McDonnell, a poised presence, could lift the GOP

As a young Army lieutenant stationed in Germany, Bob McDonnell made the Guinness Book of World Records.

He organized his hospital unit to carry a 120-pound woman on a stretcher on a record-breaking trek — 93.4 miles in 32 hours.

Thirty-two years later, McDonnell is doing a different kind of heavy lifting, as he seeks to break Democrats' eight-year hold on Virginia's governorship.

Since word surfaced seven weeks ago of his controversial graduate-school thesis, McDonnell has sought to focus the campaign on jobs creation in an economy battered by a deep recession.

That strategy appears to be working. Recent polls show McDonnell with enough of a lead over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds, a state senator from Bath County, that he is cautioning supporters against overconfidence.

"I've told my staff to forget the polls," McDonnell said in a recent interview in Verona, at a picnic sponsored by U.S. Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-6th.

"We've got a hard-working opponent. We are opposed by President Obama and Tim Kaine," the governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, "who have considerable resources. The only way we are going to win is to stay focused on our message and do an absolutely A-plus get-out-the-vote effort."

On the campaign trail, the former attorney general is cool and unflappable, traveling the state in a Ford Expedition with a McD4VA license plate.

In his trademark button-down shirt and khakis, he moves slowly through a crowd, pausing to shake hands and make conversation with each prospective voter. He also exhibits a keen sense of humor.

In February, during a dinner with reporters who cover state politics, McDonnell poked fun at one of his formative political alliances. He said he was so worried about the Democrats' media coverage and fundraising that he "called Pat Robertson and asked if he could direct a hurricane" to their Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.

McDonnell, 55, caught a break in his quest for governor when Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling decided not to challenge him for the Republican nomination, but instead run for re-election.

It wasn't the first time good fortune blessed McDonnell's family. In 1912, according to family lore, one of McDonnell's grandfathers got sick and missed a voyage — on the Titanic.

McDonnell was born in Philadelphia but grew up in the Mount Vernon area of Fairfax County. A Roman Catholic, he attended Bishop Ireton High School, where he played wide receiver and defensive back for the football team.

In November 1971, McDonnell's Bishop Ireton squad faced off against the undefeated T.C. Williams High School powerhouse team memorialized in the film "Remember the Titans."

Ireton lost 26-8, but McDonnell scored his team's only points, on a 63-yard touchdown reception and a two-point conversion.

Scott O'Brien, quarterback on the Bishop Ireton team, says McDonnell was a "tough and feisty" football player. When he scored the two-point conversion against T.C. Williams, McDonnell "was hit so hard that he vomited on the sidelines, but he was back in the game on the next play," O'Brien said. "He probably didn't weigh 150 pounds dripping wet."

Now a high school administrator in Myrtle Beach, S.C., O'Brien also remembers McDonnell's sense of humor.

"He had a nickname for everyone," O'Brien said. McDonnell called O'Brien "Sonny" after Washington Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen.

"He had great people skills," O'Brien said of McDonnell. "Everybody congregated around him."

McDonnell received an ROTC scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, where he earned a degree in management.

He spent 21 years in the Army, 4 1/2 years on active duty and the rest in the Army Reserve. He retired as a lieutenant colonel.

While in the Army, he attended night school at Boston University and received a master's degree in business administration.

Out of the Army, he went to work for American Hospital Supply. He managed operations in Atlanta, Chicago and Kansas City. By 1985, the hospital-supply industry was hit by turmoil and McDonnell's GI Bill benefits were about to expire.

McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, a former Washington Redskins cheerleader, decided to return to Virginia and make their home in Virginia Beach.

They had come to like the area while he was stationed at Fort Eustis in Newport News. McDonnell also was attracted by Regent University, then called CBN University after founder Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network.

"I had gone to a Catholic school as a kid and to Notre Dame as an undergraduate," McDonnell said. "I liked the fact that Regent was focused on values and ethics, also that the public-policy area was focused on looking at the traditions and history that our Founders brought to the nation. I was particularly interested in the Judeo-Christian traditions of America."

