Scandal clouds Virginia governor's race

Susan Page | USA TODAY

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The politician doing the most to shape the Virginia governor's race isn't on the ballot.

The cascading ethical travails of Gov. Bob McDonnell have overshadowed the efforts of the two men who want to succeed him — Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe — in a campaign with national repercussions that has taken a sharply negative turn on its own.

"It dominates the coverage, which makes it harder to talk to people about growing jobs and about a positive vision for Virginia," Cuccinelli said in an interview with USA TODAY. He acknowledged making "my own mistakes in terms of disclosure" involving gifts from the political donor behind the scandal but called them oversights that have been remedied and denied any wrongdoing.

"You hear chatter about it when you're on the trail," McAuliffe, who headed the Democratic National Committee and co-chaired President Clinton's re-election campaign, agreed in a separate interview. "It's there, but what people want to know about is the huge challenges" facing the next governor, from education to traffic congestion.

The two candidates are slated to square off Saturday at their first campaign debate, sponsored by the Virginia Bar Association at a tony resort in Hot Springs, Va. Their contest is being watched as test of the mood of voters on the issues such as the Affordable Care Act and immigration before the midterm elections that follow next year.

Four years ago, for instance, McDonnell's election was an early sign of the voter unhappiness with President Obama and the health care debate that led to devastating Democratic setbacks in 2010, including the loss of control of the House of Representatives.

Still, it's hard for position papers to compete with the drip-drip-drip of disclosures since March in The Washington Post and elsewhere about the $25,000 that Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams provided to pay for the weddings of McDonnell's daughters; the $6,500 Rolex watch he bought for McDonnell's wife to give the governor; the $15,000 shopping spree he financed for her at Bergdorf Goodman, and the $70,000 he provided to a company owned by the governor and his sister. (Williams also gave Cuccinelli $18,000 worth of gifts, and the attorney general made a profit on stock in his company.)

The federal and state investigations into McDonnell reflect a remarkable fall from grace for the Republican governor, whose political future seemed limitless last year. He was mentioned as a running mate for Mitt Romney in 2012 and seen as a potential 2016 presidential candidate himself. Now some Virginia Democrats are calling for his resignation.

It is also unfamiliar political terrain for the Old Dominion. No sitting Virginia governor has been involved in such a serious scandal in modern times, says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. That contrasts with New Jersey, the only other state holding a gubernatorial election in November. There, Gov. Chris Christie brags that as U.S. attorney for seven years he convicted or got guilty pleas from 130 New Jersey pols on bribery, fraud, tax evasion and other charges.

Christie is rated by the non-partisan Cook Political Report as likely to win a second term this fall, and he's touted as a potential GOP presidential contender in 2016.

In Virginia, though, the governor's race is a tossup. The Roanoke College Poll, taken July 8 through Sunday and released Wednesday, put Cuccinelli ahead, 37%-31%. A survey taken last Thursday through Sunday by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling gave McAuliffe the edge, 41%-37%. Both leads were within the polls' margins of error.

OUT OF MAINSTREAM?

McAuliffe and Cuccinelli have national reputations that are assets and issues: Cuccinelli as a crusader on abortion, climate change and other conservative social causes, McAuliffe as a premier Democratic fundraiser and pal of the Clintons. Each portrays the other as out of the mainstream for what in recent years has become a swing state. Virginia, which had been safely Republican in presidential elections since 1968, voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012.

"Cuccinelli in some ways has abused his position in pursuit of his ideological agenda, whether it is suing a climate scientist at the University of Virginia or suing the universities to get them to stop enforcing anti-discrimination measures against gays and lesbians," says pollster Geoffrey Garin, a strategist for McAuliffe. "If Cuccinelli were elected, he would be the most right-wing governor in recent memory, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin."

Democratic TV ads hammer Cuccinelli. In an ad released this week and paid for by the state party, a retiree frets about Cuccinnelli's views in a book published this year stating that Social Security and Medicare have helped make Americans "dependent on government." "It scares me to think of Ken Cuccinelli as governor," she said. "I think he is way out of touch with everybody."

Cuccinelli, meanwhile, portrays McAuliffe as a classic liberal with few deep ties to Virginia.

"I think if Virginians knew where Terry actually stood on taxpayer funding for abortion, for abortion up to the moment of birth, for sex-selection abortion at the option (of the woman) — those are things that I think that Virginia voters would find to be unacceptable to them," Cuccinelli said in the interview. He charged that McAuliffe had a "rather tawdry political history" as a fundraiser. And he noted that he has released the past eight years of his tax returns, while his opponent has not.

