One McDonnell flees the other

After the Democrat spent much of the summer throwing fists at the air, Robert F. McDonnell did what R. Creigh Deeds could not, planting a hard punch on the Republican’s jaw. McDonnell’s misfortune is that he happens to be that Republican.

It all began with a sharp jab McDonnell might have slipped, this one delivered over the weekend by The Washington Post, which unearthed a thesis authored two decades ago by McDonnell during his days as a law student at Regent University. In that 93-page document, the future state attorney general and gubernatorial contender laments working women and feminists, homosexuals, “fornicators,” humanism in public schools, the legalization of contraception for use by unwed couples and the admission by the Catholic Church that the earth is indeed round.

All right, we made up the last one. Liberals who believed it raise your hands.

Glee is spreading like a California wildfire among Democrats, who have endured drift as campaign strategy since Deeds won the party nomination in June, and among the gang at The Post, which chose Deeds as its boy in Virginia during a primary that Terry McAuliffe appeared set to win. McDonnell, of course, has brought this upon himself, not by a thesis written amid the abiding glow of the Reagan years, but in his stumbling run to flee himself.

Bob Stuart, The News Virginian’s political reporter, picked up on an unsettling vibe during a McDonnell teleconference Monday, when the former Virginia Beach delegate repeatedly dismissed his thesis as “an academic exercise,” giving rise to double meanings. McDonnell’s point appeared to be not that the exercise was academic in the scholarly sense but academic in the sense of another definition, this one provided by Merriam-Webster: “having no practical or useful significance.”

Naturally, Deeds contends the significance is that this 20-year-old paper traces the latticework of McDonnell’s philosophy of governance. McDonnell responds credibly, telling The Post, “Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older.” Most people, we suspect, will nod knowingly at the concept of a man’s views evolving over the course of 20 years.

But to an extent that could unnerve his base, the presumably older, wiser candidate ventured still further in dismissing the impassioned 34-year-old student and his bristling manifesto. An impression is growing, and McDonnell is giving it life, that he seeks to hide his social conservatism, as though it were some half-wit brother and the guests were at the door.

Suggesting that personal growth and experience have taken the sharpness off some of his views is one matter. Another altogether is to suggest, as McDonnell seems to, that he’d written that silly old paper, all 93 pages of the thing, as a mere exercise, like a niggling homework assignment. Can we believe this fellow?

That which girded the views expressed in the young McDonnell’s social treatise appears to have been a deep concern for the preservation of the traditional American family. That sentiment continues to be widely shared by Virginians. Many people, including the president of the United States, recognize that the country is not better for the erosion of two-parent homes. Reinforcing this crumbling bulwark is a complex task, giving rise to positions that might understandably be tempered by years and the wisdom they might provide.

McDonnell the candidate seeks distance from the student, but he has sprinted so far from him as to verge on turning the images of both men into mirages. One might have believed what he said and so his zeal overextended. The other appears to believe principally in winning an election, and so he shrinks.