No such place as 'nowhere' in Deeds' world

By Michael Sluss

WARM SPRINGS

Creigh Deeds mingled among the friends, neighbors and family members who gathered at a Bath County farm on a summer Sunday afternoon to salute a favorite son and the Democratic Party's nominee for governor.

Hot dogs and hamburgers sizzled on a grill. A bluegrass band played and cloggers performed. Before the faithful lined up for food, the man of the hour got their attention and thanked them for coming.

He doesn't get home very often these days, he said. The hunt for votes keeps him on the road, often far from the sparsely populated county where he grew up, raised a family and launched a political career.

Three nights earlier, he had shared the stage with President Barack Obama and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine at an electric campaign rally in Northern Virginia. The event drew national media attention, and the magnitude of it seemed to overwhelm Deeds.

"I'm still trying to get used to the fact that the president of the United States flew Marine One here to Virginia for me," he gushed that night.

But here in the deep green Alleghany Highlands, Deeds is not an untouchable politician rubbing elbows with the powerful.

He is simply Creigh (pronounced "kree") - the local boy whose grandfather had been chairman of the county's Democratic committee; the Bath County High School graduate who returned home to practice law; the ambitious politician who was elected commonwealth's attorney at age 29.

"You remember that?" Deeds asked, recalling his first campaign. "I knocked on every door in this county."

Heads nodded in recognition. That's the Creigh Deeds they knew, the scrappy candidate who had to battle expectations as well as political adversaries.

"You really have to get up early to get ahead of Creigh," said Chris Singleton, the commonwealth's attorney in Bath County, Deeds' former law partner, and host of the August rally on his farm near the Highland County line.

Deeds has served 18 years in the General Assembly after winning a legislative seat that Democratic leaders designed with another candidate in mind.

He lost the 2005 election for attorney general by just 360 votes out of nearly 2 million cast - all the while facing doubts about whether a little-known lawmaker from Virginia's second-smallest county could win statewide office.

Losing the closest election in modern Virginia history hurt, but Deeds said he doesn't dwell on it. What still stings, though, is a newspaper commentary he read after the long campaign ended. The way Deeds remembers it, he was dismissed as a "nobody from nowhere."

"Think about that," he said, letting the slight soak in with his Bath County friends, who found no more humor in it than he did. If that's the case, "then there's a bunch of nobodies out here and a bunch of nowheres."

Deeds dusted himself off after the defeat, returned to the legislature, and began laying the groundwork for a 2009 run for governor.

"This is a goal Creigh has had in mind since he was a young boy," said farmer Bill Bratton, who has known Deeds for decades. "We've got to make sure we get him there."

Now Deeds is running against Bob McDonnell, the same Republican who beat him for attorney general four years ago.

But he's also running against naysayers who question whether the country lawyer can lead a state that has pressing challenges in its urban and suburban areas.

Deeds, 51, insists he can build coalitions that transcend partisan and regional divides to solve transportation problems in high-growth regions and bring jobs to distressed areas. It's the only way a legislator from his part of the state could get anything done, he said, and the way he would try to bring conflicting interests together as governor.

On this afternoon in Bath County, where his family's roots date to the 1740s, he also reminds the crowd that he won't neglect the voters from Virginia's "nowheres."

"In my vision of Virginia, we will count," Deeds said.

In an era when many politicians come blow-dried, starched and pumped full of poll-tested platitudes, Deeds is something of a throwback.

He exudes nervous energy on the campaign trail. His delivery is choppy, his hands rarely still. And, he said recently, "People accuse me of using too many rural metaphors, but it's what I know."

Some call him unpolished, a gentle criticism that Deeds accepts with humor. Some, particularly his friends, call him authentic.

"He's not a Brooks Brothers-suit kind of guy," said Del. Jim Shuler, D-Blacksburg, a longtime friend and legislative ally. "I think that's an asset that works to his advantage."