McAuliffe in April did release three years of abridged returns that showed he had made $16.5 million in 2009 through 2011 and paid almost $4 million in taxes.

Perhaps more problematic for McAuliffe has been scrutiny of his business record, which he has boasted gives him the credentials to create jobs and boost the economy in the state. Since losing the 2009 nomination for governor, McAuliffe helped found GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company, and Franklin Pellets, a manufacturer of wood pellets used by power plants. But neither company has taken off in a way that would create a significant number of jobs. GreenTech ended up deciding to locate its manufacturing plant in Mississippi. McAuliffe revealed in April that he had stepped down as the company's chairman in December.

In a tour last week at the RagingWire Data Center in Ashburn, Va., McAuliffe didn't mention his own business ventures as he quizzed executives there about how the state government could help draw more high-skilled private-sector jobs to Virginia, studiously scribbling notes and numbers in a reporter-style notebook he was carrying.

"I can say all these businesses, they don't want a social, ideological agenda coming from their governor," McAuliffe told the four reporters traipsing after him in hard hats and safety vests as he admired the construction of a giant cage to secure computer servers. "To bring businesses from California you cannot have attacks on women or gay Virginians or whoever that may be."

McAuliffe, 56, is a big, bluff presence, insisting as he leaves on trying out the retinal-scan security system. "Sorry, cannot confirm your identity," the computerized voice responds. He laughs in delight.

Two days earlier, Cuccinelli also was talking jobs and the economy as he toured the Holly, Woods and Vine garden center in Alexandria on a sweltering afternoon. He asked the proprietor, Vanessa Wheeler, about the impact of the federal budget cuts known as sequestration on her customers, including federal workers who have had furloughs and employees of defense contractors that are facing cutbacks.

Pausing in the shade of a gazebo, standing next to a 5-foot-tall statue of Buddha, he parried questions from reporters about McDonnell's troubles and McAuliffe's attacks. At 44, he is a trim man with short graying hair and a no-nonsense manner.

"I would say that what Terry McAuliffe has called a success, his GreenTech chairmanship and his Franklin Pellets chairmanship, are failures, and Virginians can judge that themselves," Cuccinelli replied. "For a long, long time in this race, he said, 'My job-creation performance here is why you should elect me governor.' He's not saying that anymore."

TRIAL OF THE CHEF

History favors Cuccinelli. Virginia, the only state to limit governors to a single term, has given a political party at least two consecutive terms in the governor's mansion in every election since the 1880s. McDonnell in 2009 succeeded Democrat Tim Kaine, now a U.S. senator.

This time, though, McDonnell's troubles make it hard for him to help Cuccinelli, or for Cuccinelli to want his embrace. And the scandal is sure to be in the news during the campaign's final push. Todd Schneider, a former chef at the Virginia executive mansion, is scheduled to go on trial Oct. 15 on felony charges of embezzling state money. His attorneys say he alerted officials about Williams' gifts to the McDonnell family.

With four months to Election Day, McAuliffe has a big money advantage. On Monday, he reported raising nearly $2 million in June, close to double the $1.1 million Cuccinelli raised. McAuliffe now has $6 million in the bank; Cuccinelli, $2.7 million.

But Cuccinelli may have an advantage in the intensity of support in a contest that traditionally has low voter turnout. "Look, there's a base of committed voters for Ken Cuccinelli that is much more motivated for him than the current base of the Democrat Party is willing to turn out and vote for Terry," says Chris LaCivita, a strategist for Cuccinelli who gained fame as an architect of the Swift Boat Veterans attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.

McAuliffe said the old rules of Virginia may no longer apply. "It's a different electorate today; President Obama won the state twice," he said in the interview. But asked about turnout, he replied, "You hit the nail right on the head. No question that's what it's about. ... The goal has to be to get those voters to turn out."

It's too early to know for sure, Cuccinelli said, but the race could turn out to be a referendum in Virginia on Obama's signature Affordable Care Act and federal environmental regulations that are feared by the state's coal industry, both policies that he has opposed as attorney general. "Those push back opportunities on the federal government's overreach do play a role in this race," he said.

By November, the campaigns, interest groups and super PACS will have spent tens of millions of dollars on the race, Sabato predicts. "Everybody's going to be spending."