Here's the short version: I just got back in town from a trip up the east coast that included dinner with a cousin who lives in Williamsburg, VA. She and her husband are ex-Army and are registered Republicans, and they are pulling out all the stops for Kaine.
Details in extended comments:
Some background. My cousin and her husband met in the army. She's been out for a couple of decades now, and has been spending her time teaching at various levels, but he's just finished a full army career and now consults for a major technology company. She and I are both grandkids of conservative Arkansas stock, and her father is a professor of business at a major university in Virginia. We get along great, though we hadn't seen each other in about 5 years. We'd never discussed politics before this past week.
We pull up to their new house in a spacious, wooded Williamsburg neighborhood, and I see Kaine for governor signs in their yard and inside their storm door. Interesting, I thought. As I said, politics had never come up in the past.
During dinner, a couple of hours into our visit, my cousin directs the converstaion to her yard signs. She tells me that she has always been a registered Republican, and still is, but that this Killgore guy scares her. In fact, the Virginia Republican party in general is starting to scare her. Kaine, she says, reminds her of what Republicans used to be like, and that he is to the right of her on gun control. Apparently she has been phone banking for Kaine a couple of nights a week, and makes it a point to take lists of voters whom they suspect usually vote Republican so she can explain to them why she, as a Republican, is working hard for Kaine. She says her 8-year-old son has caught the fever and has struck out on his own to convince teachers in his school.
I responded with an apology. I told her that, being on the other side of the fence, we have not done our job as an opposition party -- that the job of an oppostion party is to effectively oppose. When we don't do that, the majority party can go off the deep end. She seemed to take that in a thoughtful manner. She still considers herself a Republican and cited Christine Todd Whitman as representing the party she considers herself to belong to. She takes comfort in the fact that there are others who also realize that the current Republicans have lost their fucking minds (my words, not hers).
So anyway, let's hope this is a portent of things to come. Perhaps people are waking up.