Pollster Glen Bolger (a founding partner at my wife’s firm) looks at the data in the Virginia governor’s race and concludes that Barack Obama hurt Democrat Creigh Deeds.

At the end of tracking, we added some questions paid for by the Republican National Committee specifically to measure the Obama effect.

[...]

The dominant national issue at that time (and still) is health care. Only 44% of likely voters support the Obama plan, while 50% oppose it. Intensity is strongly against — 29% strongly favor/42% strong oppose. The question was worded:

“As you may have heard, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are preparing a plan to change the health care system. From what you have heard about this plan, do you favor or oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care proposal?”

We also asked a message question that was stunning for two reasons. One, it was stunning in its rejection of the notion of the Democratic wave of 2006-08 is any lasting move, and it was stunning for how close it was to the final election margin:

“I’m going to read you two statements, and please tell me which one comes closest to your opinion.

Some/Other people say it is more important to elect a Governor who will help President Barack Obama implement his agenda.

Other/Some people say that it is more important to elect a Governor who will serve as a check and balance to President Barack Obama.”

Voters opted for the check and balance by a 55%-35% margin. Independents (who voted for Obama by one point in 2008 in Virginia) opted for a check and balance by an overwhelming 58%-25% margin. Throughout our tracking, we regularly found open-ended comments from Independent voters saying they wanted to balance the overwhelming power that the Democrats have in Washington. Given the absolute power the Dems have in DC, that is a very strong message for GOPers running in 2010.

We tested the impact of the Obama endorsement — 24% said they were more likely to vote for Deeds, while 32% were less likely. The minus eight increment on that can not be encouraging to the White House.

Finally, we tested a simple agree/disagree: “Creigh Deeds’ policies are too close to the policies of President Barack Obama.” Fully 52% agreed and only 30% disagreed. By intensity, 30% strongly agreed and only 9% strongly disagreed. Revisionists on the left are blaming Deeds for not embracing Obama enough, but Virginia voters did not agree. Among Independents, it was 52% agree/28% disagree.

His bottom line is that Obama’s “policies have put fiscal and economic messages back into play for Republicans.”

Presumably, by 2010, it will be even harder for Democrats to run against George W. Bush or the Republican Congress of 2006.  The degree to which Obama will be an asset or a liability to his party will, of course, depend on intervening events.  If we’re still looking at 10 percent unemployment next November, it’ll almost certainly be the latter.

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran argues that the Defense Department ought to step up and pay for the increased traffic BRAC is about to bring to his district:

The latest round of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing) moves is poised to create a daytime nightmare of traffic congestion for Northern Virginia.

Over the next two years, the on-base population at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County will double, to more than 47,000 people. In a location difficult to reach by bus and impossible by rail, the addition of approximately 24,100 personnel is poised to grind the region’s already notorious traffic — consistently ranked second-worst in the nation — to a halt, adding hours of backups on Interstate 95 and Route 1.

This outcome could be avoided, or at least mitigated, if transportation upgrades were part and parcel of the BRAC relocations. Unfortunately, the Office of Economic Assistance, the Defense Department agency that is responsible for aiding communities affected by BRAC, can only help hire planners and consultants to perform studies identifying infrastructure needs, not fund the projects they identify. At Fort Belvoir, they have done neither.

The other way to meet federally imposed transportation needs is through the Defense Department’s Defense Access Road program. The program can and does pay for roads in communities affected by BRAC, but only if the projects meet very narrow criteria. One such requirement is that traffic on any given roadway must double because of specific federal activity, measured over 24 hours. But when the “roadways” in question are I-95 and Route 1, the principal north-south highways on the East Coast, this is an impossible qualification.

The Pentagon’s narrow application of Defense Access Road eligibility, however, is not what Congress intended. The program was created to provide a means for the military to pay its fair share of the cost of highway improvements related to the post-World War II buildup of domestic military installations.

Presumably, the point of the op-ed is to get recognition from his constituents for fighting this fight. As a practical matter, there are two U.S. Representatives directly interested in this issue (Full disclosure: I’m in the neighboring Congressional District and the Fort Belvoir/Rt. 1 corridor is quite literally the dividing line) and several other Representatives and United States Senators live in the area and are personally effected by this issue.  I’m actually befuddled that they haven’t stepped in before now, since the BRAC announcement on Fort Belvoir came out several years ago.

Moran’s argument is rather weak, however:

It’s common sense for the military to help pay for these improvements. For our men and women in uniform, and the civil servants and the contractors who assist them, time spent in traffic is time not spent providing for our country’s national security.

That’s not how it works. These people will have to put in as much time as it takes to do their job and then waste a lot of time sitting in traffic.  The more logical response to the traffic issue, frankly, is that Fort Belvoir should be closed and its activities moved to a larger base in a much less densely populated area.  It would be much cheaper for the taxpayer and provide an economic boom for some part of the country that almost surely needs it more than the National Capitol Region.

Since that appears not to be an option — indeed, the Powers That Be are doubling down on the base — then it seems perfectly reasonable to have the DoD pay a large part of the cost of transportation upgrades (perhaps extending the Yellow or Blue Metro lines to Belvoir, a Rt. 1 bypass, or the like rather than simply widening Rt. 1 as Moran suggests).   Then again, since I’d directly benefit from this (my house is less than 1/4 mile from Rt. 1 and less than 3 miles from Ft. Belvoir) my analysis is biased.

