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 here's
only one opinion that's nearly universal here in the Virginia GOP:
Fire Jim Gilmore.
The vast majority
of Republican activists, from the top down, blame Gilmore for the
state of the Virginia governor's race. Some are still angry about
his mishandling of the budget squabble earlier this year, or his
grousing about the state's economic troubles over the past six months,
or his failure to inject former Attorney General Mark Earley's campaign
with the money they needed early on to combat Democrat Mark Warner's
$17 million-plus TV ad blitz.
"Jim Gilmore
had all the tools he needed to help Mark Earley win this race —
RNC coffers full to the brim, a party that reunited after a tough
primary, and a candidate that's more attractive than Gilmore ever
could be," says one GOP county chairman. "As he's done
in so many other cases, Gilmore squandered away the tools he had,
and it's conservatives who are going to suffer."
The other two
Virginia races, for lieutenant governor and attorney general, were
thought of as sure victories for the GOP in the summer. After the
Democratic primary, Republican nominees Jay Katzen and Jerry Kilgore
had the luck to face two of the most liberal Democrats to run in
the state since the 1970's. Kilgore will cruise to victory over
lawyer Don McEachin, but polls suggest that Katzen, a state senator
with a penchant for star-spangled rhetoric, will lose to Tim Kaine,
the former mayor of Richmond who has a soft spot for gun control,
gay marriage, abortion, and rolling back the death penalty. Some
GOPers privately hope that it's Kaine, not Warner, who becomes the
face of the Democratic party in Virginia over the next four years.
As it stands
today, Earley can still win in this race — but it'd have to
be a Bret Schundler-style victory, a come-from-behind shocker. Of
the six different sources for nonpartisan media polls conducted
in the past three weeks, only those conducted by the Washington
Post show Warner with a wide lead in the race. The other four,
polls from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Mason-Dixon Polling
& Research, and WJLA/ABC-7 TV show a much slimmer margin between
the two candidates, frequently with percentage leads for Warner
falling within the margin of error. The most recent poll, conducted
by WJLA, showed typical results, with Warner receiving 50% of support
from likely and registered voters, and Earley receiving 46%, with
a 4.5% margin of error. The wisdom on the battleground holds that
this is really a five-point race, despite the Post's repeated
emphasis on their own double-digit Warner margins (an oddity noted
this weekend by the Post's own unrepentantly clueless Old
Dominion reporter, Robert Melton).
If Earley were
to pull off a slim victory, it would probably come as a gift from
Hampton Roads, the southeastern portion of the state. Earley is
a Hampton Roads native who represented parts of Chesapeake and Virginia
Beach in the state senate for a decade, and campaign adviser Chris
LaCivita has said that the 1.5 million people on the peninsula and
in South Hampton Roads are critical to Earley's success. While Earley
may have recovered some ground in Southwest Virginia, where Warner
made headway after an ongoing flirtation with the NRA and sportsmen
groups, no GOP candidate can afford to have losses in the Tidewater
region against a Northern Virginia Democrat like Warner. Earley's
attacks on Warner's support for a $900 million tax-hike/transportation
referendum in Northern Virginia also comes into play here, as Warner
has said he would let Hampton Roads voters follow suit if the general
assembly put the question on the ballot.
Mark Earley
came into this race with the opportunity to become one of the most
articulate, attractive, and outstandingly conservative governors
in the nation. Many in the media labeled him as the second coming
of George Allen — but Earley was never one to mimic Allen's
aw-shucks style, and journalists are quick to forget that Governor
Allen wasn't the close friend of conservatism in 1993 that he is
today. Instead of the smashmouth tactics of Jim Gilmore, Earley's
candidacy supplied a more unique persona — a missionary who
challenged Ferdinand Marcos's regime in the Phillippines, Earley
was frequently endorsed by NAACP chapters and local unions during
his stay in the state senate, and in the 1997 elections, Earley
won significantly more votes from women and minority populations
than either Gilmore or Lieutenant Governor John Hager. An intellectual
conservative who reaches out to the inner cities and has a lifetime
of work in Virginia, Earley's campaign held all the promise of a
great administration for the ideals of the right.
Throughout
the campaign, Earley stayed proudly loyal to Gilmore's decidedly
mixed legacy. While Hager blasted Gilmore's policies throughout
his primary campaign, voted with the anti-Gilmore forces in the
state senate, and split several moderate Republicans out of the
party, Earley still didn't once criticize the Governor, for his
policies or tactics. Republicans outside of the Old Dominion rained
praise on Gilmore for his ingenious victory in Virginia's 4th District
race, and rumors of internal bickering between the RNC and the White
House were hushed. Earley even showed willingness to campaign with
Gilmore throughout the state, despite the fact that the soon to
be ex-governor's poll ratings are hardly a help on the campaign
trail.
See how the
loyal are repaid: In Sunday's Washington Post, Gilmore claimed
that Warner simply "outdid" Earley, in his campaign's
actions and strategy. Again, that's Chairman of the RNC Jim Gilmore,
speaking before Election Day, admitting that maybe Terry McAuliffe
and the Connecticut Yankee just ran a better campaign.
There must
be some grand strategy to Gilmore's actions — why he allowed
Democrats to completely control the spin surrounding the budget
battle in the state this summer, why he forced Earley's campaign
to run on fumes, getting outspent 2-1 despite the flush RNC coffers,
why he made more dour pronouncements about the state's economic
status just last week. It's probably the tactics of the truly politically
adept, that make no logical sense to any other observer.
Everyone in
Virginia remembers "No Car Tax," the campaign slogan that
made many brand Gilmore a fount of political wisdom for discovering
a real silver-bullet issue. After the polls close tonight, many
Virginia Republicans will be left wondering if Gilmore can win anything
without one.
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