Dear Democrats,

I want to say thank you for everything you have done this year for the Democratic Party of Virginia and our Democratic candidates.

With the countless hours you spent working in campaign offices, knocking doors, making phone calls and talking to friends and neighbors, you are truly the heart and soul of this party.
 
You joined so many great partners –  President Obama, the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, and countless others.  I am truly thankful, and I know that Creigh, Jody and Steve are as well.
 
For the past eight years Virginia has been on a path of success – one that earned it repeated recognition as the ‘Best State for Business,’ the ‘Best Managed State’ and the ‘Best State to Raise a Child.’  And, while the nation at large is suffering in a difficult economy, superior management has enabled Virginia to weather the storm far better than most states.

The pragmatic, results-oriented leadership of Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Jim Webb and so many other Virginia Democratic leaders is the reason for this success and I look forward to working with President Obama, our two Democratic U.S. Senators, our six Democratic Congressmen, Democrats in the General Assembly, and all of you to keep Virginia moving forward.

Thank you for everything you do to support the Democratic Party of Virginia and our values.
 
Sincerely,
 
C. Richard Cranwell
Chairman, Democratic Party of Virginia

Election Results: 1) Virginia State Board of Elections, 2) Fairfax County Board of Elections.

• Watts

  20 precincts (not counting the central absentee precinct, CAP)

  4 in Lee District [Crestwood, Garfield, Greenspring and Lynbrook]

  11 in Braddock District

  4 in Mason District

  1 in Mt. Vernon District

• Sickles

  16 precincts (not counting the central absentee precinct, CAP)

  14 in Lee District (Bush Hill, Clermont, Franconia, Hayfield, Huntley, Island Creek, Kingstowne, Lane, Pioneer, Rose Hill, Van Dorn, Villages, Virginia Hills, Wilton)

  2 in Mt. Vernon District

• Surovell

  14 precincts (not counting the central absentee precinct, CAP)

  2 in Lee District (Fairfield, Groveton)

  12 in Mt. Vernon District

• Englin

  22 precincts [District includes parts of Arlington County (3), Fairfax County (6) and the City of Alexandria (13)] (not counting the central absentee precincts – one for each jurisdiction, CAP)

  2 in Lee District (Cameron, Mt. Eagle)

  4 in Mt. Vernon District

Democrats have always believed in a vigorous debate over ideas and certainly do not countenance any destructive acts like these to further their cause.

CONTACT: Jared Leopold
571.480.4614

DEEDS CAMPAIGN RELEASES INFORMATION ON TICKETS FOR OBAMA RALLY

ALEXANDRIA – The Deeds for Governor campaign has announced the ticketing process for the Rally for Virginia with President Barack Obama.  The rally will be held Tuesday, October 27th in Norfolk at Old Dominion University.

There are a number of different ways for the public to receive tickets to the rally:

For Guaranteed Admission: Volunteers who complete a shift this weekend anywhere in the Commonwealth will be guaranteed admission to the rally. To sign up to volunteer this weekend, visit http://www.deedsforvirginia.com/action/volunteer?sc=ObamaEvent .

General admission to the rally will be on a first come, first serve basis. To RSVP for general admission ticketing and further information visit http://www.deedsforvirginia.com/events/Obama1027.

In the coming days a limited number of tickets will also be distributed by the Democratic Party of Virginia and the Deeds campaign.  

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“Given his sometimes bizarre and incendiary ideas,” the Post editors wrote, “We worry that Mr. Cuccinelli would drive qualified and nonpartisan lawyers away, transform the attorney general’s office into a staging ground for his pet peeves and causes, and make it an object of ridicule in a state where it has enjoyed a long run of respect.

Read the full Washington Post endorsement:

Mr. Shannon for attorney general
Two Fairfax lawmakers are vying for the job — one wonkish, one worrying.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009

THE RACE for attorney general in Virginia is a face-off between a pair of youngish lawyers, each from Fairfax County, each elected to the General Assembly this decade, and each now running his first statewide race. The similarities end there. While the Democratic candidate, Del. Stephen C. Shannon, is a mainstream former prosecutor — strait-laced, sober, earnest almost to a fault — his Republican opponent, state Sen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, is a provocative hard-liner who at times has struggled vainly to attract a single vote for his more far-fetched initiatives.

Mr. Shannon, who has a weakness for wonkish legalese, may not come across as a worldbeater, but there is no doubt he would run the attorney general’s office, with its 166 lawyers, as a serious, nonpartisan agency. As a prosecutor in Fairfax County, Mr. Shannon focused on busting purveyors of child pornography. With his wife, he had previously founded the Metropolitan Washington Amber Alert program, a local chapter of a nationwide system for locating abducted children. As attorney general, Mr. Shannon would steer a responsible course on consumer protection, the environment and the advisory legal opinions that the office is frequently asked to render.

