With the holiday season in its final leg, thoughts among Virginia's political class and pundits are quickly turn to the 2013 session of the Virginia General Assembly and even more so to the 2013 Virginia elections. At the national level soul searching is taking place among Republicans but no so with the Republican Party of Virginia which is bent on continuing the far right lunacy that damaged Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell's chances for a VP nod from Mitt Romney and which likely helped seal Obama's second win in Virginia. In short, those in the Virginia are continuing to drink Kool-Aid by the bucket full. Nothing personifies this more than the all but crowned Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli who will be the GOP standard bearer for governor of Virginia. In my view, the man is seriously mentally ill, but then so are most people who have remained in the Virginia GOP. A lengthy piece in the Virginian Pilot sourced from Politico looks at the coming year politically in Virginia. Here are some excerpts:
Look no further than Virginia to catch a glimpse of the GOP’s national dilemma. As the Old Dominion becomes a firmly centrist state, more closely resembling the rest of the country demographically and politically, Virginia Republicans are shifting rightward. After President Barack Obama carried the state twice, it’s plausible that the party will nominate a slate of three movement conservative white males for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general next year.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP’s presumptive gubernatorial nominee, was defiant at the gathering, citing Virginia Republican revivals in past years following Democratic presidential wins.
Cuccinelli scorned what he said were “media” calls for GOP “change, re-evaluation, remake, retreat.”
What gnaws at Virginia campaign veterans, though, is the degree to which Cuccinelli is already defined as a polarizing culture warrior at a moment when Republicans seem to be clamoring for kinder and gentler candidates. McDonnell was able to remake his political persona in large part because he wasn’t well known outside Virginia’s political class. But after three years of making headlines for suing the federal government to block healthcare reform, telling Virginia’s public colleges they can’t legally ban discrimination against gays and targeting a former University of Virginia professor’s work on climate change, the attorney general is far better known than most down-ballot statewide office holders.
Bolling, who last month quit the race and has since refused to endorse Cuccinelli, said flatly what is on the minds of many other Virginia Republicans. “I question his electability in a statewide campaign for governor,” the lieutenant governor said on a Virginia radio show recently.
Virginia GOP Chair Pat Mullins insisted at the state party’s “Advance” that Republicans still have a winning formula. “Virginia’s a conservative state, and when we stick up for our beliefs, and our values, and our principles … we win elections,” Mullins said, according to the Washington Post. “When we choose to run like Democrats, we lose elections because we haven’t given anybody a choice.” Mullins’ assertion, even with latitude given for the rah-rah circumstances of a party rally, confounds many longtime observers of Old Dominion politics.
“Their election analysis is a predictable one-note samba,” said U.Va. political science professor Larry Sabato. “It’s never their issues or their inclusiveness. Therefore, the solution is always to look for a better messenger for hard-core conservatism, ignoring the hard reality that some of their message, especially on social issues, is alienating large segments of the population in an increasingly diverse and moderate state.”
“There’s this tremendous disconnect,” added one Richmond Republican hand of how the GOP has become more conservative even as Democrats have won two presidential races, two of the last three gubernatorial contests and both Senate seats. “It seems that both in Virginia and nationally the movement conservatives are getting more and more rabid and less enthralled with establishment conservatives like George Allen and more into the crusaders.”
What heartens Virginia Republicans, at least in the short-term, is that the composition of the electorate in the state’s odd-year gubernatorial races includes fewer “federal voters” – those urban and suburban dwellers who usually only turn out in presidential years. If such Virginians don’t show up at the polls in 2013, Cuccinelli, who enjoys fervent grassroots support, will find his task easier.
It will be crucial that blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians and gays among others turn out in force in November 2013 to save Virginia from placing a truly insane madman in the Governor's mansion.
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