R. Creigh Deeds may be a man behind the times. Dithering along the campaign trail, Deeds seems to running for governor of an “‘Old, Weird’ Dominion” that’s fallen by the wayside.
His campaign is fumbling because it’s taking cues from a political playbook that’s now a bit out of date.
For the past two decades, Democrats have found statewide success following a formula that calls for ingratiating themselves with rural Virginia, overcoming the region’s skepticism of national Democrats.
Socially liberal suburban Democrats, especially those in ever-expanding Northern Virginia, were asked to suck it up, and sublimate their unease with some of the cues their candidates chose to telegraph their affinity with culturally Confederate Virginia, if that’s what it took to neuter Republicans’ vote-grabbing Culture War rhetoric.Mark Warner, a Northern Virginia venture capitalist with Midwestern roots, famously sponsored a NASCAR team as he successfully courted the rural vote in his winning 2001 gubernatorial run.
And Doug Wilder incredibly charted the course back in 1989. His dashiki in the dustbin for a decade, the once-fiery ‘fro trimmed down, Wilder adopted a genteel persona and fearlessly stumped out in the sticks, occasionally even standing under the Stars and Bars on his way to becoming America’s first black governor since Reconstruction, taking office in the former capital of the Confederacy.Deeds, a son of Shenandoah and a then-unabashed defender of gun owners’ rights, seemed the perfect candidate to implement this winning strategy for another round.The most devout of partisan Democrats – primary voters – bought into the Washington Post’s editorial argument, that Deeds, with his rural pedigree, was the candidate best poised to assemble the coalition needed to keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands, especially given the perceived Achilles heels of his opponents: Terry McAuliffe, a former DNC money man and confidant of the Clintons, and Alexandria’s former state delegate, Brian Moran, saddled with a Boston brogue and a controversial Congressional brother.Rarely mentioned, though, is that the incumbent governor, Tim Kaine, a Minnesota-born, Missouri-raised practicing Catholic won over Virginia without needing to traffic in Warner’s overt cultural symbolism.
“The old, weird America,” as rock critic Greil Marcus grandly dubbed it, is the place from which the oft-haunting sounds of America’s primeval folk music sprang, preserved for posterity by musicologist Harry Smith’s influential anthology in the 1950’s. Rural Virginia, the place that nurtured Piedmont Blues musicians, Bluegrass icon Ralph Stanley and country music’s pioneering Carter Family, is finding its once predominant influence on the wane. Indeed, the Examiner’s Senior Political Analyst Michael Barone’s recently described Virginia as now merely “Southern-accented.Many suburban voters, whom don’t consider themselves Southerners, now dominate Virginia’s electorate. Suburban Richmond and Tidewater are following Northern Virginia’s electoral progression, and becoming more fertile territory for Democrats, though Republicans remain more competitive there than they have been in recent cycles in DC’s bedroom communities.
The root of Deeds’ struggle to nudge those casual Democrats in Surburbia that overran the polls last November in record numbers for Barack Obama to the polls this year may be that, for them, he’s maybe just “too darn country.”
Many are put off by his rural accent and once-cozy relations with the NRA. They’re aware that already carried the state for the president and elected the sitting governor on their own terms. Even Deeds’ frantic attempts to scare up the story that his Republican opponent is in the pocket of the Religious Right – educated, affluent Northern Virginia’s downstate boogeyman – has fallen flat.The reshuffled demographic deck seems stacked against a candidate like R. Creigh Deeds.
If, as polls indicate, Deeds does get clobbered next Tuesday, he could last of his kind, a dinosaur among Virginia Democrats: the denizen of the disappearing “‘Old, Weird’ Dominion.”
