VA Candidate for Governor Dogged by Thesis

There is a really interesting story playing out right now in the Virginia gubernatorial race. One of the candidates is having his feet held to the fire based on a paper he wrote while a student at a Christian university. Here is an excerpt--read the entire article by clicking here.

Thesis Issue Builds, McDonnell Tries to Move On
Former Colleagues Say Views Persist

By Amy Gardner and Anita Kumar, Washington Post Staff Writers

Republican Robert F. McDonnell's 20-year-old master's thesis continued to consume the Virginia governor's race Tuesday, with Democrat R. Creigh Deeds presenting the paper as his opponent's true beliefs and McDonnell insisting otherwise.

The Deeds campaign brought out four former Republican lawmakers who said the views expressed in the thesis mirrored the positions they saw McDonnell take again and again in the General Assembly. McDonnell reiterated that some of his views have changed, particularly regarding women in the workforce, and attempted to change the subject to education.

At issue is a 93-page research paper titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade," in which McDonnell laid out a conservative action plan to promote the traditional family in government. McDonnell wrote against working women, feminists and homosexuals, and he decried the absence of religion in the public schools, the rise of single motherhood and the creation of tax credits for child care to encourage mothers to work.

He submitted the thesis in 1989, two years before he was elected to the House of Delegates, while pursuing public policy and law degrees at Regent University in Virginia Beach.

Deeds has been highlighting McDonnell's conservatism for months, but his campaign pounced on the thesis as further evidence of it after details from the paper were first published Sunday in The Washington Post. On Tuesday, the four former lawmakers, who had previously announced their support for Deeds, used the thesis to talk about McDonnell's record. "It's the Bob I've always known,'' said former senator Martin E. Williams (Newport News). "My biggest shock is that he is running away from it, because I really do think it's who is he is."