Thursday August 6, 2009

State Sen. Creigh Deeds enjoyed some high profile help Thursday night as, for the first time, President Barack Obama made an appearance in support Virginia's Democratic nominee for governor.

"Last year, Virginia, you helped lead a movement," the president told a packed house at the McLean Hilton, a reference to his election to the White House.

The president, joined not only by the candidate Deeds, but also by current Gov. Tim Kaine, didn't disappoint supporters, offering up plenty of red meat at the expense of the Republican Party.

"I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking," he told the crowd. "I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess."

But will Deeds get to try his hand at cleaning up the mess?

New polling shows a continuation of recent trends over the past couple months. A Daily Kos/Research 2000 Virginia poll released this week shows Republican Bob McDonnell with a 51-43 lead over Deeds.

That means the Deeds campaign, still about three months out from the election, is not in trouble, but has a lot of work to do between now and November.

President Obama's appearance may not give Deeds much of a boost, either. The president, wounded by the health care reform debate, has seen his approval numbers fall to new lows in his almost seven month tenure in office. Numbers out Thursday from Quinnipiac University show 50 percent of Americans approving of the job the president's done; 42 percent disapprove so far.

Still, President Obama had a clear message Thursday night; a message that Virginians need Creigh Deeds.

"I need every one of you to knock on doors and make phone calls and get fired up once again so that we can go towards the future confident with Creigh Deeds leading the great commonwealth of Virginia."

A fun fact: the president is trying to reverse a longstanding trend in Virginia. Virginians go to the polls to elect a governor the year after the presidential election. The last time a governor was elected from the same party as the president was 1974, when Republican Governor Mills Godwin was elected the year after Republican President Richard Nixon. That's a feat both Obama and Deeds would like to repeat.