The surprise endorsement of Terry McAuliffe by the Daily Press is only part of the bad news that (happily) seems to be surrounding Ken Cuccinelli. A column in the conservative Richmond Times Dispatch looks at Cuccinelli's lagging fund raising, campaign staff disorganization and seeming loosening grip on much of the Virginia GOP base other than the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins. The column also addresses Cuccinelli's stupidity in not resigning as Attorney General as has been the tradition for many decades. Cuccinelli motivation is obvious: he wanted Virginia taxpayers to support his campaign by being able to draw a salary even while not doing his job. As with so many of Cuccinelli's struggles, his situation traces to his extremism and overbearing ego. Here are column highlights:
With 23 days until the election, urgency is an understatement for Cuccinelli. It’s not just that published polls show him badly trailing Terry McAuliffe. It’s that Cuccinelli — a candidate who, like no other Republican, was supposed to inspire the full-throated passions of the party’s conservative grass roots — is losing them.
To some degree, you see this in the polls. For example, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows that Republicans are less enthusiastic about Cuccinelli than Democrats are about McAuliffe. Eighty-three percent of Republicans support Cuccinelli, but 95 percent of Democrats back McAuliffe.
The statistical evidence is backed by the empirical: Republicans acknowledge they’re divided and dispirited . . .
The problems for Cuccinelli are operational as well as philosophical. Well before a staff shake-up last month, there were signs the Cuccinelli organization was disorganized.
Cuccinelli faced a significant distraction of his own making: his day job as attorney general. It’s a post he’s used to affirm his tea party, culture-warrior bona fides for a national audience by going to federal court in unsuccessful efforts to stop federal health care reform and to jump-start Virginia’s ban on sodomy.
Unlike nearly all of his predecessors since the late 1950s, Cuccinelli refused to quit as chief lawyer once he was nominated to be chief executive. In keeping his taxpayer-supplied salary and health insurance, Cuccinelli gave Democrats an issue: that personal ambition rather than the public interest guide his actions as attorney general.
Cuccinelli is getting clobbered in fundraising. As a consequence, he is being outshouted on television. McAuliffe, so far, has collected $20 million to Cuccinelli’s $12.4 million. Cuccinelli relies on lifelines from the Republican Governors Association. It’s given him nearly $8.5 million in cash and services. That’s about two-thirds of his current total, and it includes a fresh $500,000 at week’s end.
And while trying to figure out if any of this actually mobilizes the grass roots, Cuccinelli had an anxiety-provoking moment at the Family Foundation dinner last Saturday: How to oppose the Washington shutdown as a threat to the Virginia economy — and, by implication, his political fortunes — without appearing to oppose the gala’s headliner, Sen. Ted Cruz? The Texas Republican is an architect of the shutdown, a Cuccinelli soul mate and a powerful figure to their shared tea party base.
This, by the Republican whom 46 percent of Virginians told the Quinnipiac poll they don’t consider honest and trustworthy. Now whose campaign is on life support?
I don't want to get too over confident, but should Cuccinelli lose - hopefully badly - hopefully the Republican Party of Virginia will place blame where it belongs - with the extremists at The Family Foundation which helped engineer Cuccinelli's nomination, along with the rest of the GOP's extremist ticket.
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