To McDonnell, solutions need input from all

VIRGINIA BEACH

Between campaign stops on a humid August day, Bob McDonnell’s caravan detoured onto Petunia Crescent in the Green Run neighborhood.

McDonnell stepped out and, embracing his wife, Maureen, quietly stared at a modest brick home. They bought it in 1985, when he returned to Hampton Roads to settle, raise a family and continue his education.

Behind them in the street was a reminder of how far they’ve come – a rented RV covered with images of the McDonnell clan. It’s taking him and some of his family and staff around the state as he vies to become Virginia’s next governor.

His race is drawing nationwide attention from Republicans hungry for a win, and it is thought that a victory could put McDonnell on the short list of vice presidential candidates in 2012.

The candidate doesn’t want to talk about future ambitions, saying he will serve his full four-year term through 2013 if elected. He prefers to keep the conversation on 2009, a campaign in which he’s positioned himself as a moderate reformer who can work with Democrats to get things done.

He certainly looks and sounds the part.

McDonnell, 55 , speaks in self-assured tones on the stump, rarely wavering or straying off message. In speeches, he isn’t shy about praising President Barack Obama’s ideas on charter schools or associating himself with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to signal a willingness to work across the aisle.

Where he has run into problems is squaring his current image with a record and past writings that, his critics say, show a more far-right approach to governing.

Perhaps nothing has gotten more attention than McDonnell’s 1989 graduate thesis, which came to light in August. He wrote it while pursuing dual degrees at what is now Regent University.

Democrats have seized on the paper, submitted while McDonnell lived at the Petunia Crescent house, to portray the Republican as out of the social mainstream.

Within its 93 pages are passages about the harmful societal impacts of working women and a belief that government policies should favor traditional families over homo­sexuals and other unmarried couples.

On the topic of federal spending for child-care programs, McDonnell wrote, “Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status­-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.”

In a later passage, McDonnell wrote that policy to do away with tax credits “for upper-middle income families, and targeting funds directly to low-income families, seems to perpetuate the income redistribution philosophy of the Great Society which has already produced its harvest of dependency, anomie and irresponsibility.”

McDonnell has said the paper was done in an academic setting and isn’t fully representative of his current views.

“I never really criticized working women. … I was simply looking at the impact in the change in government policy and in the family structure on what happened with children when two parents were working,” McDonnell said during a recent TV interview.

“My own personal life clearly reflects, through raising five children, that I strongly encourage my daughters to be strong and independent and professional women,” he added, accusing Democrat opponent Creigh Deeds of “misrepresenting” his views.

While McDonnell and Deeds are very familiar with each other, they won’t be mistaken for friends, especially after this bitter campaign.

Both entered the General Assembly in 1992 as freshmen in the House of Delegates. Years later, McDonnell defeated Deeds by fewer than 400 votes in the 2005 attorney general election.

Now, the two are engaged in a rematch of that contest, with the Governor’s Mansion at stake.

Democrats weren’t aware of the 1989 thesis four years ago, but they’ve recently hounded McDonnell on it.

Deeds, a state senator from rural Bath County, has pressed the issue in numerous campaign ads.

Initially, those attacks seemed to improve his standing in polls.

Surveys showed Deeds closing double-digit deficits as he and his surrogates hammered McDonnell on the thesis. But the Republican’s numbers have since rebounded.

A career in public life spanning 18 years assured McDonnell he would endure harsh criticism during this campaign. He warned his family last year about “the level of scrutiny, the level of intensity” he would face atop the ticket.

But even that reminder didn’t fully prepare them for the thesis blow-back.

“I have been very frustrated, and it’s insulting to hear people try to categorize him as not being for working women,” observed Jeanine McDonnell, 28, the candidate’s oldest daughter . Like him, she graduated from Notre Dame University and went into the Army.

“He has been behind me 100 percent of the time,” she added. “I wish these people would drop it already. It’s been going on long enough, and it’s not an accurate depiction of him.”

Ask Robert Francis McDonnell directly, and he’ll tell you there’s no ambiguity about his views.

“I’m a conservative. I’ve never pretended to be anything else,” he said. “I believe in limited government and keeping taxes and regulation and litigation low. I believe the traditional values that have been broadly embraced by our society are good.”

Some supporters add the word “compassionate” to the “conservative” description, pointing to vacations spent volunteering, as he and his family did last summer, helping to rebuild homes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Starched and steady, the trimly built McDonnell isn’t physically imposing – he stands about 5 feet 10 inches tall in loafers – but has a stately bearing with his angular jaw and steely blue eyes.

McDonnell laughed when asked whether he uses dye to conceal the silver strands in his never-out-of-place head of hair. He insists that he doesn’t apply color ; wife Maureen said a combination of natural extracts like chamomile and green tea and the summer sun have altered the hue of his hair.

His economic philosophy is rooted in a free-enterprise system with less regulation and lower taxes.

He’s praised former President George W. Bush’s fiscal stewardship and said tax cuts enacted on his watch led to an “economic revival.” Democrats contend that tax breaks helped push the country into recession.

“We are not going to improve the lives of people in Virginia just by raising taxes, which is my opponent’s main economic platform,” McDonnell said. “We’re not going to do it by supporting big-government solutions from Washington.”

That outlook has gained McDonnell support from a host of business groups and may explain why corporate interests have given more to him than to Deeds.

