The Virginia GOP has shot itself so many times in the foot on Barack Obama that it's already lost both legs up to the knee.Jim McCain--John's brother--came in and labeled Arlington and Alexandria as "Communist country."
Then a local county McCain chair in Buchanan County penned an outrageously racist column for a local newspaper accusing Obama of wanting to paint the White House black and use federal funds to purchase drugs for his "inner-city base" of support.
And now the state GOP chairman, Jeff Frederick--a youngster who wrested the state chairmanship from Jenna Bush's father-in-law by vowing to reinvigorate the party--has tried to link Obama to Osama Bin Laden, the criminal that the Republicans have yet to catch.
All the while, Obama has steadily climbed to a fairly comfortable lead in polls of Commonwealth voters. Didn't the state GOP learn anything when former Sen. George Allen blew a 20 point lead by making a racial gaffe at one of his rallies?
Sure, it's nice to rally your base. Evidently, the Republican base in the South now consists of a bunch of angry rednecks and extreme religious conservatives, so that "rallying" them consists of overt and thinly veiled racist taunts.
But if you want to win an election in Virginia, you're going to have to win the independent voters, many of whom happen to be ethnic, and most of whom are turned off by racially-tinged personal attacks. So while the GOP figuratively machine guns itself with the automatic weapons it so dearly loves, Obama is out there promoting a middle-class tax cut, a reasonable view of government, all the while appearing intelligent and competent while McCain's putative message of "bi-partisanship" is drowned in a blaze of petty partisan attacks.
The election is hardly over in Virginia--we believe it will be a lot closer than the current polls suggest--but with help from the state GOP, Obama just might pull off the upset in the Old Dominion.
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