Below The Beltway

There are still ten days of campaigning left in the Virginia Governor’s race, but the knives are already coming out on the Democratic side:

Sensing that victory in the race for Virginia governor is slipping away, Democrats at the national level are laying the groundwork to blame a loss in a key swing state on a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign that failed to fully embrace President Obama until days before the election.

Senior administration officials have expressed frustration with how Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has handled his campaign for governor, refusing early offers of strategic advice and failing to reach out to several key constituencies that helped Obama win Virginia in 2008, they say.

Democratic strategists said that over the summer, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) offered Deeds advice on winning a statewide election. Among other things, Kaine, who is also chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told Deeds that he should lay out more of his own vision and stop attacking Republican Robert F. McDonnell so ferociously. But Deeds did not embrace the advice, according to a national Democratic strategist.

A senior administration official said Deeds badly erred on several fronts, including not doing a better job of coordinating with the White House. “I understood in the beginning why there was some reluctance to run all around the state with Barack Obama,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly about the race. “You don’t do that in Virginia. But when you consider the African American turnout that they need, and then when you consider as well they’ve got a huge problem with surge voters, younger voters, we were just a natural for them.”

A second administration official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “Obama, Kaine and others had drawn a road map to victory in Virginia. Deeds chose another path.”

A loss for Deeds in Virginia — which for the first time in decades supported the Democratic presidential candidate in last year’s race — would likely be seen as a sign that Obama’s popularity is weakening in critical areas of the country. But the unusual preelection criticism could be an attempt to shield Obama from that narrative by ensuring that Deeds is blamed personally for the loss, particularly given the state’s three-decade pattern of backing candidates from the party out of power in the White House.

In this case, however, there seems to be plenty of evidence of problems with the Deeds campaign, and with Deeds as a candidate:

Democrats on both sides of the Potomac River cite prominent Democratic businesswoman Sheila Johnson’s endorsement of McDonnell in July as the first sign of trouble in the Deeds campaign. They say Deeds let several weeks go by after his June 9 primary without calling Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and one of Kaine’s leading donors.

A senior Deeds aide said that the Democrat traveled to Johnson’s Middleburg ranch in April and that the two did not hit it off. Johnson mostly wanted to talk about her opposition to labor unions, and the aide said Deeds told Johnson that he had concerns about congressional legislation that unions favored, but she seemed unhappy that he was unwilling to “trash” unions.

The campaign decided after Deeds’s primary win that the best approach was to have staffers try to set up another meeting. The aide said Deeds and staffers for Kaine’s political action committee tried to reach Johnson a dozen times but that she did not return their calls. Deeds himself did not place a call.

(…)

With Johnson’s defection, an endorsement from the nation’s first elected black governor, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, became more essential.

But as late as August, Deeds’s campaign was calling around Richmond looking for a way to reach Wilder, according to a longtime state lobbyist and also Wilder’s nephew, Michael Brown.

“It was a high official within the campaign who called,” said Brown, who supports Deeds.

And, of course, in the end, Wilder endorsed nobody and issued a rather scathing indictment of Deeds. All of this would seem to be evidence of an inept campaign, and an inept candidate, but we sort of already knew that didn’t we ?

What’s interesting about all of this is the fact that Democrats are clearly cutting Deeds loose at this point. The Virginia Governor’s race is over, folks.