The Washington Post’s enthusiastic endorsement of Democrat Creigh Deeds on Sunday was welcomed by the struggling Deeds campaign, but was also seen as an opportunity by Virginia conservatives to tie the Democrat’s candidacy to a newspaper they view as liberal. “Mr. Deeds,” the Post said in its endorsement, “has run an enormous and possibly fatal political risk by saying bluntly that he would support legislation to raise new taxes dedicated to transportation.”
That was music to the ears of many Republicans and conservatives. “It’s clarifying,” Republican Party of Virginia spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Examiner. “There is no question that Creigh Deeds wants to raise taxes. The Post thinks that’s keen. If you look at it that way, frankly, we’re happy about the endorsement.”
Murtaugh and other Republicans — traditionally cautious when publicly discussing one of the nation’s most powerful newspapers — were unusually bellicose Sunday. They accused the paper of trying to sway the election unfairly. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Bob McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin said in an e-mail. But Deeds, who has trailed by between seven and nine points in several recent statewide polls, welcomed the endorsement. “People around our campaign are definitely buzzing about that,” Deeds spokesman Jared Leopold said Sunday.
Conservative commenter Jed Babbin wrote on his Human Events blog Sunday that the Post endorsement was “a self-parody of liberal hyperbole and inconsistency.” Many Republicans and conservatives were furious when, in 2004, the newspaper spilled gallons of ink when then-Sen. George Allen called a dark-skinned Democratic operative “macaca.”
Many liberals and Democrats — includingthe Post editorial board — saw the remark as latent racism. Republicans saw a gaffe inflated into an election-changing blunder by Democrats helped by the Post. Earlier this year, Examiner Columnist Michael Barone ignited a brief exchange with Post writers when he coined the verb “to macaca” to describe the way the Post was writing about McDonnell’s 1989 conservative Christian thesis.
Sunday’s Post endorsement went back to that well, saying that McDonnell had “disparaged working women, homosexuals, ‘fornicators’ ” and, as governor, would flirt with creating a theocracy in Virginia. “They’re trying to macaca McDonnell,” Babbin told The Examiner. “And it’s not working.”