Mr. Cuccinelli is also smart and well-informed, and he has at times stood on principle, and against his own party’s majority, in regard to law-and-order issues. For instance, he sided with Democratic senators in voting to relax a state law that barred prisoners from presenting courts with new evidence of their innocence (beyond DNA) more than three weeks after their conviction. This year, he bucked his own party again when he opposed legislation to expand the death penalty — which he has otherwise advocated — by applying it to some accomplices to murder.

However, there is reason to worry that Mr. Cuccinelli would treat the job of attorney general as an ideological crusade. We take him at his word when he says he intends to fight with the federal government over constitutional and legislative issues that stick in his craw. In the past, he has introduced measures calling on Congress to amend the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants, and to subvert the First Amendment by barring journalists from knocking on the doors of bereaved families. (Those bills failed to attract any support.) He attacked the efforts of some Republican lawmakers to secure adequate funding for schools and roads. He doubts the science of global warming and casts aspersions on the motives of those who are concerned about it. He peddles outmoded, half-baked and prejudicial theories about homosexuals.

Given his sometimes bizarre and incendiary ideas, we worry that Mr. Cuccinelli would drive qualified and nonpartisan lawyers away, transform the attorney general’s office into a staging ground for his pet peeves and causes, and make it an object of ridicule in a state where it has enjoyed a long run of respect.

JODY WAGNER, Virginia’s former secretary of finance, is the sort of Democrat that helped cement the Old Dominion’s status as among the cleanest, best managed and most business-friendly states in the country. She is easily the better choice as Virginia’s next lieutenant governor and would represent a sharp improvement over the incumbent Republican seeking reelection, Bill Bolling.

In Virginia, the real importance of the job of lieutenant governor — the reason the job is sought after — is not in presiding over the state Senate, attending functions or serving on a handful of boards and commissions. Rather, the person who wins the job has a plausible claim to standing in the on-deck circle for the governorship four years hence. Just ask Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), or, as he was known four years ago, Lt. Gov. Kaine.

Smart, tough-minded and capable, Ms. Wagner would be among the best-prepared public officials to assume the job. A former corporate lawyer, she started a successful family business (making kettle corn) before going to work for then-Gov. Mark R. Warner (D). Then, as Mr. Kaine’s finance secretary — she resigned this year to launch her campaign — she developed an authoritative command of state government, spending and income, critical knowledge for the challenges posed by the recession.

Unlike the usual run of officeholders in Richmond, she is more pragmatist and problem-solver than partisan political warrior. As the only one of the six statewide candidates to have had hands-on experience with the state’s budget, she would be uniquely well placed to serve as a resource for whichever candidate is elected governor.
Mr. Bolling, by contrast, has been a politician for almost 20 years. He had every intention of running for governor this year, but was outmaneuvered by fellow Republican Robert F. McDonnell, the former attorney general. He is a quick-witted and affable fellow but more attuned to political expediency than the actual business of governance.

A conservative lawmaker before he was elected lieutenant governor four years ago, Mr. Bolling voted for some of the more ambitious spending packages in the state’s history, particularly ones proposed by Republican governors during the dotcom boom. Now he attacks Virginia’s outlays as having been profligate. He opposed Mr. Warner’s tax increase in 2004, a large chunk of which went to boost public schools. Now he talks about the vital importance of an enormous increase in teacher salaries.

Of particular interest to Northern Virginia, his ideas on transportation funding are patently unworkable. He proposes raiding already bare-bones core state services to pay for transportation but bobs, weaves and ducks when pressed to say which ones — education? public safety? human services? health? — he would target.

Yes. Well, sort of.

Republican Bob McDonnell said today that he believes the world has gotten warmer but declined to blame manmade carbon emissions.

“I think it’s a real concern, and we need to find ways to be able to reduce (carbon dioxide) emissions,” he told reporters after a rally with Sen. John McCain in Virginia Beach. “Well, there’s some debate that various scientists are going on. I think the temperature of the earth, from the science I’ve seen, has gone up and what we need to do is promote reductions” in cardion dioxide.

But does he believe manmade carbon emissions created the problem?

“Look, it’s not going to affect my policy decisions. What the policy decision needs to be is to find ways that are creative to be able to reduce” carbon dioxide, he said. “I am going to accept the science that’s out there, and the science is that we need to do everything that we can to reduce (carbon dioxide) emissions in the atmosphere.”

McDonnell said he also supports paying for alternative energy research through the proceeds the state receives from offshore drilling,

McCain said during last year’s presidential race that global warming needs to be taken seriously and today, while standing next to McDonnell, he said that reducing carbon emissions should be a goal no matter whether people accept or reject climate change as fact.