Tyler Cowen points me to an interesting discussion on the subject “Why So Few D.C. Residents Are Married.”

Washington City Paper’s Amanda Hess cites a Pew survey finding that “Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map’s color key. The closest states to D.C.’s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.”

While Pew’s D’Vera Cohn attributes this to D.C. residents getting married later than those in any state,  Hess argues that an overlooked factor is that D.C. has the nation’s highest concentration of homosexuals, who are not permitted to marry.

Newsweek blogger Katie Connolly retorts that “Both those explanations are plausible, but they give the data short shrift.”  Instead, she thinks the answer lies in the “nature of race and class in D.C.”

Anyone who’s lived in D.C. is aware of the city’s dirty secret: it essentially operates under an unwritten form of apartheid. In general, affluent, college-educated white folks with decent, steady incomes are clustered in the northwest quadrant. Their needs are serviced by a massive underclass, consisting largely of underprivileged immigrants, African-Americans, and Hispanics, that inhabits the remaining three quarters. Visitors to the city rarely glimpse this side of the city because there’s little reason to venture beyond the fancy hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

[...]

But only around a third of D.C.’s population is white. African-Americans make up 56 percent of the population, and marriage rates among African-Americans have been steadily dropping since the 1960s. The last census found that just 36 percent of African American women were married, down from 62 percent in 1950. Marriage rates for white women also declined over the same period, but only from 66 percent to 57 percent. A large proportion of D.C.’s African-American community is low income or underemployed, both of which are often indicators of low marriage or high divorce rates.

All those explanations strike me as contributors to the puzzle.  All of them, though, miss one crucial issue:  Suburbanization.

The vast majority of those of us who work in the District actually live in Virginia or Maryland.  Some even commute from as far away as West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Delaware.   Those of us who are married — and especially those of us with children — are much more likely to be in that category.

If you’re young, single, and affluent, D.C. proper — or at least, a handful of gentrified neighborhoods therein — is a great place to live.  It’s not Manhattan but there’s a decent nightlife, a plethora of restaurants, and plenty of things to do.  But unless you’re very well off financially, you’ve either got a roommate, live in an incredibly small space, or both.  And there’s essentially no such thing as a single family home in the District.  (Note for non-urbanites:  A “single family home” is  a “house.”  In places like D.C., even wealthy people tend to live in condos or townhouses.) Let alone a yard.

Oh, and unless you can afford to send your kids to Sidwell Friends, the schools are simply awful.

UPDATE:   Commenter Ugh observes, “I think the problem here is treating the District of Columbia as a state, and then comparing it to real states, each of which is infinitely more rural than the District (even Rhode Island). A more proper comparison would be to the marriage rate in Baltimore proper, or San Francisco, or Oakland, or Manhattan, etc.”

Yes, that’s exactly right. The Pew piece footnotes that point and Connolly uses it as a throwaway line but it’s really important.  Indeed, it’s really another way of making my point about suburbanization:  The same is more or less true in most of our major urban centers but, since the unit of analysis for the other 50 entities is a whole state, the impact is different.

Yesterday, Radley Balko passed on the story of Eric Williamson, the Springfield, Virginia man who has been charged with indecent exposure for being naked in his own house.    According to Williamson’s version of events, he was making coffee at 5:30 in the morning when a woman and her 7-year-old cut across his yard and spied him through a window and called the cops.

Radley joked, “Fairfax police say Williamson wanted to be seen naked. Which I guess means Williamson’s front yard is a pretty popular spot at 5:30 in the morning.”

Via AllahPundit, here’s the Fox News report, with Williamson expressing his surprise and outrage over the arrest:

Well, now it seems that the facts are in dispute.

The woman told police it was 8:40 a.m. when she was walking her son to school along a path between houses. She said they first spotted Williamson naked in an open door in the car port of his home.

She also told police that Williamson then walked across the house to a large window, facing the way she was walking.

If it’s 8:40 in the morning — it’s light out in these parts by 7 — and he’s in front of an open door, his claim to being in the privacy of his own home minding his business is seriously damaged.  And if he saw the mother and boy and then ran in front of a large window to further expose himself to them, he’s almost certainly committed a crime.

Radley, who wrote a new post updating the story, disagrees:

Given that she was apparently on his property (that part of the story hasn’t yet been disputed), and he was in his home the entire time, I’m not sure his exact position in his own home matters, unless he was otherwise in plain view of someone using the public sidewalk. Even then, it seems more like tacky behavior than behavior that should be criminal. And you’d think the guy would get a warning before you arrest him for nudity in his own house.

He admits this is all rather peculiar:

The guy does seem strange. A roommate says he was acting oddly, walking around all morning wearing nothing but a construction hat. But again, strange behavior needn’t be a crime punishable by a year in jail (if the roommate had reported unwanted nudity, that might be a different matter). Seems like a sensible policy would be that once you walk into someone’s yard and look inside their home, you can’t claim to be victimized by what you might see.

If you’re in your own house but standing naked in  an open door visible to the public — the path between these houses is apparently a common walkway used by neighborhood kids going to school — your expectation of privacy is seriously diminished.  Ditto standing naked in front of an uncovered window at 8:40 in the morning.

