Another friend of Obama goes under the bus, this time in the Virginia gubernatorial race,
Virginia Democratic candidate R. Creigh Deeds said Friday that he was confused and frustrated by statements from senior aides to President Obama that Deeds had rejected their advice in running his campaign for governor as some state party activists denounced what they saw as a betrayal by advisers to a president they helped elect a year ago.
Deeds said he was puzzled by the comments from unnamed Obama administration officials who said that he had virtually no chance to defeat Republican Robert F. McDonnell and that such a loss would reflect on Deeds’s failings rather than on Obama’s popularity.
They said that Deeds, who has been trailing in the polls, coordinated poorly with the White House and failed to adequately reach out to the constituencies that helped Obama become the first Democrat in 40 years to win Virginia.
“It is frustrating to read, because that’s not what we’ve been hearing from anybody over there,” Deeds said. “I’m just not sure where the talk is coming from. It just doesn’t make sense… There’s been no disagreements between us of which I’m aware.”
The Democratic National Committee, under the leadership of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), has invested heavily in the race, and Obama will rally with Deeds in Norfolk on Tuesday.
Kaine called the remarks “not helpful.”
“You don’t do this for as long as we’ve done it and for as long as Creigh’s done it without having your own internal sense of having good days and bad days,” he said.
The “unnamed officials” are probably panicking over the latest poll by Survey USA which has conservative Republican Bob McDonnell leading Deeds – who has successfully been associated with Obama in the minds of Virginia voters by McDonnell – by a whopping 19%.
At this point, the Obama team is trying to do damage control. Virginia was considered a bellweather for the Obama sweep last year – a state that had been reliably Republican for the past two decades, but which has taken on a much more purplish tint in recent years due to many liberal northeasterners moving into the suburbs around Washington D.C. The fact that Obama won Virginia pretty handily (52.6% to McCain’s 46.3%) showed Obama’s popularity with “moderate” parts of the country.
Conversely, the fact that Deeds is now being smashed by McDonnell, and much of this due to the Republican’s successful campaign to cast Deeds as an Obama-style fiscal whackjob, scared the daylights out of the Obama team. Virginia, once the new wave for Democrats, is now the rising tide for Republicans, where not only is McDonnell easily besting Deeds, but the two other big ticket races are seeing Bolling (for Lt.Gov) and Cuccinelli (for AttyGen) best their respective opponents by similar margins.
As a result, the Obama team seems to be trying to distance itself as much as it plausibly can from Deeds, since an Obama-approved candidate getting roundly thumped in a purple state would be the proof in the pudding of the unpopularity of Obama and his policies – unpopularity that the MSM tries to hide with softball questions, puff pieces, and cooked polls engineered by MSM outlets. But you can’t hide election results (at least not yet) – and those results will make a lot of thinking people think that Obama is definitely past his prime. It’ll be interesting to see if Obama’s rally with Deeds next Tuesday gets cancelled due to some “emergency” that requires the President’s immediate attention. When Virginia goes solidly conservative GOP, expect a lot of overflow for conservatives in 2010 – especially if Hoffman in NY-23 upsets the left-wing GOP candidate and the Democrat and takes that district for the Conservative Party.
Which can only be a good thing.
Cross-posted at the Baby Seal Club
