Shaun Kenney

This has been the topic of many conversations over the last week.

Camp Gilmore says it’s over, the votes are there, and are going out of their way to prove it. There’s no panic at the head office, and while the “it’s in the bag” talk has dissolved, no one has quite pushed the panic button yet.

Meanwhile, the mood at Camp Marshall is optimistic, but not the sugary optimism one expects from a race that knows it’s going to get beat. In fact, I would say the opposite — Marshall’s staff doesn’t just believe it can win… they are expecting a win and don’t really go out of their way to prove it.

My honest view from 30,000 feet up? Take my old stomping grounds in the Fredericksburg area for instance.

Spotsylvania? 3:1 Marshall.
Stafford? Majority Marshall.
Fredericksburg City? Majority Marshall.

Here’s the kicker:

But based on early returns from the county meetings, Gilmore strategist M. Boyd Marcus said “there really isn’t any doubt” that Gilmore will be the nominee because he is winning big in many rural counties as well as suburban Richmond and Hampton Roads.

Is Boyd right? I’ve cautioned that this might be the case, though I can confirm that in humble Fluvanna, Bob Marshall will do well (provided everyone shows up).

Now I don’t have the familiarity in places like Fairfax, Prince William, and Chesterfield that others might have. So this very well could be a blowout in the rural parts of the state while social conservatives and Northern Virginia get swamped out.

On the other hand… if Gilmore is conceding NOVA, and the social conservatives are turning out in places with contested unit chairman seats, the quiet confidence of the Marshall coalition between NOVA/SoCos/anti-HB 3202 crusaders/Davis supporters just might have more weight than folks care to realize just yet.

The catch?

“They really don’t have anyone on their side that has really done this before,” Marcus said of Marshall’s campaign. “They never really understood what was happening around them. You can’t build support on a statewide basis in a month or two.”

This is true. Then again, in the 1st District convention now-Congressman Rob Wittman didn’t have anyone who did this before either. Staff only gets you halfway there…

Surely it’s all uphill for Marshall. But history (remember Mike Farris?) often vindicates the most socially conservative candidate. After all, isn’t that why Gilmore wanted a convention in the first place against Davis?

Of course, the intent of the post is to sound out whether Marshall has sufficiently swayed Chris Beer’s vote, but there’s some interesting intel information that I can certainly confirm:

Hyland is right that Davis supporters are banging down the doors for Marshall, but there is quiet fist-pumping among many Davis supporters when you talk about Marshall’s candidacy. Marshall is also universally respected among those who know him. He’s doctrinaire, but he won’t stab you in the back. Let me tell you, among Davis supporters, there is real anger at the way Tom has been treated by the state party after all the work and all the money he spread around to help elect Republicans all across the commonwealth in the last few years. Whether its fair or not, Gilmore gets hit with that anger. There is also genuine resignation that Gilmore will get blown out by many up here and he has shown no reason yet how he won’t. For Marshall, many up here just throw their hands up and say “what the hell, why not?”

I don’t know. I’ll be a delegate in Richmond next month and I while I’m supporting Gilmore now, I was also ready to support anyone else. I was at the state central meeting where Tom got slapped in the face, and I haven’t forgotten about that either. It wasn’t just a slap in Tom’s face, for many of us from Northern Virginia it felt like a slap on all our faces. And the irony is that the convention was suppose to guarantee Gilmore the nomination, and now its being used to prevent it.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but it shouldn’t shock a soul that Marshall and Davis can work together. Differences aside, both are known as party-builders par excellence.

Has anyone figured out yet that it is an alliance of Northern Virginians plus social conservatives that have put us over the top time and time again in the past?

The new Hillary Rodham Clinton: Now 50% more pro-gun with added Jesus!

For the third time since Mr. Obama’s remarks were made public Friday night, Mrs. Clinton criticized him at length, saying his comments seemed “kind of elitist and out of touch.”

“I disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in our country cling to guns and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.

