Back to the future with McDonnell

On the windy morning Bob McDonnell and the GOP ticket blew into Danville last week, a young woman wearing a dark-blue, long-sleeve McDonnell T-shirt struggled to hold the flag of Virginia in the swirling breeze.

As other members of the ticket praised him, McDonnell took a moment to help Julia Mayhew secure the state flag to its pole.

The political winds didn’t blow in McDonnell’s favor this year. Instead, he knew which winds would carry him to victory. McDonnell followed in the political footsteps of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, two Democrats who knew that Virginians wanted their next governor to be a jobs governor.

Along the way, McDonnell was able to brush aside his controversial master’s thesis and avoid criticism for using the “F” word during a radio broadcast.

An inadvertent curse word or hundreds of pages of retro-social theory in an old college thesis couldn’t overcome high unemployment and concerns people had about the future.

McDonnell and the Republicans were helped by the national Democrats and history. Since 1977, Virginians have voted for the gubernatorial candidate of the party that lost the previous presidential election. Creigh Deeds was trying to become the first Democrat since 1965 to win the Executive Mansion the year after a Democrat won the White House.

But Washington Democrats have made it tough for their party in purple states like Virginia. The climate change and health care bills have scared and angered people of all political stripes.

Deeds didn’t help his case with the master’s thesis controversy. While McDonnell’s views on working women were clearly out of step with the way most people — including McDonnell — live their lives, Deeds inadvertently waded into the divisive social issues that have destroyed Democratic candidates over the years.

This was especially curious for a man from rural Virginia (Deeds even lived and worked in Danville for a year). Deeds should have known how politically toxic those issues were to Democratic candidates.

It’s hard to say what the Democrats could have done to run away from the bad news — both real and imagined — coming out of Washington over the past year. Maybe one of Deeds’ Democratic primary opponents could have better used the campaigns’ real issues — transportation and economic development.

But that didn’t happen.

McDonnell ran a generally upbeat, mainstream campaign on the issues that Virginians cared about this year, and the voters rewarded him and his party with a sweep for the ages.