Welcome to yellowhound

Welcome to yellowhound’s blog. I am a Richmonder who has been drawn into the blogosphere by my strong feelings about the 2009 Virginia gubernatorial race. As a yellow dog Democrat, I would rather vote for a mangy yellow dog than a Republican. Even so, I believe in the two-party system which has generally served our nation well, creating stability and a useful check and balance on the tendencies of both parties to go overboard or to become entrenched and corrupt.

I have Republican friends whom I like and respect. But… the Republican Party has lost its way time and again in American history:

• Herbert Hoover was a humanitarian civilian hero of World War I, but his party’s rigid, heartless and shortsighted economic philosophy gave us the Great Depression. 

• Dwight Eisenhower was a great military leader and a true patriot who warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, but he was inexcusably timid about standing up to McCarthy and his ilk’s cynical, destructive  and un-American movement to tarnish Democrats and liberals by manipulating American’s fears. He also turned the CIA and the Dulles brothers loose on Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit, harming the people of that country and our standing in Latin America and the world.

• Richard Nixon’s divide-and-conquer political strategy and his paranoid criminality once in office cast a lingering stench over the Grand Old Party of Lincoln. 

• The anti-intellectual Ronald Reagan, for all his wit and geniality, was a threat to our Constitution whose reflexive anti-Communism led him to sneak around the will of Congress and turn the zany Oliver North loose to run amuck in the National Security Council. 

• George Herbert Walker Bush, for all his bravery as a young World War II pilot, was willing to hold his nose and engage in more divide-and-conquer politics in his quest for office, foisting upon us the cynical and racist Willie Horton ad.

• And the psychobiography-driven George W. Bush — what a piece of work! His cynicism, incompetence and cronyism, his manipulation of our post-9/11 fears, his delegation of power to a smugly imperial, dark-side Vice President, his lack of respect for and understanding of science, his willingness to pervert the law, our civil rights and our basic sense of morality to serve his ends… all caused enormous harm to our nation at home and abroad. Republicans deserve to suffer humiliation and defeat for years for having inflicted such a president upon us and having driven their own moderates out of the GOP. But in the long run we need a functioning and decent Republican Party. Good luck to them.

Which is not to say that I want to see Republican Bob “Regency U.” McDonnell win the 2009 gubernatorial race. His victory would not only be unfortunate for Virginia, it would give the national Republican Party a morale boost it does not deserve right now. They need to lick their wounds, reassess and try to recover their moral compass.

Democrats must choose between three candidates in the primary election on June 9th: 

1) Terry McAuliffe, an intelligent and energetic fellow with many good positions, but with an unfortunate inclination for hyperbole, an expediently fungible sense of ethics, and a highly questionable business history which the Republicans will use effectively against him should he win the primary.

2) Former Delegate Brian Moran, a good liberal from Northern Virginia who has served the Commonwealth for years but who may not be electable state-wide in a state that is still purple, not blue, and in which many regions are suspicious of NoVa.

3) Senator Creigh Deeds, an accomplished and sincere moderate and native Virginian who came within a few hundred votes of beating McDonnell in the 2005 state-wide Attorney General’s race despite having been outspent 2 to 1. That spending disparity will not exist this time and Deeds has the best prospect of winning the general election in November.

Sen. Creigh Deeds announcing his education policy in Richmond, April 13, 2009, with a student supporter and endorser Sen. Henry Marsh.

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Sen. Creigh Deeds listening to a voter’s concerns at a fish fry in Richmond, March 21, 2009.

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