“I hope to God you understand this race is winnable.”
Vice President Joe Biden at yesterday’s fundraiser for VA gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds.

Having flogged the nothingburger story of the 20-year-old master’s thesis of VA Attorney General Bob McDonnell to bloody rags, the Washington Post does and abrupt volte face today and blames the lackluster campaign of Democrat candidate Creigh Deeds on flogging Bob McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis to bloody rags.

Republican Robert F. McDonnell has taken a commanding lead over R. Creigh Deeds in the race for governor of Virginia as momentum the Democrat had built with an attack on his opponent’s conservative social views has dissipated, according to a new Washington Post poll.

McDonnell leads 53 to 44 percent among likely voters, expanding on the four-point lead he held in mid-September. Deeds’s advantage with female voters has all but disappeared, and McDonnell has grown his already wide margin among independents. Deeds, a state senator from western Virginia, is widely seen by voters as running a negative campaign, a finding that might indicate that his aggressive efforts to exploit McDonnell’s 20-year-old graduate thesis are turning voters away.

Nowhere in the story does it mention that the thesis that is turning away voters in Virginia is the same thesis that generates 572 Google hits within the Washington Post and was regularly featured on the front page and editorial pages of that paper.

If the old saying “success has many fathers while failure is an orphan” is applied here, one could say that Creigh Deeds has just been stuck with paying child support for the Washington Post’s bastard.

I’m not celebrating a victory yet. Election day is still a ways off and as we’ve learned from past experience if anyone can turn a sure win into an abject defeat it is a Republican candidate. Hopefully, regardless of the outcome of this election, the takeaway is that if you use an incident manufactured by the editorial board of the Washington Post as the centerpiece of your campaign, you have no one but yourself to blame when you fail. And the Washington Post will have no but you to blame either.

California’s race for the Senate is easy for people all across the country to care about, but we’re also going to elect a new Governor next year. Term limited or not, Governor Schwarzenegger has burned his bridges with most of the party and likely will never seek elective office again.

So it’s an open seat, and an open field for both parties this time around. Let’s start with the Democrats. It’s less depressing that way.

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In 2010, Texans either will lead the nation forward according to conservative principle and under conservative leadership, or they will put their trust and faith in the ways of Washington. In the last several weeks, current Texas Governor Rick Perry and U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison - each vying for the Texas Governorship in 2010 - have each made significant public statements that make their positions crystal clear. Perry is for Texas. Hutchison is for Washington.

This past Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Fiscal Conservatism and the Soul of the GOP,” centered around an interview of Governor Perry. In that article, the Governor outlines his view of the current state of affairs and of the appropriate path forward… for Texas and for the nation. It is absolutely rich with solid, well articulated conservative position. For example, he acknowledges that the reason the GOP has “been hurting” is that “they spent too much money. They acted like Democrats.” He gets quite specific, stating “When they passed that pharmaceutical bill for everybody forever—I mean, one of the most expensive entitlement programs that this country’s ever seen before—we started on the road to hell.” Amen.

He blasts Obamacare - calling it “one of the scariest policies.” He touts tort reform. He notes the absurdity of focusing on a flawed immigration plan as a way to “win” hispanic votes, and shows an understanding of that community which represents more than one third of his state demographically. He recognizes good people to follow and miserable people to follow. For example, stating, “I love Sarah Palin… [s]he is substantially more the face of this country than some other people who might want to be…” He points to Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” and the more contemporary book by Amity Shlaes, “The Forgotten Man,” as books currently occupying his thoughts. On the other hand, he notes the squandered opportunities by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he rightfully calls Senator Voinovich (R-OH) a “piece of work,” in response to the Senator’s idiotic and misplaced dismissal of southern conservatives. Finally, he calls out the Obama administration directly, saying, “[t]o me, this is one of the great Frankenstein experimentations in American history. We’ve seen that movie before. It was from 1932 to 1940.”

In short, Perry “gets it.” He swatted issue after issue out of the park - relying on limited government conservatism to make the case for Texas and for the nation, and possibly more importantly, unabashadly calling people out who fail to stand on principle and praising those who do.

Now let’s take a look at a recent op-ed by the Senior Senator from Texas - in which she makes the case for blowing your brains out while sitting around a table with a bunch of Washington insiders rationalizing their way to mediocrity and obsolescence while bowing down at the altar of the national government. Overstatement? Well, go ahead and waste a few minutes of your life reading the uplifting masterpiece she “wrote” (we know some staffer wrote it, but her name’s on it…) in the Austin American-Statesman a few weeks ago. Ok - feel inspired yet? Uh-huh.

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If Sarah Palin had intended to make media heads collectively explode, she couldn’t have planned it better. She called a press conference on short notice, then announced that not only would she not seek a second term as Alaska’s governor, but she intended to resign later this month. All that would remain for her to do is pop some Orville’s, sit back and enjoy the show as the punditocracy begins wildly speculating about that which it does not know. As crazy as this sounds, consider how crazy the reaction has been so far to her announcement

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, claiming she had been talking to people “very close” to Gov. Palin, reported:

“I have been told that she has told her supporters she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn’t like her life. She feels that she needs to raise her family. She’s sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capitol, and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she’s stepping down in order to clear the way for a presidential run. In fact she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.”

Sounds very cut and dried.

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As a Virginian and a member of the Republican Governor’s Association, I’m glad that the Democratic primary is settled and now the campaign for Virginia governor can begin. State Senator Creigh Deeds won the primary last night, after trailing by double digits less than three weeks ago.

The stakes in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial race are the highest ever. Even more than New Jersey, the other major off-year contest, the gubernatorial elections in my backyard are predictive of trends that will play out further into the cycle. I know that many felt our best chance would be against Clinton’s money man, Terry McAuliffe, but this Virginia Republican is not concerned. This race is not going to be about who our opponent is. We will win because of what the Republican Party is, and who and what we represent.

I believe our nominee, Bob McDonnell, is a major rising star in this party, and this race will prove it. For one thing, Bob brings a number of qualities to the race that previous GOP candidates in Virginia did not have. Better still, he carries none of their flaws.

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Texas Governor Rick Perry – like all other Governors – has a responsibility to protect the interests of the people of his state. It should come as no surprise, then, that he endorsed a resolution in the Texas legislature supporting states’ rights under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This topic has been covered by quite a few folks, recently. Pete Randall posted here on RedState an interesting comparison with Georgia (which is doing nothing) and you can catch both transcripts from Rush Limbaugh’s commentary about it and audio clips of Governor Perry on Sean Hannity’s radio show here.

In his support of the measure, Governor Perry stated, “I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.”

Well said.

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Here’s a nice little tidbit: the so-called “stimulus” bill includes a provision that allows state legislatures (like, perhaps, South Carolina’s) to override their Governors’ (like, perhaps, Mark Sanford, R-SC) decision not to accept borrowed bailout funds, simply by passing a concurrent resolution.

In other words, state legislatures can override the GOP Governors out there who have kept their respective spines and integrity intact, and force the state to accept this dirty money over the wishes of that state’s chief executive.

The text, taken from pages 490-91 here (warning: massive .pdf file), reads as follows:

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The Texas Republican gubernatorial primary race has just gotten more interesting. The Dallas Morning News is reporting that Sarah Palin has endorsed Texas Governor Rick Perry for reelection. According to Wayne Slater, who wrote the Morning News story, Gov. Perry’s campaign is using the Palin endorsement to try to peel away conservative support among women for Sen. Kay Baily Hutchison, Perry’s main opponent in the GOP primary contest.

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