For Democrats who want their party to escape the “urban elitist” label, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert Creigh Deeds is ideal: He’s a longtime state delegate (i.e., representative) from a stoplight-free county along the West Virginia border with only 5,000 residents. He lives in a house his ancestors built in 1740 and owns a mule named Harry S. Truman. He describes himself — with a twang — as a “middle-of-the-road guy from rural Virginia” and actually beat out a Republican for the NRA’s endorsement in his unsuccessful 2005 race for attorney general. (That Republican was Bob McDonnell, who won the race by a few hundred votes, and whom Deeds is facing again in this year’s gubernatorial race.)

But recent history should dissuade us of the notion that rural is synonymous with conservative, or that a small hometown automatically translates to preferring small government. Bill Clinton perfected the glad-handing, rural good ol’ boy routine, and before him there was the Georgia peanut farmer who kept reminding us of his deep humility. As with them, a close look at Creigh Deeds’s record shows that behind the aw-shucks persona is a familiar character: the sharp-elbowed, supremely ambitious pol always looking out for the next deal and his own interest.

Deeds clearly relishes and cultivates the apolitical image of a simple country lawyer. When asked whether his inability to raise funds while the General Assembly (legislature) is in session would hurt his gubernatorial bid, he responded, “I can’t put my ambition above my responsibilities.” While discussing his campaigning style, he said, “I’m not sure you can be too earnest.”

But flexible principles have been at least as useful in Deeds’s rise as touting the importance of being earnest. You wouldn’t be reading this article if the Washington Post hadn’t endorsed Deeds (in the Democratic primary race) on May 22, declaring the 17-year lawmaker, previously little known in the northern Virginia suburbs, to be the designated successor to the supremely popular former governor Mark Warner and the moderately popular current governor, Tim Kaine. In that editorial, Post editors particularly saluted his introduction of “legislation to create a bipartisan commission to draw up voting districts.”

Yet Deeds owes his first election to public office, in 1991, to blatantly partisan redistricting — “brutal,” in the words of the Post — that paired 14 Republican incumbents against each other and one Republican against an independent incumbent. Then there was four-term Republican delegate Emmett Hanger, who found after redistricting that “just a handful of precincts” were left from his old district — grafted onto heavily Democratic areas, some of which were several hours away.

“It was definitely gerrymandered to create an opportunity for Creigh,” says Hanger, now a state senator. “He was then Commonwealth’s Attorney, letting it be known he would like to be governor someday.” Hanger says he bears Deeds no ill will, as the defeat gave him time to spend with his family, rejuvenated his business, and eventually led to his election to the state senate. But he notices that bipartisan redistricting only “became a part of [Deeds’s] agenda when Republicans exercised gerrymandering in 2001.” In fact, there seems to be a proportional relationship between Deeds’s interest in bipartisan redistricting and Republicans’ power in the state.

Deeds punctuated his workload in the legislature (creating a 14-member Virginia Sheep Industry Board, sponsoring a bill to recognize Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs as pets, making it a “class 3 misdemeanor” to interfere with a person who is lawfully fishing) with occasional media-friendly bits of nanny-state nagging: For example, he voted for a law allowing police to stop and ticket motorists for failing to buckle their seatbelts, and a ban on “mass murderer” trading cards; and he sponsored a bill requiring any person holding a yard sale, auction, or fundraiser near a road where the speed limit is more than 35 mph to notify the local governing board.

But Deeds’s perception of the state’s interest has always aligned with the interest of his district, which in turn has always aligned with his ambition. In the mid-1990s, there was a push to bring riverboat gambling to Virginia. It was defeated in the General Assembly, and Deeds was one of 55 members of the 100-member House of Delegates who voted no. Then pro-gambling forces started recanvassing the opposition, and Deeds indicated that he would flip to support it if 2 percent of the tax revenue was steered towards a project in his district. Deeds insisted that his constituents’ needs justified the deal, but the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot summarized it in a brutal manner: “If riverboat gambling gets a second chance this year in the General Assembly, it will be the result of a simple rule that most legislators don’t like to admit: Money equals votes. . . . The deal was too good to pass up for Del. Creigh Deeds.”