The style plays well in Deeds' state Senate district, which stretches from the Alleghany Highlands to Charlottesville. His early legislative record is heavy with bills that reflect the priorities of a mostly rural, politically moderate constituency.

Deeds pushed for years to get federal and state assistance to clean up the abandoned Kim-Stan Landfill in Alleghany County, a site that ultimately was added to the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list. He worked to expand the state's land conservation program and institute a new water quality program. And he sponsored a constitutional amendment to guarantee hunting and fishing rights, an initiative that was mocked by some suburban lawmakers before it passed in 2000.

Some have questioned whether his rural roots and political philosophy fit well in a Democratic Party that is more anchored in urban and suburban areas.

Deeds answered some of the doubts in June with a decisive primary victory over two well-funded Northern Virginians, former Del. Brian Moran and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

Deeds had less money, a smaller staff and fewer big-name endorsements than his rivals. For a while, he had to fend off speculation that he would drop out of the race. Observers said he overcame those deficits partly by winning over small audiences and adhering to his unofficial campaign slogan: "Always underestimated, never outworked."

"He's not prepackaged," said Democratic activist Susan Swecker, a Highland County native who managed Deeds' first legislative race and his 2005 campaign.

"He's going to look you in the eye when he talks to you, he's going to give you an answer, he's going to take everything in. His style is not that big, bold, brash kind of thing."

Deeds took the same approach in his early campaigns, including his first run for the House of Delegates in 1991. The Democrat-controlled legislature had redrawn the House district represented by Republican Emmett Hanger Jr. of Augusta County, but Deeds was not the candidate that party leaders had in mind. Deeds waged shoe-leather campaigns to win the nomination and the general election.

Hanger later won a state Senate seat and became friends with Deeds, working with the Democrat on agricultural and conservation issues and rural economic concerns.

"That first election showed me he was a tireless worker and that he had something special - an intangible that people like, they see, they believe," said former House Democratic leader Richard Cranwell of Vinton, now the chairman of the state Democratic Party.

To hear Deeds tell it, his tenacity was born of necessity: "Growing up in an area where there wasn't a lot of opportunity, growing up without a whole lot, maybe being a little hungry... I think has helped me prepare for life in public service."

Robert Creigh Deeds was born in Richmond, where his father was a police officer and his mother worked for the state highway department. His parents divorced when he was 7, and his mother, who would later remarry, brought Deeds and his younger brother, Greg, back to Bath County, to the Millboro farm of his maternal grandparents.

"The deed to that property has Thomas Jefferson's wax seal on it," said Deeds' wife, Pam, underscoring the depth of the family's roots in Bath County.

It was there that Deeds solidified a bond with his grandfather Austin Creigh Tyree. Their shared middle names gives Deeds a permanent connection to the man who fed his early interest in politics and opened his eyes to government's capacity to help people.

Tyree was chairman of the county Democratic Committee, and his home was the first in the county to be powered through the Rural Electrification Act.

"We didn't have money," Deeds said. "So I grew up knowing about the power of government to effect change in people's lives; knowing that government wasn't the answer to everything, but there are some things that government had to do and it could be a positive influence on people's lives."

Deeds helped with farm chores and loved baseball, though he lacked the physical gifts to excel at the sport. (He remains a die-hard Cincinnati Reds fan.)

He left the family farm for college in West Virginia with four $20 bills from his mother and plenty of ambition.

Deeds met his future wife while running for student body president at Concord College, and the couple returned to the highlands a year after he earned his law degree at Wake Forest University. And that's where they have stayed to raise their four children.

"I don't know that it's ever been a consideration for him to be anywhere else," said Pam Deeds, who prefers the serenity of rural life to the tumult of the campaign trail.

She won't read, watch or listen to the news during campaign season because "it just upsets me, and there's not a thing I can do about it."

Deeds grimaces when he considers the time that two statewide campaigns have taken him away from his family. "I've lost so much; some of it I'll never get back," he said while campaigning in Southwest Virginia this summer.

