Will The Real Bob McDonnell Please Stand Up

Finally, we are getting a better picture of the real Bob McDonnell, courtesy of the Washington Post (where's the Deeds campaign?). Yesterday's Post has a must-read on McDonnell's master's thesis when he attended evangelical Christian Regent University in 1989, shortly before being elected to the General Assembly.

For anyone in Northern Virginia that might be fooled by McDonnell's "Nova's own" yard signs, his master's thesis shows him to be more along the lines of the "Christian right's own."

In his thesis, McDonnell laid out a 15 point action plan he thought the Republican Party should follow to protect American families. It was anti-working woman and sounded like something that far right Delegate Bob "Taliban" Marshall would eagerly embrace. Jerry Falwell would be proud.

For his part, McDonnell says his "views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." Well, we'd like to know just which views from that thesis have changed.

George Allen liked to portray himself as some kind of moderate, too, until the inner George Allen got the better of him and exposed the real man with his "maccaca" gaffe. The thing about the maccaca comment is that it fit perfectly well with a number of other hints we had that he was a racist.

We don't believe for a second that McDonnell has changed his stripes. Rather, he's clever enough to see that the overt appeal to the GOP right by other candidates has cost the party the middle--the moderate independent voters who decide Virginia elections.

While the revelations about McDonnell's thesis will give some of those voters pause, the Deeds campaign still needs to give those same voters a reason to come out and vote FOR him. So far, Deeds' campaign has been pretty anemic, perhaps in part because he has had to build up a war chest following the primary battle.

Post Labor Day, we hope to see Deeds kick into a new gear!