Williamson wasn’t, say, emerging naked from bed and walking down to start the coffee in the interior of his home.  If someone happened to catch a shadowy glimpse under such circumstances, I’d completely agree with Radley’s view of the situation.   For that matter, if he was standing naked in his carport doorway at 5:30 in the morning to smoke a cigarette and some earlybird neighbors walked by, the most I’d expect would be for police to issue him a friendly warning.  But, if the accuser’s version of events is accurate — and I’m inclined to believe it was given the reaction of the roommates — then Williamson was willfully committing indecent exposure to small children.   That’s not, in my judgment, worth a year in jail on first offense.  But it’s not innocent behavior, either.

As an aside, I’m rather amused at the caption on the WTOP photo.  What has his growing up in Hawaii to do with anything?  Do they have different customs there on nudity?  Or is he actually a Kenyan citizen whose citizenship is in question?  If so, perhaps he’ll be deported.

Virginia GOP Gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell is taking quite a bit of flak for a thesis he wrote in college in 1989.

The media spotlight is on gubernatorial hopeful Robert McDonnell who is currently launching his 2009 campaign for governor of Virginia. McDonnell finds himself in hot water for his 1989 thesis, which outlines a position hostile to women’s interests and feminism.

Frankly, I think this kind of thing misses the mark. Politicians who have been in office for awhile have had ample opportunity to build a record that can be judged. More importantly, that record can show how a politician’s thinking has evolved over the years. People change their minds. They vote different ways. Moreover, as Will notes, this type of examination can have a chilling effect on academia:

Moreover, I’m wary of the chilling effect academic witch-hunts have on the interaction between experts and politicians. Presumably, we want our political leaders to get advice from academics, who are disinterested and frequently more knowledgeable on a particular subject. Academic documents are also fundamentally different from political ones – they’re less vetted, more exploratory, and ultimately less subject to artificial political constraints. I think this is a good thing, and I’d like to see more practical interaction between the academy and policy-makers precisely because academics have more freedom to come up with good ideas.

I completely agree. Judge McDonnell on his record in office; not his college thesis.

When Republicans controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in the House and Senate, I often read calls from bloggers on my side of the aisle for purging the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) from the ranks.  After all, the likes of Arlen Specter and  Lincoln Chaffee were a giant pain in the butt and always seemed to be in cohoots with the Democrats to craft a “compromise” bill that we weren’t going to like.   Why not get rid of these clowns and just work with the True Believers?

Well, by and by, it happened.  Most of the Republicans in the Northeast lost.  A couple of them became Democrats.

And now the Democrats control the presidency and have strong majorities in the House and Senate.  And, lo and behold, bloggers on their side of the aisle are saying the same thing.   Digby, responding to Charlie Cook’s claim that the Dems could lose 20 seats in the House in 2010, mostly among the so-called Blue Dogs:

I would love to hear anyone tell me why I shouldn’t be cheering for that outcome.

Cook said it would “reflect on” the president, but from my perspective it would reflect well on him. And if it happens because he rammed through meaningful health care reform instead of some watered down bucket of warm spit and the administration managed to get unemployment down, I think he will very likely have Morning in America in 2012.

To hell with Rahm and his appease the Blue Dogs at all costs strategy. What good is it if the president fails in 2012? If Cook is right and the Dems maintain their majority while losing a bunch of these reactionary wingnuts, I couldn’t be happier. And the Democrat should be happy too because it means they can pass successful legislation for a change.

Now, I encourage the Democrats to pursue this strategy.  I really do.  But instead of “winning by losing” they would simply be “losing by losing.”

Blue Dog Democrats are mostly Southern Democrats.  They’re moderate on the social issues and moderately hawkish on fiscal issues, making them liberals back home, conservatives in the Democratic Caucus, and “wingnuts” to the Netroots.  If they lose, they’ll be replaced by Southern Republicans who will naturally be to their right.

The Blue Dogs disagree with Obama on some issues but they wish him well and will vote with him when they can.  Almost all of them will campaign for him back home in places like North Carolina and Virginia and Florida, where he won narrowly last time even though Republicans have generally carried them.   Their replacements would disagree with Obama on more issues and hope he fails politically so that their party can take back the White House in 2012.

The only way that addition by subtraction works for a party is in the leadership.  A key committee chairman who opposes the party’s agenda can be more trouble than he’s worth.  For example, I opposed having Arlen Specter chair the judiciary committee, given how important the courts are to both party’s agenda.  (I would have given him a chairmanship of similar prestige where his views were more in line with the GOP’s mainstream.)  But taking away occasional supporters and replacing them with dedicated opponents is not a winning strategy.

This map resulting from a Gallup poll on party identification is making the rounds:

The lede from Jeffrey Jone’s write-up:

An analysis of Gallup Poll Daily tracking data from the first six months of 2009 finds Massachusetts to be the most Democratic state in the nation, along with the District of Columbia. Utah and Wyoming are the most Republican states, as they were in 2008. Only four states show a sizeable Republican advantage in party identification, the same number as in 2008. That compares to 29 states plus the District of Columbia with sizeable Democratic advantages, also unchanged from last year.

So, Texas and Mississippi are competitive states?  Alabama is just a smidgen Republican?  And North Carolina and Virginia have gone from competitive Red States to Solid Blue in a matter of months? Does this strike any of you as even remotely plausible?

