As this year's Virginia gubernatorial election approached, Republican governors from around the country stormed into the state to make the case for their party's nominee, right-winger Jerry Kilgore. "Everyone is watching," Idaho's Governor Dirk Kempthorne told the crowd at a fundraiser for Kilgore. "They are watching Virginia...to see whether conservatism is still on the march." On November 8 the voters of the state that has not backed a Democrat for President since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 gave Kempthorne and his fellow conservatives an answer: They elected Democrat Tim Kaine, derided for months by Republicans in an expensive, often vicious campaign as "the most liberal candidate who's ever run for governor in the Commonwealth of Virginia's history." Kaine was never quite the liberal his opponents claimed, but he has been an honest supporter of moves to increase taxes to fund education, transportation and environmental programs; a thoughtful critic of the death penalty; and a consistent proponent of racial justice in a state that is barely a generation away from the days of "massive resistance" to integration.

Kaine's backers will tell you that his win had a lot to do with the man and his campaign, as well as a ham-handed attempt by the Republicans to suggest that his discomfort with capital punishment meant that he would have gone easy on Adolf Hitler. But the candidate also benefited from a collapse of confidence in the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies. In Virginia, where a substantial portion of the electorate lives in the Washington suburbs, the daily stories of indictments, scandals, missteps and neglect--particularly of the victims of Hurricane Katrina--have taken their toll on the President's popularity. The state that gave Bush a solid 54 percent of the vote last year now gives him only a 41 percent approval rating. He's even less popular in the other state that held a gubernatorial election, New Jersey, where Bush's approval rating--34 percent--was so dismal that the Democratic candidate, Senator Jon Corzine, re-energized a flagging campaign by running TV ads that linked his Republican opponent to Bush. In what was once expected to be a close contest, Corzine won by ten points.

It's always a little dangerous to extrapolate from the results of off-year elections. But Democrats were crowing about their wins in the gubernatorial races this year and looking forward enthusiastically to next year's thirty-six statehouse contests. Even Republicans were acknowledging that the old Bush magic seemed to be fading. Kilgore actually avoided appearing with Bush at one of the President's two pre-election appearances in Virginia, and New Jersey Republicans pointedly asked the man they used to refer to as the campaigner-in-chief to stay out of their state, as did California Republicans, who were struggling to pass referendums designed to enhance Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's authority while undermining legislative Democrats.

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