Shaun Kenney

Now this is an interesting comment:

It appears the @joe_abbey rumors today was RIchmond based Creightards trying to CA– USE a coup- and their planned coup has miserably failed.

That would be interesting given that Prof. Sabato had mentioned earlier:

Top Dems (Warner, Kaine, Obama) will have to organize major rescue effort soon for Deeds. POTUS can’t afford to lose both NJ & VA badly.

So if it’s Richmond based, who at the top levels in Richmond were looking to sack Joe Abbey as CM for Deeds?  Was it because of the “Rebel Yelp” or was it because certain folks higher up the food chain wanted a change and saw the Rebel Yelp as the excuse?

Jury is still out, but if Ben Tribbett has the goods, this has gone from internal housecleaning to Byzantine palace coup very quickly.

If true, I’m sorry to see this happen, not because I think Abbey was doing a terrible job and needed to stay there (the cynical reason).   Far from it, I have a heck of a lot of respect for Abbey and think he got sold a line of crap with the Confederate flag issue.

Unfortunately, it will be Abbey who pays the price for the mistake:

Party activists have blamed Abbey, fairly or not, for Deeds’ listless campaign. Abbey will apparently retain a title and a role in the campaign, but the decisions will be made by Monica Dixon (a close associate of Sen. Mark Warner), longtime Democratic party staffer Kevin Mack, and Mo Elleithee. The latter will handle all communications and press, and he is a veteran of high-level positions with the successful gubernatorial bids of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine as well as Hillary Clinton’s presidential effort.

Maybe Abbey was in over his head, but I seriously doubt it.  You don’t take on Brian Moran and Terry McAulliffe of all people — win — and then get shunted on account of incompetence.  This is Damage Control 101, and Abbey trusted the wrong crowd and got burned.

Damn shame.

UPDATE:  Prof. Larry Sabato over at UVA’s Center for Politics tips the hand a bit:

The Deeds GOV campaign in VA, trailing badly in the polls, is being shaken up internally. Public announcements won’t reveal the full story.

Ouch.

UPDATE x2:  Mohammed Elleithee says the campaign isn’t shaking up, just “beefing” up.  That’s one way to look at it, though calling out Larry Sabato’s credibility certainly doesn’t seem to be the right tack — nor is it any secret that the Deeds campaign has demoted it’s brightest star, given all the #savejoeabbey comments on Twitter.

Ben Tribbett over at NLS isn’t backing off of his story. In fact, he’s putting the helmet on and digging the trenches:

It’s clear the confederate flag is on a flagpole.  Sitting on a table.

Now, look which booth that table runs into.  It runs under the “Sportsman for McDonnell” banner.  In addition it is clear that table does NOT run into the next booth over.  You can also see from the booth on the right, that it is not a table that is in every booth.

Problem is, if that were true you could have taken a picture head on and resolved this nicely.  I still argue this is a simple photographic trick of the eye — parallax is the ten-cent word for it, and a simple look at the posters tell the tale of the tape, enough to convince Delmarva Dealings that this is about as non-issue as it gets.

Nonetheless, it’s painfully evident that this is not what Creigh Deeds wanted or needed right now.  Bob Holsworth this morning absolutely eviscerated the claim by Deeds spokesperson Mohammed Ellithee that Joe Abbey’s mistweet was merely personal:

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Despondency from Northern Virginia Dems… and tough to say, but I couldn’t agree with them more about the climate:

There are many things going on right now and many important issues like national health care reform, restoring voting rights, reasonable gun control etc. It is very hard to keep going and stay focused.

Very hard to keep going and stay focused?!  That has to be one of the most despondent, beaten down, dejected representations of the climate in Virginia (for a leftist, anyhow) I have read in a long, long time.

Read on:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Todd Smyth
Date: Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 2:17 PM
Subject: [FallsChurchforObama] Sobering Brigades Meeting Last Night
To: Falls Church for Obama

Ben Tribbett (Not Larry Sabato) gave a very professional and well done, but sobering presentation last night at our monthly Brigades meeting. His analysis of each targeted state Delegate district and the implications of redistricting made clear how critical the election in Virginia will be this year. What I took away was that unless we help Creigh Deeds carry the state with a wide margin, we might lose seats in the HoD, which would put us in a position of losing the state Senate in the next election. To me, this means we are in real trouble and on the brink of losing Virginia in a way that could create a modern dark ages that none of us would like to live in.

