For the entire campaign, Virginia Democrats, led by their nominee for Governor (Creigh Deeds), have alleged that Bob McDonnell is not a mainstream conservative. Rather, they claimed, he is an ultra-conservative, especially on social and moral issues, who is concealing his real agenda in order to get elected.
Normally, this can be dismissed as the rhetoric that traditionally accompanies partisan campaigns.
In this case, however, the Democrats now have a little documentary evidence to bolster their claims:
Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.
McDonnell was quick to dismiss the importance of the document in question:
Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."
McDonnell added: "Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older."
This denial of relevance by McDonnell has a tinge of disingenuousness to it.
A "decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era" attempts to (a) make the document appear older than it was (it was actually submitted to the university months after Reagan had left office), and (b) make the author appear younger than he was (McDonnell was not a wide-eyed college freshman when he wrote the document, he was in his mid-30s).
Also, his claim not to have thought about the thesis in ages is exceptionally disingenuous. As WaPo points out, the only way that they knew about the existence of the thesis is that McDonnell himself had alluded to it in an interview, pointing out that he had written his graduate thesis on welfare policy. Of course, the document extends well beyond that, into matters of covenant marriage, abortion, and even a skeptical analysis of the landmark Griswold case.
Yet another problem for McDonnell is that while he claims that his life and career rebut several of the more controversial aspects of the thesis (his own daughters work outside the home, he offered), there are numerous examples in his nearly two decades in public life where he acted on the policy initiatives in his thesis. Indeed, in doing so, he found himself to the right of his own GOP caucus on many occasions:
Republican friends who support McDonnell's campaign for governor acknowledge parting ways with some of his more conservative views. Former governor and U.S. senator George Allen said he doesn't share McDonnell's opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest. "There should always be an exception," he said. And state Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (Virginia Beach), a close friend first elected to the legislature the same year as McDonnell, described covenant marriage as "the state overstepping its bounds."
The discovery of this thesis presents a pair of political problems for McDonnell. On one level, he is going to be tempted to deny the bulk of the thesis as irrelevant, so as not to offend voters not driven by Pat Robertson-esque social conservatism. But in doing so, he does risk offending that moralistic base. Even as McDonnell appears eager to deny his past, some Republicans, like state legislator Bob Marshall, think that McDonnell needs to embrace the thesis, not run away from it. Marshall was quoted by WaPo as saying, "If you duck something, that tells your opponents that you think your position is a liability." He also hints that some GOP activists are frustrated by what they see as McDonnell being less than eager to affirm his social conservatism.
While it is not certain how much play this thesis is going to get, and the impact of the document is even less certain, one thing is quite clear: cruising along with a solid lead with two months to go, this was the last thing McDonnell wanted to see come to the surface in Campaign 2009.
Another thing that is clear, the Democrats are going to be burning through several highlighters mulling over this this work of nonfiction. The timing, also, is not helpful, as it comes at a time when, according to PPP, Creigh Deeds' polling numbers might have finally gotten off the mat a little bit.