Jones offers this as a preemptive rebuttal:

Since Obama was inaugurated, not much has changed in the political party landscape at the state level — the Democratic Party continues to hold a solid advantage in party identification in most states and in the nation as a whole. While the size of the Democratic advantage at the national level shrunk in recent months, this has been due to an increase in independent identification rather than an increase in Republican support. That finding is echoed here given that the total number of solid and leaning Republican states remains unchanged from last year. While the Republican Party is still able to compete in elections if they enjoy greater turnout from their supporters or greater support for its candidates from independent voters, the deck is clearly stacked in the Democratic Party’s favor for now.

Now, I don’t doubt for a moment that the last sentence is true.  Democrats have shed their image as a radical Left party and the Republicans are at modern lows after the debacle of the Bush presidency and twelve years in the Congressional majority.   But does anyone really think Mississippi is equally likely to go for Obama as for the Republican nominee in 2012?

I’m not suggesting Gallup is cooking the books here, merely that their questions would seem to be a poor proxy for what we’re trying to capture when we as about party identification.

Glenn Reynolds points to a story by Doug Winship about Washington State’s liquor stores running out of, um, liquor just in time for the July 4th weekend during which all good Americans celebrate their country’s independence by getting hammered. Naturally, all liquor stores in Washington State are run by the government of the state of Washington who 1) screwed up royally and 2) don’t really care because, after all, they don’t have a lot of competition.

While I’ve seldom had difficulty getting the beverages needed to restock our bar at Virginia’s ABC stores, having a state-run monopoly does have its quirks.  For example, I went in the other day to procure some Angostura bitters.  You know the brand that’s synonymous with bitters and that’s a key ingredient in many classic cocktails.  It seems that, for reasons unknown to the manager of my local ABC store, the Commonwealth has decided not to stock Angostura bitters but rather Peychaud’s.  Both are esteemed brands that have been around nearly two hundred years but Peychaud’s is much less, er, bitter than Angostura.  True connoisseurs of such things, of which I am decidedly not one, tend to keep a supply of both on hand as the properties of each go better with different cocktails.

Certainly, if this were the worst thing the Commonwealth’s government were doing, I’d be quite pleased.  But there’s no obvious reason why private individuals shouldn’t be able to open liquor stores and supply a wider variety of products.

Matt Yglesias has discovered the facts that 1) each state gets two Senators and 2) some states are bigger than others, a condition that has obtained since the inception of our current system in 1789.  There was, as some may recall having read, this thing called the Great Compromise whereby delegates representing sovereign states under the extant Articles of Confederation agreed  they would have a bicameral legislature wherein one house represented people and another represented said states.  This compromise, incidentally, was a diminution of the power the smaller states had under said Articles.

Anyhoo, it has come to Matt’s attention and he’s none too happy about it:

The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them.

Probably not — but we might have been better off recommending something like that to the Iraqis.  Some form of strong federalism or even confederalism makes a lot of sense in cases where states are comprised of geographically bound subgroupings with a strong sense of separate identity and history of autonomy.

The problem in the United States is that our current system no longer reflects the reality on the ground.  Most of us are now highly mobile with no strong sense of place-related identity.  Most Californians or New Yorkers or Virginians probably just think of themselves as Americans and only incidentally as residents of their states. This is least true, however, in the less populated states, which tend to be comprised of residents with intergenerational roots and therefore much more provincial.

While I live in Virginia, I’ve paid only scant attention to what has been a lackluster governor’s race. But the polls suddenly shifted a couple days ago and it appears that the general election will be interesting, indeed.

Running with the least money and fewest ties to vote-rich Northern Virginia, State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds has won the three-way Democratic primary for governor, paving the way for a rematch with Republican Bob McDonnell in the fall.

Deeds, 51, a country lawyer from Bath County in the western part of the state, was viewed as an unlikely winner against two Northern Virginians with entrenched political ties.  Known for his moderate views on such issues as gun rights, but also appreciated for his folksy style and attention to the Washington suburbs’ cry for road improvements, Deeds was leading in Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun and Prince William counties. Deeds had almost doubled the vote totals of each of his opponents, Democratic activist Terry McAuliffe and former Del. Brian Moran.

“Three weeks ago, this was a two-man race between McAuliffe and Moran,” said Quentin Kidd, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University. “Deeds was going to win the rural vote and that’s it. People are going to be talking about how he pulled this off for weeks and months.”

Deeds, a 17-year veteran of the General Assembly, lost by a mere 323 votes to McDonnell in the 2005 election for attorney general. His victory today presents Republicans with a different challenge than they were expecting: a moderate with strong ties to rural voters and a political apparatus throughout the state.

The GOP was preparing for battle with McAuliffe, whom they hoped to portray as a big-money fundraiser for former president Bill Clinton and a carpetbagger who had never been active in Virginia politics before this year. And Moran, who represented one of Virginia’s most liberal communities in the House of Delegates, was vulnerable because of such positions as his advocacy to repeal Virginia’s ban on gay marriage.

But with Deeds, the race is more likely to boil to which candidate does a better job appealing to such bread-and-butter issues as job creation, traffic and who would better manage the state. McDonnell, a longtime conservative lawmaker from Virginia Beach before he took statewide office, has run a campaign thus far centered on exactly those issues.