One of the major problems is that while conservative Republicans tend to vote in every election, many of the people who came out to vote for Obama last November are the least likely to vote in a non-Federal election. Our challenge is getting as many people who voted last year
out to vote this year. Both Del. Caputo and candidate Jeanette Rishell said the only way we can get it done is to be united in getting people out to vote this November. My concern is that many of us are divided in our focus. There are many things going on right now and many important issues like national health care reform, restoring voting rights, reasonable gun control etc. It is very hard to keep going and stay focused.

I would like to ask everyone to think about the situation we are in now and try to do whatever you can to get yourself and people you know involved, informed and taking action. And by that I mean canvassing, phone banking, house parties, signing up new volunteers and data entry. We need everyone we can get as often as possible. Here are the coordinated offices so far in NoVA. If you have other office locations and contacts, please reply with them.

—
Todd Smyth
Fairfax, VA

I’ll ask rhetorically:  What do you think the MSM would have done if a Republican had mentioned that Virginia’s submission to the Democratic Party would “create a modern dark ages”?

So why was the picture taken at an angle? Well, it has a lot to do with a simple photographic and scientific phenomenon called parallax:

Parallax is an apparent displacement or difference of orientation of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.

A simple everyday example of parallax can be seen in the dashboard of motor vehicles which use a “needle” type speedometer gauge (when the needle is mounted in front of its dial scale in a way that leaves a noticeable spacing between them). When viewed from directly in front, the speed may show 60 (i.e. the needle appears against the ’60’ mark on the dial behind); but when viewed from the passenger seat (i.e. from an oblique angle) the needle can appear against a slightly lower or higher mark (depending on whether it is viewed from the left or from the right), because of the combined effect of the spacing and the angle of view.

Thus ends the Confederate Flag controversy!

Couldn’t resist. But if this picture were legitimate, you can bet the staffer taking the picture would have taken the picture head on, right? But a little parallax, a blog, maybe a gullible MSM reporter or two… who knows?

Bob McDonnell wants to fix the economy; Creigh Deeds wants to kill future taxpayers.

Meanwhile, someone is leaking photos of Confederate flags that just ain’t so.  Jim Hoeft over at Bearing Drift joins Anita Kumar over at the Washington Post in taking Joe Abbey and Ben Tribbett to task:

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If it hasn’t become obvious at this point, I’m performing one of those stylish “staycations” back home.

One of the virtues of being able to do this is to talk about practically whatever I want during the day and not goof off with the delayed posting feature in WordPress, but the better advantage is that I get to check out cool events such as these:

Talk: Jefferson and Slavery
William Merkel, Associate Professor of Law, Washburn Law School presents his work on “Jefferson and Slavery: Legal and Constitutional Issues, 1801-1809.” His presentation, a work in progress, will include the role of the Three Fifths Clause in the election of 1800, the legal status of slavery in the new and existing western territories, federal prohibition of the international slave trade into the United States, and colonization of African Americans outside the United States. 4 p.m. at Monticello’s Jefferson Library. The talk is free, but space is limited. Please e-mail to register.

Offered as part of the ongoing Fellows Forum series at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.

I’ve been on a renewed Jeffersonian kick over the last few weeks that has devolved into reading more on Roman history, How Rome Fell and The Inheritance of Rome being the two books by my nightstand currently.  In the process, I was persuaded by a friend to purchase The Quotable Jefferson, which really is a remarkable little book offering a great deal of temporal insight as to how Jefferson drifted on many a topic — slavery included.

Your really can’t make this stuff up:

“I think it’s obvious that Creigh knows that he is in trouble, so he’s thrown up this Hail Mary pass to rile up his liberal base,” said state GOP Chairman Pat Mullins.

But Deeds rejected the notion that effort was a gamble.

“Everything in life is risky,” he said. “Helen Keller once wrote that life is either a daring adventure or nothing. So this is my daring adventure. . . . And that means sometimes I have do things that some people view as risky. I don’t think it is.”

So if Creigh and Jody are plotting the WYLD STALLYNS reunion tour, where does that leave Steve Shannon?

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Heh.

Kenton Ngo tries to explain why the abortion strategy for Deeds works. Unfortunately, there’s two immediate pitfalls.

First, pro-lifers are single-issue voters and make up about 20% of the support for Deeds. Why break them off?

Second, pro-aborts don’t place abortion as their top issue. In Virginia, your top issues are jobs, economy, and transportation — Deeds might as well be talking about doorknobs, the issue in and of itself simply doesn’t ring true.

Now this is not to say the strategy isn’t born out of necessity — it most certainly is. Deeds is getting crushed across the board. What Deeds is doing is shoring up his base.

Problem is, it’s August, and he’s shoring up a constituency he really shouldn’t have to reassure.