The Kilgore Autopsy

If Jerry Kilgore manages to blow the Virginia gubernatorial election today, he'll have nobody to blame but himself.

How so, you may be asking?

...Kilgore's poor showing in the debates and twice botching the "identical abortion question ... refusing to take a position on the criminalization of abortion. This is a big mistake because it will gain him little support and it also raises unnecessary suspicions about him on the Right."

Kilgore also hasn't committed on taxes. Americans for Tax Reform said last week that Kilgore has not signed "the pledge" not to raise taxes as governor. Grover Norquist told TAS Friday, "He has left the door open to some tax increase. Ten years ago, that'd be a pretty good line in the sand. When you're running against a guy who raised taxes by a billion dollars, you gotta be pretty clear. He's not gonna raise taxes. He should say it. The tax issue is the one that wins elections for Republicans - period."

And as if that wasn't bad enough....

On what other issues does Kilgore offer as a strong, attractive alternative? Domestic violence and overcrowded classrooms? While these are admirable positions, who's going to come out in favor of domestic violence? Any advantage over Kaine will be one of decimal points because the candidates will only differ in degrees. The same goes for education: Tim Kaine isn't going to suggest that we pack more students into classrooms.

Emphasizing mostly moderate issues isn't doing the job. Instead, some onservatives wonder what sort of governor Jerry Kilgore would be. Is he the type of Republican who attends NAACP luncheons or events with President Bush? Last Friday, he was the former, appearing at a NAACP conference in Richmond while steering clear of the Bush presidential visit to Norfolk - an event popular conservative Senator George Allen had no problems attending. [emphasis added]

Now I will be the first one to acknowledge that I don't live in Virginia, don't live anywhere near it, and am not familiar in the slightest with any of the local nuances that aren't readily apparent to outsiders. Perhaps such things are playing a bigger role than any of us outsiders know. And the typical center-right third party candidacy (Russell Potts) that always torpedoes Republican candidates (particularly in Virginia, for some reason) is poised to suck away what could have been Kilgore's margin of victory.

But from the looks of things from afar, it looks like the Old Dominion's former attorney-general ran a race tailored to the electorate of, say, Rhode Island as opposed to what is still a predominantly "red" state. That's not to say that Jerry Kilgore is a RINO; but if he has managed to alienate the GOP base on two of its core issues (abortion and taxes) and can't even defeat a thinly-veiled liberal who was part of a huge tax increase double-cross barely more than a year ago, he might as well become one.

Either that or move to Rhode Island. Because it looks like he'll have an open schedule after today.

UPDATE: It's official. Which only serves to reiterate the central question: Why can't Republicans ever confidently run as unabashed conservatives when that has been proven time and time again as the surest path to victory?

Doug Forrester also lost tonight, as expected and as he deserved to. Him running as a conservative would have meant that Halloween had come a week too late on his personal calendar. Now that he's lost two statewide races in the past four years, perhaps he will finally go away into the lost RINO preserve and leave the New Jersey GOP to stew in the abundance of moribundity he bequeathed to it, and perchance to recover, someday.