With money expected to pour in from both political parties and out-of-state donors, the race should be well-funded in a year with only one other major election — a governor’s race in New Jersey.

Though I’ve lived in Virginia for the past seven years, McAuliffe was the only candidate I had paid any attention to before the campaign started and only because of his career as a Democratic Party apparatchik. Moran’s name was familiar, but only because his brother Jim had been my Congressman.

Virginia is an odd state in that it allows governors to serve only one consecutive term. That dramatically narrows the field as, for example, most United States Senators and even Representatives are unlikely to be willing to leave their relatively secure posts for four years in Richmond. Still, the field was particularly lackluster this year. McAuliffe was a carpetbagger hoping to buy his way in and Moran and Deeds were mere state legislators.

Deeds at least had some statewide name recognition from his failed AG bid. But, interestingly, he was considered an also-ran a couple weeks ago.

While McAuliffe had been the favorite, simply because he had so much money, he alienated a lot of folks with his heavyhanded campaigning. The state was quite literally littered with his signs and this annoyed a lot of folks.

UPDATE: Chris Cillizza picks the “Winners and Losers” from the contest.

WINNERS

Deeds Ads: For a candidate little-known statewide and suffering a significant charisma deficit to at least one of his opponents, Deeds’s ads were of critical importance in introducing himself to Virginia voters and making the case why he was the natural heir to the political legacies of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. Thanks to David Dixon and Rich Davis, who have been with Deeds since he lost the attorney general’s race by 323 votes in 2005, the nominee’s ads stood out from the pack. Crisp and clean they cast Deeds as something of an everyman — the kind of guy who is easy to vote for. Need to see what we are talking about? Go watch the Deeds ad touting his endorsement by the Washington Post.

Mainstream Media: Just when you thought we were dead and buried. . . . Ask anyone involved in the race what the critical moment was when things started to move for Deeds and they will tell you — to a person — it was Friday May 22 when the Post endorsed the state senator. “The defining moment in this campaign occurred in a conference room at the Washington Post,” said Chris Cooper, a Democratic consultant at Knickerbocker SKD who has worked extensively in Virginia. Proof of the power of the Post endorsement? Deeds carried the three northern Virginia congressional districts — including the seat held by Rep. Jim Moran, the brother of former state Del. Brian Moran. No one would have thought that possible even a few weeks ago.

Momentum: In primaries, momentum tends to be a major factor. Since the candidates have few differences on the issues, most voters and elected officials like to wait until the end to make up their mind and then go with whichever candidate has the look of a winner. That’s clearly what happened in this race as Deeds scooped up massive swaths of undecided voters across the state — not to mention a handful of influential state senators — in the final days of the contest. Once Deeds got rolling, it was impossible to stop him because the three candidates largely agreed on issues; voters were siding with the winner and that sentiment turned what was once a close race into an absolute landslide.

Joe Abbey: While both McAuliffe and Moran had bigger names at the heads of their campaigns, it was Abbey, Deeds’s campaign manager, who wound up on top. As early as February, an influential Virginia politics blog — ingeniously named “Not Larry Sabato” — wrote a post pointing to the changes Abbey had made since coming on in December 2008 that managed to keep Deeds in the game. Given the importance of Virginia in the 2012 electoral landscape, Abbey is now in a position to write his own ticket when it comes to his next job.

DGA: The Democratic Governors Association got their ideal candidate in Deeds — a moderate from the rural, western part of the state who will be tough to label as just another Democratic liberal. That doesn’t mean Republicans won’t try — they were already hitting Deeds last night for his votes in the state Senate to raise taxes — but Deeds is a much more difficult target than McAuliffe, certainly, and even Moran would have been.

Headline Writers: The semi-oddness of Deeds’s name — first and last — makes for a field day for the ink-stained wretched who have to pour all of their creative juices into a few words. Jim Hobart, who works at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, offered up a few gems based off of the Deeds’s victory on Tuesday night. Among them: “Yes inDEED!”, “Mr. Deeds goes to Richmond?” and, our personal favorite, “InCREIGHdible”.

LOSERS

McAuliffe’s Ads: The Macker’s competitive advantage in this race was his fundraising capacity, which allowed him to get up on television months before Deeds or Moran. And yet, there isn’t a single ad that proved particularly memorable even though McAuliffe insiders insist the commercials did move numbers (not enough, apparently). We also wonder whether it was a strategic mistake for McAulliffe to talk so much in his own ads; his accent made him sound like he was running for mayor of Syracuse — we are on record as first to float the idea! — rather than governor of Virginia. Don’t dismiss the importance of how a candidate sounds in his (or her) ads; Republican strategists acknowledge that Jerry Kilgore’s accent hurt him badly during his own 2005 gubernatorial bid in Virginia.

Brian Schweitzer: Why the heck did the chairman of the DGA fly from Montana to Virginia to not only endorse McAuliffe but travel the state with him? We didn’t understand it when it happened and we understand it even less now. Schweitzer is ambitious and won a lot of hearts for his stemwinder at last year’s Democratic National Convention. But, the McAuliffe endorsement is rightly seen as a blemish on what has been a sterling electoral record for the Montana governor. Kudos to the Republican Governors Association for their well-timed press release on the subject last night; “Congratulations on your victory tonight,” said RGA Communications Director Mike Schrimpf. “FYI, the DGA will be calling you soon . . . they’re real sorry about that endorsement of Terry McAuliffe last week,” joked RGA spokesman Mike Schrimpf.

