  Visit his website.  Join the Facebook group.  Follow Deeds on Twitter.  Subscribe to the e-mail list.  Oh, yeah, and please contribute!

If you need to know the type of Republican we're facing in Bob McDonnell, visit TheRealBobMcDonnell.com for all the dirt (and share that URL with anyone you know who lives in Virginia, has friends and family in Virginia, might move to Virginia, etc.).  If you're looking to pigeonhole McDonnell, the best description is that he is a Pat Robertson disciple.  Yeah.  So it would be awfully swell to keep him out of the Governor's office.

Remember: the 2005 Deeds-McDonnell race was decided by 323 votes out of over 1.94 million votes counted.  This race will be exceptionally close.  Every single dollar will make a difference.  Every single minute spent volunteering will make a difference.  Republicans will be favored to win this right up until Election Day.  However, if Democrats in Virginia and across the country are able to contribute time, money, and resources, we can flush the conventional wisdom down the toilet and deliver yet another embarrassment to the Rush-Newt-Cheney Republican Party and another loss to the Michael Steele RNC.

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A SUSA poll has come out on the Virginia governor's race:

http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S= 10265296&nav=S6aK

Of 409 likely Democratic primary voters, it's 38% for McAuliffe, and 22% each for Brian Moran and Creigh Deeds.  But McDonnell leads all three Dems in a sample of 1396 RVs, with McDonnell leading McAuliffe 46%-39%.  Deeds runs only behind by 5, 44-39.  Moran does the worst against McDonnell, trailing 46-34.

Something has shifted in the primary race, and it's going to be uphill in November no matter who wins the primary.  Is McAuliffe that bad a candidate?  I do think Bill Clinton's campaigning for McAuliffe has given him a boost.

So, can Brian Moran turn it around?

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