RICHMOND — History told Virginia Democrats it wasn’t going to be easy.

For the past 32 years, the party that wins the White House has lost the governorship — a trend that often portends shifts in national politics.

In narrow triumph, Dems push through landmark legislation

Fourth-graders are not progressing in their capacity to perform rudimentary arithmetic, mirroring a malady that long has afflicted Democrats. The results for schoolkids came in Wednesday from federally funded achievement tests, and for Democrats a day earlier with the passage of a Senate Finance Committee health care bill to the sound of triumphant cries among the vacuous left.

Prospects for a Republican sweep in the state’s marquee races brighten almost by the minute as Democrats struggle against drags at the top of the state and national parties. R. Creigh Deeds and President Barack Obama look like a dating service mismatch, each racing for the door as though fleeing an unwanted goodnight kiss.

Tingles are racing up legs in that bristling sphere known as the left, this time over Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell’s utterance of the queen mother of dirty words. The dread term spilled from the same mouth McDonnell kisses his wife with during a radio interview last week. Fudge.

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Most students attending Central Virginia public schools will have a chance to watch President Barack Obama’s live back-to-school address Tuesday, but some will have to wait until school administrators review the recording first.

In the spring, consultant Frank Luntz admonished the Republican Party to defeat President Barack Obama’s health care reform initiative, including national health insurance (also called universal health care or a single-payer system), according to Politico. If that’s true, Republicans are putting party politics before the needs of the country, and they may be winning the debate. 

A trio of Democrats seeking office huddled Wednesday to talk among themselves about education, providing an evening’s respite from the health care wars but not from rhetoric beaten to a pulp by the raw might of partisan twaddle. The federal No Child Left Behind law is damnable (kind of), public schools are positively starved for cash, student-teacher ratios must be kept low and hang those accursed unfunded mandates.

Contrasts continue to strike. The Golden Corral soon will open its gates in the West End, another indicator that development will not soon abate in that section of Waynesboro where pulses still can be detected. Eastward, Roses, the discount clothing and retail store, is venturing back into Willow Oak Plaza. A smattering of small shops has opened in the vicinity.

As the president of the United States drifted from the heavens to Blountville, Tenn., and then a Kroger grocery store in Bristol, resisters wilted, deals bloomed and a path opened to a dream and a nightmare, that of nationalized heath care. The form of it is surely far more diluted than Barack Obama prefers, but systematically dismantling an economic system is no easy thing, not even for a fellow whose gifts are a mix of Chicago and the celestial.

An editorial piece by the Richmond Times-Dispatch published July 20 in The News Virginian (“Plumber’s point pertinent”) reminds me of a liberal tactic that is being repeated today. 

RICHMOND — The Democratic candidate in Virginia’s gubernatorial race is competing with the health care debate in Congress for the allegiance of party activists and volunteers in the state who vaulted Barack Obama to victory last November.

Statewide and Shenandoah Valley turnout estimates for today’s Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary are in the single-digit range of registered voters, election officials said.

This week’s opinion marketplace

A rough ride to recovery or further recession into the political backwaters advances Tuesday from trot to canter for Republicans here and elsewhere. This places upon the shoulders of the GOP’s carefully coiffed Virginia gubernatorial candidate a burden of hope that he so far appears able to carry though his party falters.