Brian Moran: Moran had been laying the groundwork for this race for years and, prior to McAuliffe getting into the contest, was widely seen as the likely Democratic nominee. Instead, he finished third and lost every congressional district in his supposed base. What happened? Moran seemed never to get over the idea that McAuliffe was running for governor; he focused so much of his time and energy on proving that the Macker was a carpetbagger who was ill-suited to be governor that he never made a positive case to Virginians for why they should choose him.

The Clinton Legacy: Not only did McAulliffe, the national chairman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lose in his first run for elected office but so too did Adam Parkhomenko, the wunderkind who came to prominence as HRC campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle’s assistant during the 2008 campaign. Parkhomenko, who was running for the 47th district House seat, wound up placing third behind winner Patrick Hope. While Clintonites may never set foot in the Ballston Westin hotel again — the site of McAulliffe’s “victory” party and countless events for the New York senator during the campaign — it’s almost certain that Parkhomenko will be heard from sometime soon in Commonwealth politics.

Sounds about right.

Unfogged’s Stanley cast a strategic ballot with a visceral twist:

In a vote based solely on their political positions, I’d vote for Moran. He ran to the left, and I’m right with him on those issues. But he wasn’t going to win.

At the end of the day, I voted against McAullife. I just don’t like him, and it’s the first time I’m voting on that sort of gut reaction.

So I voted for the guy that could beat him, Deeds, even though he was probably the most conservative guy in the race.

My strong sense is that quite a few people voted against McAullife.

Patrick Ruffini — who consults for Republican nominee Bob McDonell — thinks the results signal the end of the old era of money in politics.

How many times do I have to say it? In the modern campaign, early money and establishment support matters far, far less than it used to, and could actually turn out to be a handicap — particularly when money becomes the story.

Campaigns like McAuliffe’s that are focused above all else on money, and that put out self-congratulatory press releases about their “grassroots organization” and their Noah’s Ark of big-name consultants, frequently forget that money can’t buy two other M’s: message and momentum.

[...]

The moral of the story is not to run an ascetic campaign for its own sake, but to realize that money and political success are growing more and more intertwined. This is not 1988 or 1992, when a Paul Simon or Paul Tsongas could have a surplus of political success combined a deficit of money, strangling their upstart campaigns in the crib. Today, the money comes in virtually instantaneously online at the first hint of success. The McAuliffe model of banking money early to generate momentum later through ads is broken. The new model is to generate organic opportunities for momentum first then monetize them, punching through the finish line in a final blitzkrieg at the end.

It also doesn’t help to have a grating personality.

To illustrate that US professional sports have a lot of “hilariously anticompetitive interferences in the market” compared to the English Premier League, Daniel Davies constructs an artificial sports league based on all major professional teams in “Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC” in order to achieve a comparable population and economic basis to compare to the UK.

The Mid-Atlantic region has 7 NFL teams (Ravens, Bills, Jets, Steelers, Giants, Eagles, Redskins), 4 NBA teams (Nets, Knicks, 76ers, Wizards), 6 Major League Baseball teams (Orioles, Yankees, Mets, Phillies, Nationals, Pirates) and 7 National Hockey League teams (Devils, Islanders, Rangers, Flyers, Penguins, Sabres, Capitals). That’s a total of 24 major sports teams, split up as seven each for New York and Pennsylvania, four each for DC and New Jersey, two in Maryland and none for Delaware, Virginia and West Virginia.

Using this league, he notes that the teams rarely play each other and that they’re overly concentrated in huge metropolitan areas as compared to the Premier League.

Despite the fact that I absolutely agree — indeed, take as self-evident — that drafting, salary caps, and other mechanisms to achieve parity are indeed anticompetitive, this thought experiment doesn’t buttress the argument.  It’s simply not useful to make up a league and then compare how its teams play outside the league.

As Davies himself notes, “When making any such comparison, though, one has to remember that the USA is not the size of the UK; it’s roughly the size of Europe.”  So, it’s ridiculous to construct an artificial Mid-Atlantic All-Sports League while ignoring that fact.

Of course Delaware and West Virginia lack teams; they simply don’t have a sufficiently large television market to sustain one.  Virginia doesn’t, either, although Northern Virginia has DC’s Redskins in their market and southern and western Virginia is likely in the market for the Charlotte teams (as is West Virginia).

Similarly, it would be odd for the NFL teams in the imaginary Mid-Atlantic region to play most of their games against one another when they play in an actual League that’s spread across a giant continent.  And, of course (as Davies concedes) basketball teams seldom play baseball and football teams, what with their being different sports.

It is noteworthy that the Premier League’s 20 teams for 60 millionish people is a greater concentration than seen in American team sports.  Largely, though, that’s a function of scalability.  If the NFL were to have a team for each 3 million people in the United States, it would have 100 teams.   Even with the present 32 teams, several years may go by without a team playing a given team outside its conference.  With 100, it wouldn’t be a “league” in any meaningful sense at all.   And the playoffs would either have to become NBA-interminable or 70 percent of the league would be eliminated from competition very early in the season. Neither would be workable.

