Dear Virginia: When one of the candidates vying to be your next governor crusades for speaking only English at work and doesn’t want people having oral or anal sex, it’s time to admit you have a problem.
Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s strident conservative views have turned his race against former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe into arguably the ugliest election in 2013. Outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell’s lieutenant governor called the race “disgusting.”
Virginia is now a political battleground state, and the winner of this year’s gubernatorial election could indicate which way voters swing in in 2014 and 2016. The state went for Barack Obama twice and George W. Bush twice. McAuliffe is an experienced campaign brawler and close confidante of Bill and Hillary Clinton, but Cuccinelli’s mouth has stolen the show thus far, especially with his desire to stamp out all languages except English in public spaces.
A post on the ProEnglish Facebook page, which has a strong 51,000 likes for the Virginia nonprofit, touts that in past legislative sessions Cuccinelli has advocated for making speaking Spanish or Portuguese at work a fireable offense. ProEnglish states that its mission is to “educate the public about the need to protect English and make it the official language of the U.S.”
In direct response to Cuccinelli’s tone-deaf views, McAuliffe launched his Latinos Con Terry campaign on July 29. The McAuliffe campaign did not return our request for comment.
Despite the strong online momentum the ProEnglish movement has gained, the reality of the United States in 2013 is that one-fifth of all residents speak a language other than English at home. It’s a losing battle, and during this year’s race Cuccinelli has backed off slightly. Earlier this year, his campaign’s immigration issues webpage was scrubbed.
Cuccinelli has compared ObamaCare to slavery so many times that the NAACP asked him to stop. He also believes “homosexual acts” are “intrinsically wrong.”
Whoopi Goldberg declared on The View recently that she’s “going to make sure you’re not going to become governor.”
Dear Ken Cuccinelli: The only demo you haven’t repulsed is rich men. Running on a “Ban All Blow Jobs” platform, you may lose them as well.
— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) July 17, 2013
Ken Cuccinelli is fucked up. He wants a state where forced transvaginal ultrasounds are legal, but anal sex is not.
— DC Debbie (@DCdebbie) August 8, 2013
“It’s scary to me that he has more than five supporters statewide,” says Jasmine Whitehorn, who worked as a Field Organizer in Danville for the Virginia Democratic Coordinated Campaign. “I don’t understand Virginia. This is the same electorate that voted for Obama twice, and in even bigger margins in 2012.”
In a Quinnipiac poll published July 18, McAuliffe held a slim 43-to-39 edge over Cuccinelli. The good news for Cuccinelli is that the same poll says voters would rather hang with him at a barbecue over his rival.
Whitehorn doesn’t think Cuccinelli’s popularity spells doom for Democrats in 2016 though. “Presidential elections bring out huge numbers in Virginia,” she says. “Larger turnout is the only thing that brings me any comfort.”
Some policy influencers are taking a much more measured approach. Marco Grimaldo, president and CEO of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, says his group is not taking a position on either candidate. But Grimaldo did say the English-first, English-only policies that Cuccinelli endorsed were “wrong-headed.”
“There’s a real keen sense in Virginia that the immigrant population in Virginia is growing, and the number of foreign-born citizens with voting rights is growing, and that has some bearing on the leadership of Virginia,” Grimaldo says.
On immigration, Cuccinelli’s campaign punted the question to the federal level. ”Ken Cuccinelli is running for governor of Virginia and focused on economic issues at the state level,” his press secretary, Anna Nix, says in an email. “He believes Congress should be able to come up with a solution that fully secures the border and does not allow for any form of amnesty,” she adds.
Of course, her boss once linked a Washington, D.C., pest-control policy with federal immigration laws, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that he spared us his plan for Virginia’s immigrants.
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