Those of us who have been on the alert for Washington Post news page stories “Macacaing” Virginia Republican governor candidate Bob McDonnell have suddenly encountered a fallow period. The Saturday Post’s print Metro section (at least in my D.C. edition) was devoid of stories on the governor race. Sunday’s Metro section included a page C1 story story headlined “Deeds Touts Himself as Heir to Kaine and Warner.”
It’s something in the nature of an overview of much of the campaign, pegged to the appearance of both governor candidates as well as the Democratic and Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general at the Labor Day parade in the small industrial town of Buena Vista, tucked picturesquely in the Appalachian mountains west of the Shenandoah Valley. The reader is told that Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds has pitched himself as the heir to his two Democratic predecessors, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, especially Warner, and it also mentions policy proposals he has made. It describes McDonnell’s positions lower in the article and devotes less analysis to his campaign strategy than it does to Deeds’s.
The one reference to McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis, the subject of so much breathless description and commentary in the Post’s pages and pixels in late August and early September, comes in the 21st of 24 paragraphs: “The emphasis on Warner and Kaine has led Republicans to accuse Deeds of spending too much time talking about the past, including about former president George W. Bush, whose economic policies McDonnell has praised, and about a controversial graduate thesis written by McDonnell 20 years ago.” Overall, this article struck me as a good example of fair and intelligent campaign coverage.
On the same jump page, C4, the Post has an analysis of the issue of prison jobs and funding and a “Fact Checker” item on a Deeds TV ad running in the Roanoke and Bristol markets charging that McDonnell supported electric power rate increases as attorney general. These two articles seemed to me to do a good job of presenting relevant facts and to provide a basis on which readers can make their own independent judgments about the candidates.
There’s a startling contrast between these stories and the Post’s additional web coverage and its earlier stories which were obviously part of a campaign to “Macaca” McDonnell. It looks like someone made a management decision to switch course.