To be sure, there are quirks in the system that are partly a function of monopoly power.  Most obviously, Los Angeles lacks an NFL franchise.  As recently as 1995, it had two but refused to fund a decent stadium out of taxpayer funds and was outbid on that score by Oakland and St. Louis.   Otherwise, though, there are very few metropolitan areas without a team who could sustain one over the long haul without seriously jeopardizing the survivability of a current team.  Indeed, the most recent rounds of expansion and/or relocation have put teams in places like St. Petersburg, Oklahoma City, Columbus, San Jose and Nashville; it’s not at all certain that’s wise.

We’re in Asheville, North Carolina for a couple of days, the first stop on a road trip to see friends and family. I awoke to find a copy of the Asheville Citizen-Times at the door with a headline I thought I’d never see: “NC approves ban on smoking.”

North Carolina, a state built on tobacco, will outlaw smoking in restaurants and bars starting next year. Citing the dangers of second-hand smoke, legislators gave their final stamp of approval to a smoking ban Tuesday with a tight vote in the House, 62-56.

Gov. Bev Perdue said she would sign the legislation, hailing “an important and historic day for North Carolina.”

The ban reflects the dwindling influence of tobacco companies in setting the state’s agenda. It presents a hassle to the owners of some diners and nightspots, and an affront to those who see it as an invasion of property rights.

But Lee Storrow, a 19-year-old UNC Chapel Hill student from Asheville, said most people his age will just be glad not to come home smelling like smoke. “They can choose to go out with friends and not have to choose between their health and having a good time on a Friday or Saturday night,” said Storrow, who pushed for the ban as a volunteer with the American Heart Association.

I’m with Storrow in preferring not to have to wade through a sea of cigarette smoke in order to dine out or grab a beer at the bar.  Still, I continue to believe that the proprietor of the establishment should have the right to decide what best serves his customers.  Tobacco is a legal product, after all.

I’m astounded, though, that North Carolina, a state so associated with tobacco that many brands of cigarettes are named after its cities, is taking this step.  I live in Virginia, the other major tobacco state, which passed a similar ban in March, effective 1 January 2010.

The original version of the post had Virginia still “contemplating” the ban but commenter Boyd noted that it had already passed.

Taegan Goddard passes on word that Tom Ridge, once Pennsylvania’s governor and putatively contemplating running for Arlen Specter’s seat representing that state in the Senate, is a resident of Maryland for the purposes of federal tax and lobbying filings.

Do these sort of things matter in statewide elections?   Is anyone otherwise disposed to vote for Ridge going to be dissuaded by the notion that he’s a carpetbagger?

Rather obviously, Ridge has strong ties to Pennsylvania.  But he moved to Washington for the Homeland Security post a few years back and stayed in its suburbs to cash in as a lobbyist.  Obviously, he’s not going to commute from Pennsylvania to K Street every day.

Rick Santorum represented Pennsylvania in the Senate while living in Leesburg, Virginia; at least Maryland and Pennsylvania are contiguous. Indeed, most Senators and Representatives reside in DC or its suburbs, maintaining their legal residence in their home states only as legal fictions.

George H.W. Bush spent years in Texas before moving to DC but maintained his “Texas” residency by virtue of a Houston hotel room.  Dick Cheney ran for Vice President from Wyoming, where he grew up and which he represented in the House of Representatives, even though he was living in Texas running Haliburton.  Hillary Clinton was twice elected to the Senate from New York even though she came from DC via Arkansas via Chicago.

Radley Balko has a new column at Fox on “Washington’s Wealth Boom.”

The new top three [wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income] are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2007, it was nine of the richest 20.

[...]

While the D.C. metro area hasn’t completely escaped the recession, it’s doing much better than most everywhere else. Real estate advisers Grub & Ellis Company recently ranked the D.C. metro area the top market in the country for commercial real estate investment. Investment advisers are high on D.C. area real estate even in down times, because they know the federal government’s only going to get bigger. That means more federal employees, more grantees and contractors, and more wealthy lawyers and lobbyists setting up shop inside the Beltway — both to get a piece of the federal budget (or, more recently, the $7 trillion-and-growing pot of federal bailout honey), and, as the federal regulatory state expands, to lobby for regulations most favorable (or, least unfavorable) for their clients.

The problem is that, save for the tech corridor in D.C.’s Virginia exurbs, the Washington Metro area doesn’t actually produce anything. Washington doesn’t create wealth, it just moves it around — redistributes it. As government grows and takes control of more and more of the private economy — either through spending, regulation, or taxes — more and more wealth that’s created elsewhere comes to Washington to be devoured.

The Washington wealth boom is the result of the massive expansion in government over the last 10 years, which has populated the region with an increase in well-paid federal employees, and wealthy federal contractors and lobbyists.

It’s axiomatic, really, that the more powerful government is in our lives, the more money that there is around the seat of power. The combination of a massive global recession, a multi-trillion dollar federal stimulus, and the impending handover of the executive branch to a Democrat eager to consolidate control of the economy in Washington do not portend a reversal of this trend any time soon.