She described herself as a pro-gun churchgoer, recalling that her father taught her how to shoot a gun when she was a young girl and said that her faith “is the faith of my parents and my grandparents.”

You know it’s bad when HRC criticizes someone as “kind of” elitist and out of touch. What the hell does that mean, anyhow — “kind of” out of touch?

Tough Mass Meeting last night in Augusta County.

Of course, Augusta isn’t the only one with such battles, but it does speak to the dissention in the ranks of the GOP that we seem to be walking more towards an old-1970’s Libertarian Party ethos rather than the Reaganesque big tent of years past.

Well now… isn’t this special:

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Super-Altoids?

$10 says it tastes like crap.

I don’t know if Jim Gilmore has any control over his “bloggers “, but trumpeting as an achievement the spending of budget surpluses towards public universities rather than returning them to the taxpayer doesn’t seem like the best move to underscore one’s fiscal conservative values. D.J. McGuire explains:

One of the many things the American right has done to change the debate on education in general is to force Americans to see that a government monopoly is not the best way to deliver education. At the K-12 level, this has led to numerous conservative proposals for education reform under the e umbrella of educational choice – in essence, taking the entire idea of government help for education and restructuring it so that the students, not the institutions, are aided. The conservative movement is making similar moves in housing, medical insurance, and other areas.

Gilmore’s tuition freeze, by contrast, moves in the exact opposite direction. It doesn’t strengthen individual choice; it limits it by forcing them to use public education in order to benefit from the aid. It doesn’t embrace the free market; it distorts it by using government power to artificially lower the prices for government-funded universities to the detriment of private and religious ones.

Artificial subsidization of public institutions kills private and religious universities. Not a difficult concept to master, unless you’re a big-government type… and there’s a party for that.

What’s more disturbing at this point is the utter lack of message control… where once again, Marshall’s conservative record has zero apologies to make.

UPDATE: Kenney the Younger sees the same problem (and coincidentally attends VCU). Is anyone watching the Bloggers 4 Gilmore henhouse?

The momentum builds. Read it all.

Not good news for Leslie Byrne, though I’d be more interested in head to head polls vs. Republicans.

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Fairly compelling argument from Jackson Landers over at Rule.303:

In a nutshell, officially admitting that there are wild cougars in Virginia invites a political mess that none of these people really wants to deal with. Can you really blame them? So in response to sighting after sighting and article after article, DGIF and other agencies give the same old ‘swamp gas and weather balloons’ routine, as if we were talking about unicorns or velociraptors hiding out in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Their potential ‘out’ when some hunter finally shoots one and forces the issue into everyone’s lap is the fact that, as I have explained here, odds are that these are not in fact eastern cougars at all but rather exotic pet trade hybrids. Hybrids which have no official status in wildlife regulations and are not considered endangered animals.

At that point, DGIF will almost certainly attempt to calm everyone down by pointing out that these are the product of escaped pets. This is what other states have done in the same situation. That takes care of the legal protection issue, but as for the rest it changes nothing. In terms of either safety or a desire to restore the old ecology of Virginia with a large, top level carnivorous cat, who the heck cares what subspecies it is? The worst part is that people usually swallow this kind of crap. And certainly DGIF will say that we have no reason to think that the escaped animals are breeding, so they don’t really count, etc. But you’d have to be a complete idiot to think that there is any reason why these cats wouldn’t be doing what comes naturally and breeding in the wild.

Now I have never seen one of these bad boys running amok in my part of Fluvanna (might have heard one out towards Luray — sounds like an angry baby crying), but I have had the pleasure of running into black bear from time to time… even in Spotsylvania County there were black bear sightings in and around the battlefields.

Heck, anyone care to guess how long ago it was when people said that coyotes weren’t a problem… until folks started shooting them in and around Fort A.P. Hill? I wouldn’t put it outside of the realm of possibility that eastern bobcats are still running amok in Virginia.

See… the Pope videoblogs!

Nice… even Pope Benedict XVI gets the new media!