Salon.com > Creigh Deeds

Get ready for the Grand Old Tea Party takeover

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:03:00 +0000

The whole thing may have started with a rainy April rally in Washington's Lafayette Park. But by the time the first wave of elections since President Obama took office are over, Tuesday could wind up being the day the Tea Party movement left the fringe and went mainstream. (Or at least mainstream-ish.)

Grass-roots conservatives are crowing already about a House special election in New York's 23rd District, mostly because a national movement forced out the Republican Party's officially endorsed candidate, Dede Scozzafava, in favor of a more ideologically pure choice, Doug Hoffman. Polls show Hoffman is now likely to beat Democrat Bill Owens, even though Scozzafava wound up endorsing the Democrat. The lesson the Tea Party types are taking from all this? They won the battle for the soul of the GOP.

White House in spat with Virginia Dem candidate

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:15:00 +0000

At the moment, it seems like it'll take a miracle for Democrat Creigh Deeds to be elected as Virginia's next governor early next month. And that's despite the fact that the incumbent is a Democrat, as was the governor before him -- not to mention that President Obama won the state last fall.

You can be sure, then, that if and when Deeds loses, there'll be a swarm of pundits rushing to attribute the defeat to Obama and the way Virginia has reacted to his administration, not to Deeds. So it's not surprising that the White House would want to distance itself from the stench of defeat, and start laying the blame squarely at Deeds' feet. Still, it's more polite to at least wait until a member of your own party actually loses before you start trashing him in public.

That's not what White House officials are doing, however. Instead, the Deeds campaign was greeted on Friday with a story in the Washington Post that had national Democrats burying the candidate's corpse, and delivering some very unflattering eulogies. One unnamed "senior administration official" was even quoted as saying, "Obama, [incumbent Gov. Tim] Kaine and others had drawn a road map to victory in Virginia. Deeds chose another path." Another anonymous senior administration official criticized the Deeds campaign for not using the president more often and more efficiently, especially in order to increase African American voter turnout.

In Virginia, Democrat turns against Democrat

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:45:00 +0000

Normally, endorsements in a general election are a formality. Wouldn't spit on your party's chosen candidate if they were on fire? Doesn't matter -- you endorse him or her anyway. And if you can pull enough votes, you'll damn sure go out on the stump once or twice too, maybe even embrace for the cameras.

Not so in Virginia, at least not this year.

Democratic gubernatorial canddiate Creigh Deeds has been seeking the endorsement of Doug Wilder, a fellow Democrat who served as governor in the 1990's and was the mayor of Richmond until this year. He was the state's first African-American governor, and Deeds needs help turning out the base, which means turning out black voters.

But Wilder turned Deeds down, and then added insult to injury. In a statement announcing his decision not to endorse Deeds or his Republican opponent, Robert McDonnell, Wilder went after Deeds' positions on taxes and guns, saying in part: