This wasn’t supposed to have happened. Even before Virginia Democrats picked Senator-Elect Jim Webb as their nominee, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic nominee would be a sacrificial lamb. Allen had been a popular Governor who became the only Republican to unseat a sitting Democratic Senator during the 2000 elections. His approval ratings were consistently high. And, at least at the beginning, he enjoyed a lead in the polls that seemed insurmountable. And yet, nonetheless, today, George Allen conceded defeat.
So, the logical question one might ask is why did this happen ? There are, I think, several reasons.
First of all, Allen ran an appallingly bad campaign. It started with the admittedly over-hyped macaca controversy and continued into the final weeks of the campaign with the exceedingly stupid obsession of the Allen campaign and its allies over certain explicit passages from Webb’s novels. In an ordinary year, things like this wouldn’t have amounted to anything; in a year when the President’s approval ratings are in the basement, it just served to reinforce negative feelings that the electorate already had.
Second, the Allen-Webb campaign just serves to reinforce an argument I made in the aftermath of last year’s Gubernatorial election; Virginia is no longer the solid-red state that it was assumed to be from 1964 onward. The most-populated and fastest-growing counties in the state (Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William) all went for Webb. All of these counties are in Northern Virginia and, combined, they gave Webb a total of nearly 340,000 votes. Judging by the map, Allen won more counties, but Webb won where it counted.
Finally, I’ve just got to say it, previously-stated Presidential aspirations notwithstanding, George Allen really wasn’t all that great. He calls himself a Jeffersonian conservative (leaving aside the fact that Thomas Jefferson was anything but a conservative), but he never seemed all that committed to individual liberty. Like his mentor, John Warner, he seemed more concerned with bringing home the pork to the Old Dominion and being the loyal Republican.
All this reminds me of something a friend of mine from law school, a Democrat, told me when I first moved to Virginia. Virginia politicians, he said, are universally morons. They call themselves the heirs of Jefferson, and Madison, and Mason, but they can’t hold a candle to the Founders generation. Given this hypothesis, its little wonder that the last President Virginia contributed to the nation was a man who led us into a totally useless war and set into a motion events that led to a worldwide cataclysm. His name ? Woodrow Wilson.
As I said before the election, I voted for George Allen because he was better than the alternative. By the time the campaign was over, though, I thought far less of him than I did before it began.
