Everything you need to know about sex and politics begins with reading the results of the Virginia gubernatorial race.
As any Washington Post reader knows, Governor-elect Bob McDonnell wrote in a 1989 thesis that “every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators.” When the Post reported on his thesis — which was leaked by the McDonnell campaign, as it happens — the Republican distanced himself from the wording but didn’t disown it, and ran commercials highlighting some of the important women in his life — including his military daughter — who support him. And he moved on. He asked voters to judge him on his 2009 campaign proposals, “not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven’t thought about in years.”
And now he’s won the race for governor of Virginia. Unfortunately, the
Washington Post isn’t poised to learn from the experience or even simply report the news. The paper is too busy still campaigning against him. In a post-election
piece, it quotes the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato:
Sabato also predicted that McDonnell "will avoid social issues like the plague" because of his controversial graduate-school thesis, in which he criticized working women, single mothers, and homosexuals. After the thesis was widely publicized, he spent several weeks during the campaign defending himself against accusations that he is a right-winger.
The Washington Post had tried to kill his candidacy on the grounds that he was a sexist Neanderthal, but it backfired — because women aren’t a monolithic voting bloc. They care about many real issues, not just the manufactured panderings known as “women’s issues.”
The preemptive spin yesterday on MSNBC was that Democrat Creigh Deeds was too negative, and that this rubbed voters the wrong way. No, Creigh Deeds and his allies thought that they could pander to women with “women’s issues” and defeat McDonnell. But they were told otherwise by voters, who have worries other than those of women’s-studies curricula planners and abortion ideologues. USA Today gets this much right: “The Republican fought back by emphasizing his efforts to promote and support working women and his commitment to state economic issues, such as unclogging Virginia’s highways.”
It’s not so much that McDonnell ran away from social issues — he is who he is: a socially conservative Catholic who went to an evangelical graduate school (Pat Robertson’s at that!) — as that he was able to overcome the media caricature of his views and give a full picture of what he could offer Virginians as their governor.
In the end, McDonnell wound up with a slight lead with women. That’s after the Washington Post ran, earlier in the fall, such headlines as “McDonnell Tries to Salvage Women’s Votes.”
Well, the governor-elect did.
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