'89 Theses

Sorry for the Lutheran inside joke.

The Washington Post reports on the controversy in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, regarding some very socially conservative ideas that had been expressed by Republican candidate Bob McDonnell in a master's thesis in 1989.

I suppose the problem for McDonnell is that voters who agree with those ideas (and I'm sure there are a few) are already firmly within the Republican base. Recent statewide Democratic victories have relied heavily on suburban voters in Northern Virginia. Those are probably the voters that McDonnell is mainly going to need to woo, and the least likely to be particularly socially conservative.

Virginia Democrats who are making an issue of this, sound a lot like Senate Republicans when they insisted on the relevance of Justice Sotomayor's speeches from previous years. As usual, politicians are among those who most heartily embrace Ralph Waldo Emerson's statement that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

McDonnell continues to have a pretty good lead in recent polls, but the latest polls reported by Real Clear Politics show a little bit closer race than I reported on here.