“I think it’s important we err on the side of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and taking measures that are necessry to do so,” he said.

Democrats including Creigh Deeds have accused McDonnell and the entire Republican ticket of failing to believe in the concept of global warming.

McDonnell sidestepped a question about climate change at this week’s debate but he did say the state needs to reduce carbon emissions as well increase energy sources, including coal, natural gas, nuclear and off-shore drilling.

“Prominent Republicans such as John Warner, Lindsay Graham and even John McCain have said that climate change is a scientific fact,” Deeds’s campaign manager Joe Abbey wrote in a press release this afternoon. “But when asked what he believed, Bob McDonnell couldn’t form a coherent answer. Either that’s because he knows that he and the rest of the Republican ticket are far outside the mainstream on this issue, or because Bob McDonnell’s real position is ‘say anything to get elected.’”

Earlier today, while campaigning with Deeds, Gov. Tim Kaine said that young voters are particularly energized by their desire to see politicians address climate change.

Deeds again criticized McDonnell for insisting that he supports the so-called cap and trade bill in Congress that caps greenhouse gas emissions, even though Deeds has said repeatedly that he does not.

“Bob has worked very hard to federalize this issue. He’s spent millions of dollars scaring people in Southwest Virignia, telling them I’m for cap and trade. I’m not for cap and trade,” Deeds said. “I understand the bill that passed in Congress and I’m not for that bill.”

Mr. Deeds for Governor
His transportation realism and Mr. McDonnell’s bogus roads plan present Virginians with a stark choice on Nov. 3.
This incredible line is a direct quote from the Washington Post.

The Washington Post
Sunday, October 18, 2009
 
A LEGACY of sound policies, coupled with the proximity of the federal government, has partially protected Virginia from the harsh retrenchments that the recession has forced on many states. Yet the commonwealth faces a daunting crisis in the form of a drastic shortfall in transportation funding, measured in the tens of billions of dollars, that threatens future prosperity. If the current campaign for governor has clarified anything, it is that state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee, has the good sense and political courage to maintain the forward-looking policies of the past while addressing the looming challenge of fixing the state’s dangerously inadequate roads. The Republican candidate, former attorney general Robert F. McDonnell, offers something different: a blizzard of bogus, unworkable, chimerical proposals, repackaged as new ideas, that crumble on contact with reality. They would do little if anything to build a better transportation system.
 
There are plenty of reasons why Mr. Deeds is the better choice for governor in the Nov. 3 election. He has stood with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, the incumbent, and his predecessor, now-Sen. Mark R. Warner, in support of the sane fiscal and budgetary choices that have made the state one of the best-governed and most business-friendly in the nation. Mr. McDonnell has generally spurned those policies, most notably by opposing Mr. Warner’s landmark tax package in 2004, which attracted bipartisan support as it boosted public safety and education and protected the state’s finances. Mr. Deeds has compiled a moderate record on divisive social issues that reflects Virginia’s status as a centrist swing state. Mr. McDonnell has staked out the intolerant terrain on his party’s right wing, fighting a culture war that seized his imagination as a law student in the Reagan era.
 
But the central challenge facing Virginia and its next governor is the deficit in transportation funding projected at $100 billion over the next two decades — and only Mr. Deeds offers hope for a solution. Following a road map used successfully in 1986, he would appoint a bipartisan commission to forge a consensus on transportation funding, with the full expectation that new taxes would be part of the mix. Mr. McDonnell, by contrast, proposes to pay for road improvements mainly by cannibalizing essential state services such as education, health and public safety — a political non-starter. And rather than leveling with Virginians about the cost of his approach, as Mr. Deeds has done, Mr. McDonnell lacks the political spine to say what programs he would attempt to gut, or even reshape, in order to deal with transportation needs.
 
Mr. Deeds has run an enormous and possibly fatal political risk by saying bluntly that he would support legislation to raise new taxes dedicated to transportation. It is a risk that neither Mr. Kaine nor Mr. Warner felt they could take. But given that the state has raised no significant new cash for roads, rails and bridges in 23 years, Mr. Deeds’s position is nothing more than common sense. It is fantasy to think that the transportation funding problem, a generation in the making, will be addressed without a tax increase. A recent manifesto from 17 major business groups in Northern Virginia, calling for new taxes dedicated to transportation, attests to that reality.
 
Yet Mr. McDonnell, champion of a revenue-starved status quo, remains in denial. He professes to feel the pain of Virginians struggling with financial hard times. In fact his transportation policy, a blueprint for stagnation and continuing deterioration, would subvert the state’s prospects for economic recovery and long-term growth. And it would only deepen the misery of Northern Virginia commuters who already pay a terrible price — economic, personal and psychological — because of the state’s long neglect of its roads.
 
