Cuccinelli ready to rise

Only Dostoevsky’s Karmazovs and middle-aged married couples know how to fight like this. To hear Ken Cuccinelli tell it, Steve Shannon is too doltish to be attorney general. To hear Shannon tell it, Cuccinelli is too rabidly red for the job. Pass the pestle, Mitya, and take out the trash.

Like the classic Russian novel, the race for attorney general intrigues because of intelligent and dichotomous characters, Cuccinelli, the Republican and frontrunner, on one page and Shannon, the Democrat, on the other. They attended the same schools and before they began feasting on each other as opponents, they dined regularly together while working as state lawmakers in districts that overlap.

Shannon’s pitch principally is that he’s a former prosecutor, and Cuccinelli is not. He contends Cuccinelli would transfer the Attorney General’s Office into a launchpad for partisan pugilism, taking on gay marriage initiatives elsewhere and digging feet and nails into opposing so-called union “card-check” bills, among other things.

“Cooch,” as chums and foes alike are fond of referring to the Republican, dismisses these assertions, somewhat. He is an unabashed lover of the Constitution and views the founding document as giving him leave to defend states’ rights, something Shannon ridiculously linked Thursday to Virginia’s segregationist history. Shannon’s implication: Remember? That was states’ rights, too. Then, Shannon comically denied seeking to impugn Cuccinelli with the stain of racism. Well.

Where Shannon impresses is in his zeal to stem child pornography on the Internet. He rattles off statistics on the topic with the ease that others cite their names and addresses. More than 19,000 computers statewide are used to trade child porn. He vows he’d rein in that figure, but then says something startling: he’d prosecute cases himself to draw attention to the issue.

This strikes us as noble but painfully naive. The attorney general is tasked with running a large public law firm with 300 employees, 60 lawyers and a $25-million budget. The boss prosecuting cases might not only risk the appearance of political grandstanding, it might jeopardize judicial outcomes, considering he’d be handling a job ordinarily done by specialists while still trying to manage a vast agency.

This highlights a hand that Shannon has overplayed, hailing his experience as a prosecutor, accumulated over several years at the start of the decade before his election as a Fairfax County delegate in 2003. Cuccinelli has not been a prosecutor. So? He has worked as a criminal defense lawyer and now is a business law attorney and a partner in a Fairfax firm and he has experience ranging from licensing and financing to corporate law, all potentially useful in his next job.

Further, he’s an expert on America’s founding legal document. He knows the importance of fighting gangs, child porn and sexual predators – all emphasized by Shannon – but he recognizes the office and the job as larger. All of this, combined with his principled view of the law, makes Cuccinelli our choice for attorney general.