"And it hurts."

None of Deeds' campaigns has cost as much money, or come with as much scrutiny, as this one. His race with McDonnell to the Governor's Mansion began quietly enough, but it has escalated into a fierce exchange of attacks that are expected to intensify in the campaign's final weeks.

Some question whether Deeds' affable image has been tarnished by the barrage of attacks and negative ads aimed at McDonnell. Deeds has relentlessly hammered McDonnell over a 20-year-old graduate school thesis that contains controversial views on social issues and the role of working women in society.

He raised the issue several times during a September debate in Fairfax County, eventually drawing groans of disapproval from some audience members.

Deeds also has blamed the former attorney general for electricity rate increases imposed by Appalachian Power, even though McDonnell's office recommended smaller increases than the company had sought in proceedings before the State Corporation Commission.

McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin said last month that Deeds has been so focused on attacks that he has failed to spell out what he would do if he is elected governor.

"It appears that while Creigh Deeds knows he wants to be governor, he doesn't know why," Martin said.

McDonnell has pounded Deeds for acknowledging that he would sign a bill that increases taxes to pay for long-neglected transportation needs.

Deeds has struggled to articulate how he would produce new money for roads and transit, saying only that he would call a special legislative session next year and try to forge consensus on a bipartisan plan. If the plan contains new taxes dedicated for transportation, he said, he would sign it.

But he has not outlined a specific plan to generate revenue, saying only that he would not divert funds from schools, public safety and other essential services.

"There's all sorts of documentation out there that we need at least a billion dollars of funding for transportation," he said. "I just know that a lot of options have to be considered, and I want to bring people together to get it done."

Deeds tells rural audiences that fixing chronic transportation problems in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads is critical, because the tax dollars generated in those regions flow disproportionately to less prosperous parts of the state to fund schools.

But he tells those same audiences that he'll push just as hard to build statewide support for proposals to boost the economies of rural and distressed areas, saying Virginia won't have "nowheres."

Though his political philosophy took shape in a rural setting, Deeds calls himself "a work in progress" on some high-profile issues.

He voted twice on the Senate floor for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages but said he voted against it in a 2006 referendum.

And after a career of earning high ratings from the National Rifle Association, he decided last year to join a legislative push to require background checks for all firearms purchased at gun shows.

Deeds had long opposed such legislation but changed his mind after meeting with parents of students who were killed or injured in the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. Though the weapons used in the shootings did not come from a gun show, several families of the victims became advocates for the bill.

Deeds added amendments that helped get the bill out of committee, but it still failed on the Senate floor. His support for the bill drew scorn from pro-gun groups, but Deeds said he has no regrets.

"I knew at the time I would be attacked because I had a pretty consistent approach on that legislation for a long time. But I felt a need as a parent to respond to that grief, and I think I did the right thing."

Deeds said he doesn't relive the 2005 election and barely hesitated on making another statewide bid this year. After former Gov. Mark Warner decided he would run for the U.S. Senate in 2008 instead of making a second run for governor, Deeds plowed ahead with his own plans.

Deeds argues that money was a major factor in the outcome of his 2005 contest with McDonnell. McDonnell, who had to win a GOP primary before the general election, spent almost twice as much as Deeds for the duration of the campaign.

"People have said, 'Wouldn't you have rather lost by 100,000 votes?' Well, no. I'm proud of every vote I got. I basically pulled him to a draw even though he had huge demographic, financial and political advantages over me. I proved I could win."

And now, Deeds said, "I don't believe you choose your time; I believe your time chooses you.

"This was the course that I had to follow. Would it have been easier if I had won that election in '05? You're daggone right it would have been easier, but that's not the way it worked. I'm doing what I have to do."

Roanoke Times researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.

Michael Sluss, (804) 697-1585, mike.sluss@roanoke.com