Skip to main content

A closely watched governor's race

By


The Virginia governor's race has gotten nasty, very nasty, with Ken Cuccinelli putting all his eggs in the Tea Party basket, hoping that it will energize the base of the Republican Party to carry him past Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic party chairman.  McAuliffe has built a sizable lead in the month leading up to the Nov. 5 election, which has led to desperate measures on Cuccinelli's part.

The current state attorney general is a Tea Party favorite, but like other Republican candidates the past year had tried to move more to the center of the party.  However, that didn't seem to work and now he is calling in Rick Santorum and other arch social conservatives to mobilize the rural base of the GOP in hopes of offsetting the strong appeal McAuliffe has in the Washington DC metro area of Virginia.

The state appears more divided than ever.  This is a state that previously split in the build-up to the civil war, with West Virginia becoming a new state in the Union.  Now, we see the "cultural war" being played out like in so many other parts of country - rural vs. urban areas.  The problem for Cuccinelli is that the state has become increasingly urban and swung for Obama in each of the last two national elections, leaving pundits to ponder if this could be the end of the Tea Party in swing states.

Making things worse for Cuccinelli is that his own party appears to be vacillating on him, anxious to move beyond these cultural divisive issues and embrace the political center, especially in the wake of the Tea Party-engineered government shutdown.  What had been a safe district for Republicans in Florida went Democratic in a recent House special election, adding new fears that the Tea Party message no longer works.

Even worse is the huge gender gap emerging, with Cuccinelli trailing among women voters by 25 per cent, largely because of his zero tolerance approach to abortion and highly dubious Crimes Against Nature law he reinstated as attorney general.  But, it seems some persons simply can't see the writing on the wall and choose to live in some rural fantasy of America.

Comments

  1. James FergusonNovember 8, 2013 at 6:53 PM

    It seems that if Kooch had one more week he might have pulled this election out. All he had to do was keep saying Obamacare over and over and over again. This seems to be the big takeaway from the election (once again) as the teabaggers try to claim a "moral victory" that will carry them into the midterms. But, by then I think many of the kinks will be ironed out in the ACA, with millions more subscribers.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more