Gleeful Republicans, convinced that Mr. Deeds has dealt his own candidacy a lethal blow by his stance on taxes, have seized on it as evidence that Mr. Deeds is heedless of the financial strains on ordinary Virginians. A recession is no time to raise taxes, they say; never mind that any solution is unlikely to be in place until recovery is underway. Of course, these same Republicans, Mr. McDonnell included, screeched about the Warner tax increase, first calling it unneeded (during a short-lived budget surplus) and then — when it began to look inadequate — preferring not to talk about it. In Mr. McDonnell’s view, there is never a good time to invest adequately in the state’s critical infrastructure.
 
Mr. Deeds has been broadly criticized, not least by stalwarts of his own party, for putting too heavy an emphasis on negative ads about Mr. McDonnell and failing to make an affirmative case for himself. If so, it reflects a failure of campaign strategy and tactics, not a lack of raw material. In fact Mr. Deeds — a decent, unusually self-effacing man who calls himself “a nobody from nowhere” — has a compelling life story and an admirable record of achievement as a legislator from rural Bath County.
 
As we noted in endorsing Mr. Deeds in June’s Democratic primary, his record in the legislature ably blended the conservative interests of his constituents with an agenda reflecting the prosperous, politically moderate face of modern-day Virginia. He has been a longtime champion of a more enlightened, bipartisan system of drawing voting districts, a stance to which Mr. McDonnell only recently gravitated. He has played a constructive role in economic development by shaping the Governor’s Economic Opportunity Fund, which provides incentives for investors in Virginia, and he has stood for responsible environmental policies, including green jobs and alternative energy research. Despite his rural roots, Mr. Deeds has been ideologically flexible enough to support abortion rights; press for background checks on firearms buyers at gun shows; oppose displaying the Confederate flag on state license plates; and warm to equal rights for homosexuals.
 
As for Mr. McDonnell, he deserves credit for having run a disciplined, focused, policy-oriented campaign. As a candidate, a statewide official and a lawmaker, he has maintained a civil, personable manner. His intellectual agility, even temper and facility with the grit of policy have inspired the respect of colleagues, staffers and rivals. He is a dexterous politician.
 
Our differences with him are on questions of policy. The clamor surrounding his graduate dissertation from 1989, in which he disparaged working women, homosexuals, “fornicators” and others of whom he disapproved, has tended to obscure rather than illuminate fair questions about the sort of governor he would make. Based on his 14-year record as a lawmaker — a record dominated by his focus on incendiary wedge issues — we worry that Mr. McDonnell’s Virginia would be one where abortion rights would be curtailed; where homosexuals would be treated as second-class citizens; where information about birth control would be hidden; and where the line between church and state could get awfully porous. That is a prescription for yesterday’s Virginia, not tomorrow’s.
 
Mr. McDonnell has inspired a worthwhile debate over privatizing liquor sales in Virginia, one of 18 states that control the wholesale and retail trade in spirits. But by suggesting the state could use the proceeds of privatization as an ongoing funding source for road improvements, he has played fast and loose with the facts — first by plucking projected revenue figures from thin air and second by glossing over the question of what state services he would cut if the $100 million currently gleaned from annual liquor sales could be diverted for transportation.
 
Mr. McDonnell has sought to corner Mr. Deeds by focusing on debates in Washington over energy policy, labor union membership and other contentious federal issues. But a governor of Virginia can do little to influence the ideologically charged debates raging on Capitol Hill. Mr. McDonnell also has claimed he would be more effective at creating jobs. Yet while Mr. McDonnell has been an activist public servant, he has no significant record, either as a lawmaker or as attorney general, of promoting policies to encourage job growth.
 
Mr. Deeds, lagging in the polls, lacks Mr. McDonnell’s knack for crisp articulation. But if he has not always been the most adroit advocate for astute policies, that is preferable to Mr. McDonnell’s silver-tongued embrace of ideas that would mire Virginia in a traffic-clogged, backward-looking past. Virginians should not confuse Mr. McDonnell’s adept oratory for wisdom, nor Mr. Deeds’s plain speech for indirection. In fact, it is Mr. Deeds whose ideas hold the promise of a prosperous future.

Location: VA Victory ’09 Field Office
Address: 7600 Colshire Dr, 4th Floor, McLean, VA 22102; map, click here
Date: Tuesday, October 20
Time: 12:00 pm

IMPORTANT: Space is limited — You must RSVP for this event by calling 703.462.1422 or by email, fairfaxvols@vavictory09.org.