BUENA VISTA, Va. -- The Virginia governor's race became a full sprint Monday with traditional parades, picnics and speeches to voters largely preoccupied with issues now before Congress, not lawmakers in Richmond.
Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell shook hundreds of hands, posed for scores of snapshots, and bantered with a somewhat restive and uncharacteristically sparse Buena Vista parade crowd.
Only two states -- Virginia and New Jersey -- elect governors this year. But in this conservative Blue Ridge Mountain town, the deepest concerns for Felicia Moore and many other voters along the parade route had to do with Congress and battles over health care and energy.
"That's got to be the first thing I care about now with my kids growing up," said Moore, 32. She describes herself as a Democrat since the age of 8 who has yet to commit herself in this fall's race.
By the traditional start of the fall campaign season, she usually knows more about the upcoming election than she knows this year, she said. Most of what she learns comes in the evenings, from television news, and the governor's race has taken a back seat through August to the tumultuous congressional town hall meetings over health care reform.
Echoes of the passionate divide were clear even in the cordial, small-town atmosphere of the parade, where families languish in lawn furniture under lush shade trees.
Dr. Glenna Greene, a Buena Vista chiropractor, said she's a swing voter who enthusiastically supported Democratic former Gov. Mark R. Warner in his 2008 U.S. Senate race. But on Monday, she wore a McDonnell pin, as much a reflection of the national debate as the governor's race.
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"It's because of all the billions and trillions of dollars the Democrats are spending," she said. She connected Deeds with the trend from an attack ad the Republican Governors Association is underwriting that features video of Deeds, a state senator, taking credit for $1 billion in amendments he offered for the 2008 state budget. The ad neglects to mention that 80 percent of the money would have funded public schools and raised the pay of Virginia teachers to the national average.
"We're broke, and we don't need to be any more broke than we already are," she said.
At several points along the route, foes of Democratic health reform proposals heckled Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who doubles as Democratic National Committee chairman. The unfazed governor climbed into the back of a pickup truck with a bluegrass band, and whipped out his harmonica for a song.
"When you're in politics, you've got to have a fallback," he said with a laugh afterward. "You never know when you're going to need it."
Other signs of this fall's unusually hard-edged partisan dialogue were evident from both sides.
Yellow flags and T-shirts emblazoned with a coiled snake and the legend "Don't Tread on Me" were never far from GOP candidates. The American Revolution-era flag has become a de facto logo of hard line conservative "Tea Party" groups vehemently opposed to President Barack Obama's spending initiatives.
Some women backing Deeds and the Democratic ticket wore stickers that read, "I Am Not A Detriment To Society," an allusion to a rigidly conservative thesis that McDonnell, then 34, wrote in 1989 in which he called working women and feminists detrimental to traditional families. It also argued that states can discriminate against "cohabitators, homosexuals and fornicators" to shield heterosexual, two-parent families.
On the stage beside each other for the first time since news reports about the thesis shook up the race a week ago, neither Deeds nor McDonnell mentioned the issue.
During speeches at the end of the parade, hecklers who back McDonnell got Deeds' attention. As Deeds recalled his 360-vote loss to McDonnell in the 2005 attorney general's race -- the closest statewide outcome ever in Virginia -- McDonnell partisans taunted him.
"That's right ... that's right," Deeds said amid the roar. "That's what America's all about."
McDonnell opened his comments by assuring Deeds' wife, Pam, that none of the barbed rhetoric is personal. Last Monday, however, McDonnell bitterly denounced Deeds for exploiting the thesis and said his family was insulted by Deeds' assertion that McDonnell still harbors a bias against working women.
"To insinuate that on a policy level that I was not in support of working women, which was the contention of the Deeds campaign for a week, yeah, that is something that my family and I resent," McDonnell said.