McDonnell studied public policy and communications and then added a major in law the next year when the university opened a law school.

In 1988, McDonnell got a summer internship on Capitol Hill working with the Republican Policy Committee led by Rep. Jerry Lewis of California.

Although the GI Bill paid for McDonnell's graduate-school tuition, he held several jobs to help support his family, which had grown to include three daughters. Among the jobs, he worked in sales for The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk.

In 1989, McDonnell submitted his 93-page master's thesis, titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade."

Deeds has seized upon the document, terming it demeaning to working women. In campaign stops and television ads, the Democrat has hammered McDonnell, saying the thesis crystallized a brand of social conservatism that is out of touch with Virginia values.

In much of the thesis, McDonnell explored the tension between what he saw as a governmental interest in preserving the traditional family and the Republican tenet of limited government.

Forty pages in, McDonnell criticized the notion of additional tax credits for child care.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children."

McDonnell says he has discarded the view, arguing now that the contributions of women are important to the workplace and politics. He cites, among other things, his eldest daughter's career in the Army. She is a combat veteran of Iraq who now works for a high-tech defense contractor.

He says that as governor he would hire on merit and that he did so as attorney general, pointing out that half of the deputy attorneys general he appointed were women.

Out of law school in 1989, McDonnell was hired as an assistant prosecutor in Virginia Beach. There, he became interested in politics.

"I thought victims weren't treated very well and criminals were let off too easily," he said.

In 1991, Kenneth W. Stolle, then the Republican Party chairman in Virginia Beach, was seeking Republicans to run for General Assembly seats.

He recruited McDonnell, who knocked off Democrat Glenn B. McClanan, who had held the House of Delegates seat since 1972. Stolle also ran for office and won a state Senate seat.

"We won the seats going door-to-door," McDonnell said. "We had very little money. We outworked them. I only raised about $23,000."

Because of his prosecutorial experience, McDonnell spent his first few years in the House of Delegates introducing law-and-order bills.

He also sponsored social legislation, including several anti-abortion bills. Rising swiftly through the ranks, he became chairman of the House Courts of Justice Committee and became a co-sponsor of then-Gov. George Allen's welfare-reform bill and a bill to abolish parole.

Running the courts panel "takes a lot of patience and a lot of attention to detail," said Del. David B. Albo, R-Fairfax, who succeeded McDonnell as committee chairman.

"I've never seen him lose his temper," he said. "I think it's his military background."

By 2005, McDonnell was running for attorney general. He defeated Deeds by 360 votes in the closest statewide election in Virginia's history.

It was not until a recount was finished on Christmas Eve 2005 that he was declared the winner.

"It was a tough time," McDonnell said. "My daughter [Jeanine] had just left for Iraq five weeks before Election Day. On Election Night I was ahead by 3,200 votes, but by the next day it was down to 1,500 votes."

Marla Graff Decker, who served as deputy attorney general for public safety under McDonnell and holds the same job under his successor, Bill Mims, said she was impressed by the way McDonnell "went native" when he became attorney general.

"They took the time to learn about the office and the agencies that we serve," she said. "They spent a lot of time walking the floors getting to know people, the ins and outs of this office."

As attorney general, McDonnell cracked down on drunken drivers, drug dealers, identity theft and child sexual predators. McDonnell said the General Assembly passed 83 of the 94 legislative proposals made by his office.

He resigned in February to run for governor.

Whoever is elected governor will take office at a time when state revenue is likely to continue to fall. Kaine, as governor, has had to cut $7 billion in state spending since April 2007 because of declining tax revenue.

"I am hopeful that within a year this economy turns around and we will be back at a reasonable budget," McDonnell said. "I don't want to have to face four years when I only have to think about what I am going to cut."

The governor, who under Virginia law cannot serve consecutive terms, should function as the chief executive officer of a major corporation, with a $75 billion biennial budget and 105,000 employees, he continued.

"You've got to have vision, you've got to be a leader, you've got to be decisive, and you have to make sure that the people that drive state government are taken care of.

"I realize that you've got a very short time to make a difference."

Tyler Whitley is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.