The oldest of five children in an Irish-Catholic family, McDonnell said his conservative views were informed by church teachings and parental lessons.

While he obeyed those instructions, he apparently didn’t absorb the political leanings of his post-New Deal Democrat parents.

“I don’t know when Bob actually became a Republican. I don’t know if he ever wasn’t one,” shared younger sister Eileen Reinaman, who remembers her brother as a curious child who excelled in athletics and academics.

An Army scholarship covered McDonnell’s college tuition, and years later, GI Bill benefits subsidized his graduate and law studies at Regent.

McDonnell served in the Army overseas and stateside , spending 21 years on active and reserve duty

before retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1997. He was stationed at Fort Eustis on the Peninsula for a time in the early 1980s.

He returned to the area after a career with a medical supply company.

As years passed, McDonnell juggled graduate studies, a Capitol Hill internship, the demands of a growing family, and at one point, a job in sales for The Virginian-Pilot.

His political career began to blossom when he took a job out of law school with the Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney Office in 1989 and two years later won his first campaign for the House of Delegates.

McDonnell made his early stripes in the legislature as a champion of law-and-order proposals.

He pushed for tougher penalties for sex crimes, drunken driving and people with repeat gun arrests, and to beef up the death-penalty law.

Later, he proposed welfare reform legislation and successfully carried a bill to revamp the way judges seeking reappointment are evaluated in Virginia.

Even in the initial days, whether there was consensus or conflict, McDonnell remained poised, recalled Leo Wardrup, a fellow Beach Republican delegate at the time.

“He will not belittle you. He will not talk down to you. He will treat you with grace and dignity, and I’ve seen that in acrimonious, toe-to-toe debates on the House floor,” Wardrup said.

Fellow Notre Dame grad Gerry Scimeca, who ran McDonnell’s first campaign, said McDonnell showed a preternatural grasp of policy and talent for politicking.

“You knew you were working for an exceptional candidate,” he said. “There was something special about him.”

Scimeca recalled a day handing out fliers at a high school football game when a tough-looking young man shouted Bob’s name.

“Bob turns around and greets him like they were old friends, which was kind of surprising,” Scimeca said. “So he chats him up, and afterward I asked him, 'How do you know that guy?’ Bob tells me he prosecuted him and the guy has turned his life around.”

Not everyone has been so charmed.

Attorney Glenn McClanan, the Democrat McDonnell unseated in the 1991 race, said McDonnell used bare-knuckle tactics to become Regent founder Pat Robertson’s first elected protégé.

“He was a very ideologically driven person. He was really Pat Robertson’s first candidate, the first one of the Regent University group to run for office,” McClanan said. “I can’t imagine him as the governor of Virginia. It’s beyond my comprehension.”

Don’t tell that to the thousands of Republicans who roared approval as McDonnell accepted the party’s nomination in late May.

He vowed to make kitchen table issues his priority, drawing applause as he called for thousands of new college degrees awarded; a greater focus on math, science and technology instruction; better roads; and new sources of energy.

More applause followed when he reminded the crowd, “We fought to protect marriage, the right to life, and the rights of parents.”

His views on these issues haven’t changed.

On others, though, they have.

His economic development platform calls for expanding the Governor’s Opportunity Fund, which offers incentives to companies coming to

Virginia. Deeds has noted that in the legislature, McDonnell voted to cut the fund.

Similarly, McDonnell opposed past efforts to change the rules for drawing legislative districts, but he now says he will appoint a bipartisan commission to address the issue.

One of his signature accomplishments as attorney general was a push to stiffen penalties for sexually violent predators. A law change he championed instituted mandatory 25-year sentences for the worst offenders.

Midway through his tenure, McDonnell waded into a landmark gun-rights case that had reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

He supported a brief filed with the court in support of overturning a Washington, D.C., ban on individuals owning handguns, which the high court ultimately did.

Although McDonnell is generally viewed as a solid supporter of Second Amendment rights, he doesn’t hunt or own firearms.

Perhaps the lowest moment of his time as attorney general was the ultimate failure of the complex 2007 transportation funding plan he crafted with other Republicans and Democrats.

McDonnell’s current plan to pay for road projects relies on a mixture of uncertain funding sources – future offshore drilling royalties, tolls, future revenue dedication in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, and the sale of state liquor stores.

He argues that his leadership will transcend partisan divisions that have stalled past attempts to improve Virginia’s roads network.

And his ties to the vote-rich regions of Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia and Richmond give him a personal stake in solving their traffic problems, McDonnell says.

Democrats believe McDonnell will have to divert state spending from key priorities like public schools to pay for his road plan.

Not true, McDonnell responds. Reducing wasteful spending through government audits will free up money that can be spent on other needs, he contends.

But like Deeds, he is asking voters to bet that he can accomplish things past governors have been unable to do.

“I believe that the experience I’ve had as an Army officer, a prosecutor, a legislator, a Fortune 500 company manager, attorney general have given me the leadership skills and the decisiveness to make the tough decisions the next governor’s got to make,”

McDonnell said recently.

“It’s about getting results and it’s about finding ways to get every citizen involved in the body politic,” he added. “Only 50 percent of the people bother to vote in our big elections in Virginia. I want everybody to take an interest in this government, to be part of a solution.

“We’ve got many challenges, from crime to jobs, to energy prices. I need everybody to care about our government, take an active role and be part of the solution.”

Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com