While neither Radley nor I are directly involved in government service (disclosure: I was once a federal contractor and was a federal employee as an Army officer)  we’re part of the Washington economy as well, studying and commenting on public policy for a living.  It’s worth noting, too, that the figures are somewhat skewed by the high cost of living in the area, which artificially raises “income” while not necessarily improving living standards.

The Secret Service motorcade carrying 7-year-old Sasha Obama departs Sidwell Friends School after dropping off her sister Malia, on the first day of school on January 5, 2009 in Washington, DC. The incoming first family are staying at the luxury Hay-Adams Hotel, with a view of the White House before moving to the president's official guest home, Blair House, on January 15. AFP PHOTO/Karen BLEIER (Photo credit should read KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

One of the side discussions over the Blair House brouhaha has been that having the Obamas stay at the Hay-Adams Hotel would pose a major inconvenience for those who drive through that part of the District of Columbia, as roads around the hotel would be closed for security reasons.    With the hotel only three blocks from the offices of the Atlantic Council, I can personally vouch for that much.

Here’s what DC’s NBC station has to say:

Drivers complained of gridlock on I Street, a major east-west thoroughfare through downtown D.C., on Monday, due to street closures in the area. City officials advised advised motorists to stay away from the area for the next 10 days, saying there isn’t much they can do to ease the congestion until the Obamas move out of the hotel.

[...]

The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) has put the following limitations into effect, starting at 1 a.m. on Sunday, January 4 until midnight on January 15:

• 16th Street, NW, between I Street and H Street, will be closed to vehicular traffic and parking will be restricted.
• Connecticut Avenue, NW, between I Street and H Street, will be closed to vehicular traffic and parking will be restricted.
• H Street, NW, between 17th Street and Vermont Avenue, will be closed to vehicular traffic and parking will be restricted.
• Parking will be restricted on I Street, NW, between 14th and 17th Streets.

This is a massive and ridiculous inconvenience to protect against a theoretical threat.

I don’t blame President Bush (or whoever it was that decided to deny the Obamas early entry into Blair House) for this.  Nor do I blame President-elect Obama, even though he could have surely started his kids a couple days later in their fancy private school if he cared about us plebes.    No, I blame Bill Clinton.

I’m being mostly tongue-in-cheek but it is true that, after decades of the Secret Service begging to shut down the part of Pennsylvania Avenue nearest the White House to traffic, Clinton finally acceded to their wishes in 1995 following the Oklahoma City bombing.   While the action was almost universally derided as a ridiculous overreaction, achieving a modest gain in the safety of the First Family in exchange for a massive inconvenience for DC residents, workers, and tourists, the precedent was set.

Now, there’s seemingly no concern at all for the burdens security puts on ordinary folks, so long as the Big Shots are protected.   So, when Obama was at home in Chicago running his transition from there, streets were closed around his neighborhood.  At the same time, streets were closed around his transition headquarters in southeast DC even though he wasn’t there personally!

• D Street, NW between 5th and 6th is closed to vehicular traffic and parking is restricted.
• Northbound 6th Street St, NW, between Indiana Avenue and E Street, is reduced to one lane of traffic. The other 2 northbound lanes are blocked off.
• Indiana Avenue, NW, between 5th and 6th Streets, has been temporarily converted to accommodate two-way traffic until the traffic restrictions are lifted on D Street.
• No parking is allowed on the west side of 5th Street, NW, between Indiana Avenue and E Street.
• No parking is allowed in the curb lane on the south side of E Street, NW, between 5th and 6th Streets.
• The east side of 6th Street is closed to pedestrian traffic.

Now, they’re closing down the busiest part of working DC to protect his hotel.

And it gets better:  In an unprecedented move, they’re shutting the city down entirely for the inauguration.

The U.S. Secret Service and regional transportation officials unveiled a plan yesterday to ban personal vehicles from all Potomac River bridge crossings from Virginia into the District and from interstates 395 and 66 inside the Capital Beltway on Inauguration Day.

The plan would also cordon off a large section of downtown Washington from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. to help manage the unprecedented crowds expected.

Some bridges and main thoroughfares with access to the city will remain open, including New York Avenue and the Sousa, Whitney Young and Benning Road bridges. But Northern Virginia drivers will be able to reach the District only from the Beltway in Maryland, and officials are urging people not to attempt to drive into the city.

The bottom line, officials said, is to keep the Mall, the Capitol and the parade route clear of traffic. Even people who live in the District or can get in from Maryland or Virginia can’t get anywhere near the inaugural events or the surrounding downtown area by car. Walking, biking and mass transit — which is expected to be jammed — will provide the only access.

I attended the last inauguration (an experience I would not recommend to others) and we managed to drive in from Virginia with only minor inconvenience. Yes, the roads around the parade route were closed. But cars could certainly get in and around the city.

The Inauguration Day closures are less annoying than the ones for the transition office and the Hay-Adams, since it’s just a single day and it’s a major national civic occasion. Besides, federal workers in the National Capital Region get a paid holiday every four years and most offices (including those of the Atlantic Council) follow suit out of practicality. But the daily closures to protect against theoretical dangers to one citizen are outrageous.

It’s long past time to quit treating presidents like kings. Yes, there are people who would do them harm and it’s a major national trauma when one gets killed. So, provide them with bodyguards and armored limousines and take caution when selecting their routes and releasing their schedules. But don’t shut down half a city for their benefit.