For Democrats who want their party to escape the “urban elitist” label, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert Creigh Deeds is ideal: He’s a longtime state delegate (i.e., representative) from a stoplight-free county along the West Virginia border with only 5,000 residents. He lives in a house his ancestors built in 1740 and owns a mule named Harry S. Truman. He describes himself with a twang as a “middle-of-the-road guy from rural Virginia” and actually beat out a Republican for the NRA’s endorsement in his unsuccessful 2005 race for attorney general. (That Republican was Bob McDonnell, who won the race by a few hundred votes, and whom Deeds is facing again in this year’s gubernatorial race.)
But recent history should dissuade us of the notion that rural is synonymous with conservative, or that a small hometown automatically translates to preferring small government. Bill Clinton perfected the glad-handing, rural good ol’ boy routine, and before him there was the Georgia peanut farmer who kept reminding us of his deep humility. As with them, a close look at Creigh Deeds’s record shows that behind the aw-shucks persona is a familiar character: the sharp-elbowed, supremely ambitious pol always looking out for the next deal and his own interest.
Deeds clearly relishes and cultivates the apolitical image of a simple country lawyer. When asked whether his inability to raise funds while the General Assembly (legislature) is in session would hurt his gubernatorial bid, he responded, “I can’t put my ambition above my responsibilities.” While discussing his campaigning style, he said, “I’m not sure you can be too earnest.”
But flexible principles have been at least as useful in Deeds’s rise as touting the importance of being earnest. You wouldn’t be reading this article if the
Washington Post hadn’t endorsed Deeds (in the Democratic primary race) on May 22, declaring the 17-year lawmaker, previously little known in the northern Virginia suburbs, to be the designated successor to the supremely popular former governor Mark Warner and the moderately popular current governor, Tim Kaine. In that editorial,
Post editors particularly saluted his introduction of “legislation to create a bipartisan commission to draw up voting districts.”
Yet Deeds owes his first election to public office, in 1991, to blatantly partisan redistricting “brutal,” in the words of the
Post that paired 14 Republican incumbents against each other and one Republican against an independent incumbent. Then there was four-term Republican delegate Emmett Hanger, who found after redistricting that “just a handful of precincts” were left from his old district grafted onto heavily Democratic areas, some of which were several hours away.
“It was definitely gerrymandered to create an opportunity for Creigh,” says Hanger, now a state senator. “He was then Commonwealth’s Attorney, letting it be known he would like to be governor someday.” Hanger says he bears Deeds no ill will, as the defeat gave him time to spend with his family, rejuvenated his business, and eventually led to his election to the state senate. But he notices that bipartisan redistricting only “became a part of [Deeds’s] agenda when Republicans exercised gerrymandering in 2001.” In fact, there seems to be a proportional relationship between Deeds’s interest in bipartisan redistricting and Republicans’ power in the state.
Deeds punctuated his workload in the legislature (creating a 14-member Virginia Sheep Industry Board, sponsoring a bill to recognize Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs as pets, making it a “class 3 misdemeanor” to interfere with a person who is lawfully fishing) with occasional media-friendly bits of nanny-state nagging: For example, he voted for
a law allowing p
olice to stop and ticket motorists for failing to buckle their seatbelts, and a ban on “mass murderer” trading cards; and he sponsored a bill requiring any person holding a yard sale, auction, or fundraiser near a road where the speed limit is more than 35 mph to notify the local governing board. But Deeds’s perception of the state’s interest has always aligned with the interest of his district, which in turn has always aligned with his ambition. In the mid-1990s, there was a push to bring riverboat gambling to Virginia. It was defeated in the General Assembly, and Deeds was one of 55 members of the 100-member House of Delegates who voted no. Then pro-gambling forces started recanvassing the opposition, and Deeds indicated that he would flip to support it if 2 percent of the tax revenue was steered towards a project in his district. Deeds insisted that his constituents’ needs justified the deal, but the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot summarized it in a brutal manner: “If riverboat gambling gets a second chance this year in the General Assembly, it will be the result of a simple rule that most legislators don’t like to admit: Money equals votes. . . . The deal was too good to pass up for Del. Creigh Deeds.”
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