The Examiner‘s editorial board spoke yesterday with former Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor. After a wide-ranging discussion on various issues in the race, we asked McDonnell about the recent controversy regarding his master’s thesis from 1989. Although it has not put a dent in his poll numbers yet, the Washington Post has been working hard to make the issue central to the campaign.
When we asked McDonnell exactly how he has changed in the 20 years since he wrote the 70-page document, he offered a very lengthy answer. Although he disavowed some of the more incendiary assertions he had made in the thesis, he also stuck to his guns regarding the central thesis of the paper. What follows is a partial transcript of his thoughts on the subject.
“The subject of the thesis was that there are government policies — particularly the ones at that time that came out of the Great Society, and the incredible welfare policies from that — that appeared to be not helpful to maintaining an intact family. That was the thesis. And I think that was true then and it’s true today. In fact, from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama to Kaine to McDonnell, everybody has said something similar to this: that the family is the bedrock of society, and that as the family goes, so goes the nation.
“I think there’s a broad agreement on that — that it is a legitimate and noble policy goal to have policies that strengthen and support the family. I think that was the basic premise of the thesis, and that’s the basic premise that I have now. We don’t want to do anything in our code in Virginia that’s going to undermine the family, make it harder for fathers to stay in the home, make it harder for moms to take care of their kids or do anything to incentivise a split in the family. The old AFDC [welfare] policies did that.
“That’s why, just fast-forwarding for a minute, I guess the best evidence I could give as to what I did based on my beliefs is what I did in 1995. I carried the welfare reform bill for Governor [George] Allen. It was a historic change in Virginia’s welfare law. We had a Democrat majority in both houses, and after quite a bit of back and forth, we were able to get a comprehensive welfare reform bill passed in 1995. And the next year, based on the Wisconsin bill of Tommy Thompson, and the Virginia bill of George Allen, Bill Clinton signed essentially the same bill — with caps on lifetime benefits and mandatory work and all of those things. So I would say that the issues I was discussing in the thesis, about having welfare policies that are supportive of the family, and so forth, I think those were enacted into law by a pretty broad cross-section of the General Assembly in 1995.
“When I said that it changed — there were inferences in the thesis that I was not supportive of women working. And I think that’s — those inferences were ones that I look at differently now. My daughter’s been in Iraq, I’ve encouraged both of my oldest two daughters to get master’s degrees. I think that over these last twenty years now, there have been ways that we’ve found to help support families throughout society and I fully and wholeheartedly support women in the workforce. The inferences were to the contrary in the thesis.
“But as far as my belief that protecting human life is important, I’ve been the same for 20 years. I’m strongly pro-life and I will be a pro-life governor…It was a 70-page thesis, and I think a few people pulled out two or three sentences and said, Aha, that’s descriptive of the entire belief system! And that’s not true. The essence of the thesis, about making sure government policies don’t undermine the family, I think is still an important question today. And as governor, I’ll make sure that we continue to do everything we can to support families. Because the stronger the family unit can be, I think the less money government has to spend to attend to the breakdown of the family — whether it’s welfare or social services or criminal justice services — those things generally come part and parcel with family breakdown. I think there’s a fair amount of documentation on that.
“When I say I’ve changed, most people go back, ‘What did you think, write 20 years ago?’ I’ve been tempered by raising five kids, by being 14 years in the legislature, by being Attorney General. And I’ve found practical ways to get things done. I’ve cast probably 70, 80 thousand votes, I’ve introduced 400 bills in the House, 100 as the Attorney General, and I think those speak pretty clearly about my views on virtually every subject out there. My only contention was that some of the conclusions that certain people had reached by reading one or two lines of this thesis, and then to suggest that I had some kind of radical agenda for America was just very disingenuous…The best evidence for what you believe is what you have actually done…”
