Message still point of trouble for Deeds

RICHMOND — Thanks to a college thesis his Republican foe wrote 20 years ago, Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has a chance to reset the governor’s race and drive home a defining campaign message.

Now, all he needs is the message.

The Washington Post’s scoop last week exposing Bob McDonnell’s writings that working women and feminists undermine traditional families rattled the race just before Labor Day, when candidates traditionally begin their sprint to Election Day.

McDonnell commanded the race for most of the summer, building his own narrative on central issues: jobs in a troubled economy and the state’s beleaguered highway system. Deeds spent weeks after his surprisingly easy Democratic primary victory raising cash and rebuilding his campaign staff.

By mid-August, a statewide poll showed McDonnell ahead by 7 percentage points, but with an unusually large segment of Virginia’s electorate disinterested in its off-off-year politics.

With the thesis stirring up the race, Deeds has the chance to define himself — and McDonnell — for the first time to a large swath of voters just now putting the lazy days of summer behind them and tuning in.

“This thesis clearly puts Bob’s record into context,’’ Deeds said at a news conference featuring women angered by McDonnell’s writings. “The path he wrote about in 1989 is the path he followed as a legislator.’’

But political experts say it will take more than controversy over McDonnell’s statements to land Deeds in the governor’s office.

“You have to give people a reason to vote for you, and you have to give them a reason that the other person is not the best choice,’’ said Steve Jarding, a lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Jarding masterminded Mark Warner’s gubernatorial victory in 2001 and Democrat Jim Webb’s shocking, narrow upset of Republican Sen. George Allen three years ago.

The clamor over McDonnell’s thesis gives Deeds a break at a critical moment. First, it put McDonnell’s campaign on the defensive, forcing him to answer questions about writings he has dismissed as “an academic exercise.’’ Second, it awoke Democratic and liberal activists who were either exhausted or complacent after the 2008 triumph, or were preoccupied with battles in Congress over health and energy legislation.

“This caused people to sit up, read the article, pay a little attention and get engaged in the race in a way they weren’t,’’ said Monica Dixon, a senior adviser to the Deeds campaign.

But what issue or message will eventually define Deeds’ campaign and compel Virginians to elect him? No. 1 on most minds is jobs. Deeds has hitched his job development ideas to transportation.

McDonnell has a 19-page white paper on transportation. He claims he can address a backlog of deferred highway construction needs well over $100 billion and growing and raise nary a tax.

Critics note plenty of holes in his proposals. Shifting a share of northern Virginia’s sales tax receipts would take cash from education, public safety and health care to and put it into asphalt. Selling Virginia’s state-owned liquor stores is an idea the General Assembly has repeatedly rejected. Tolling northbound lanes of Interstates 85 and 95 at the North Carolina line is something transportation officials say federal law does not currently allow. And before the state can capture royalties from oil and gas production off the Virginia Coast, Congress would have to approve it.

Deeds’ funding proposals are much more general. If legislators can reach the transportation funding compromise that has eluded them the past 10 years, he would sign it as governor. Just don’t ask him how he wants it done.

“I’m not going to throw up lightning rods,’’ he said, bristling when pressed in a recent interview with Associated Press reporters and editors. “You might want to play a game of gotcha, but that’s not the way leadership works.’’

Whether McDonnell encounters lasting trouble from his 93-page treatise is uncertain.

He was a 34-year-old former Army officer when he submitted it for a combined law and master’s degree from Regent University in Virginia Beach, founded by Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster who also created the Christian Coalition.

Besides proclaiming career women and feminists detrimental to traditional families, McDonnell wrote that governments are warranted in discriminating against “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators’’ to protect heterosexual, two-parent families. He offered a 15-point plan for Republicans to advance the aims, and over 14 years in the Virginia House of Delegates he has sought to enact many of those points.

In a 1½-hour conference call with reporters Monday, McDonnell renounced much of what he wrote. He said experiences in his own life and those of his two grown working daughters — one of them an Iraq war veteran — changed his views on women in the workplace.

Both campaigns and their allied partisan political action committees are already in the game in big ways. Advertising attacks and counterattacks, just getting started, will soon dominate television screens.

Both sides’ budgets to pursue their ad blitzkriegs through Election Day will be virtually unlimited, a reflection of the high national stakes the election represents.

The Democratic Governors Association invested $3.5 million into attacks on McDonnell last spring, and the Democratic National Committee, headed by Gov. Tim Kaine, last week pledged at least $5 million for Deeds and the Democratic ticket. That doesn’t count campaign appearances for Deeds with President Barack Obama.

The Republican Governors Association plowed $2.5 million into the PAC running the ads against Deeds and gave McDonnell $1 million in March. But all of that combined is only about half as much as the Republican National Committee plans to throw behind McDonnell and the GOP this fall.