In October 2006, Deeds joined Hirschler Fleischer P.C., a Richmond-based law firm with a small lobbying presence. Shortly thereafter, the Virginia State Bar’s standing committee on legal ethics erased a 50-year-old rule that prohibited state legislators from working alongside lobbyists at law firms. At the time, the Washington Post explained that “without the proposed change, Deeds would be violating state ethics rules.” This was a generous way of saying that he either had already violated or was about to violate those rules, and he wanted the restrictions to be loosened and the committee to grandfather in his employment. Deeds later denied that he had pressured the state bar to change the rule, but conceded that if it hadn’t done so, he would have had to quit the firm. Deeds assured the public, “If I thought I were doing anything unethical, I would step away from it.” In fact, Deeds did step away from that firm in June 2007, moving to another firm that didn’t employ lobbyists.

In this year’s Democratic primary, Deeds criticized one of his rivals, former delegate Brian Moran, for taking money from “tainted” defense contractors, even though Deeds himself had sought donations from those same contractors just four days earlier. When pressed, Deeds “clarified” his accusation: The taint on Moran, he said, came from the defense contractors’ ties to his brother, the controversy-attracting U.S. congressman Jim Moran. (Jim Moran, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, had steered earmarks to clients of the lobbying firm PMA Group, a major donor. The FBI is now investigating PMA Group.) “I don’t have a brother in Congress,” Deeds said, “and I guess that’s just sour grapes on my part but I don’t think it’s an unfair criticism.” In other words, the companies’ donations to Moran were tainted, but donations to Deeds would have been clean.

Similarly, Deeds criticized the other primary candidate, Terry McAuliffe, for taking money from executives of the controversial utility company Dominion Virginia Power — and then accepted $5,000 from Dominion Virginia Power’s political action committee the following day. A spokesman for the Deeds campaign declined to respond to multiple queries on these matters.

More fundamentally, Deeds’s perception of what’s best for his district shifted dramatically leftward when he started preparing to run for governor. He knew that to win the Democratic primary, he would have to appeal to voters in the significantly more liberal northern suburbs. During his run for attorney general in 2005, by contrast, he won the nomination without a primary, so he could tailor his message for a bipartisan statewide audience all along. Deeds’s ads that year touted his “conservative values”: teaching abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage as “moral obligations and not matters of personal opinion or personal choice”; putting before the voters a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage; broadly defined Second Amendment rights; and a ban on partial-birth abortion. Now he says supporting the gay-marriage vote was “a mistake,” he opposes all limits on abortion, and he supports closing the “gun show loophole” on firearms sales, citing the Virginia Tech shootings — even though the shooter in that tragedy did not purchase his weapons at a gun show, so even if the proposed restriction had been in effect, it would not have prevented the massacre. It is unlikely that the Creigh Deeds of 2005 would recognize the Creigh Deeds of 2009, much less vote for him.

Deeds’s campaigns, past and present, have always relied on convincing voters that he’s simple, homespun, honest, and humble — the Ben Matlock of state politics. But it’s hard to picture that television lawyer trying the Machiavellian move Deeds did in 2005, when he pushed legislation to repeal Virginia’s unique one-term-and-you’re-out limit for governors. Theoretically, Deeds, then running for attorney general, wanted to help Warner’s successors serve longer — but he made sure the new rule would apply only to governors elected in 2009 or later. Despite his high-minded rhetoric, Deeds’s proposal — which was ultimately rejected — would have meant that the first governor permitted a second term might just happen to be himself.

This year’s race is close, and Deeds could end up falling just short to Bob McDonnell, as he did in 2005. But if not, the country lawyer’s goals may go well beyond the Commonwealth. As a teenager, he told the host of a locally televised high-school quiz bowl that his future ambitions included becoming president. The record suggests that few forces on earth are quite as relentless as Creigh Deeds’s ambition.

– Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot for National Review Online.