Merli Column: Will the real Bob McDonnell please stand up?

One of the convenient blessings of the digital age is that if you happen to be a writer — or have written anything on any topic that others had access to — then the chances of it being retrievable via the
Internet are extremely good. Likewise, such immediate and widespread access to so many written words by so many others also can also be a curse.

For better or for worse, I can easily retrieve the bulk of whatever I’ve written in this space (and in other venues) going back more than a decade. (Why I would want to is another question.) And so it’s with
this first-hand awareness of this insanely comprehensive accessibility to our past written works that I felt at least a modicum of sympathy this week when I read about that graduate school thesis that Bob
McDonnell had written 20 years ago.

If McDonnell had not recently been anointed the GOP candidate for governor of Virginia, no one would have been the wiser (perhaps including McDonnell, who easily may have forgotten his thesis
altogether). But after an excruciatingly dull and uneventful summer gubernatorial campaign (for us, at least) pitting McDonnell against Democratic hopeful R. Creigh Deeds, word of McDonnell’s Reagan-
era treatise first broke in the media last weekend, and now it’s taken center stage in a contest that didn’t appear to have much of a stage to begin with.

McDonnell’s graduate paper reads, in part, like something out of 1889 — and not the year it was written, 1989. His views 20 years ago on gays, as well as the scourge of “fornicators” (apparently he had a
thesaurus handy) and other societal woes made McDonnell sound like a social cretin, even in 1989. At one point in his paper (modestly dubbed “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The
Compelling Issue of The Decade”), he labeled women in the workforce as “detrimental” to the “traditional family” and lamented the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to rid classrooms of Judeo-Christian
teachings.

This week, McDonnell assured reporters that his thinking on some of these key issues has changed over the years — choosing to voice a more moderate middle ground rather than staunchly defend his
thesis’s older opinions for the sake keeping happy his ultra-conservative backers. He also points out that he was, after all, writing a college thesis and trying to make certain points for the primary purpose
of earning high marks (literally) for his efforts. That surely will sound familiar to any of us who ever had a similar writing assignment in school.

This is what bothers me, however, about his written observations all those years ago: McDonnell was not a naïve, head-strong stereotypical 22 year-old college graduate when he wrote his paper. He
wasn’t even a graduate student in his mid- or late-20s when he spoke of a woman’s place in a man’s world and other issues that only an extreme conservative fringe might adhere to today. Rather, when
he authored his thesis he was a father and husband fast-approaching his 40s who had already been working in the real world (beyond the ivory towers of academia) for more than a decade.

And at least judging from most people I’ve known for much of their lives — and representing every political persuasion from Ted Kennedy to Richard Cheney — most of us rarely change our basic views of
the world around us between our late-30s and our late-50s.

That is not to say McDonnell wouldn’t make a decent governor, or that he won’t get the chance. He continues to lead in the polls and, as of today, he may well find himself moving into the governor’s
mansion in Richmond next January as Tim Kaine moves out. He also showed a fair amount of restraint from any lingering extremist views while serving as the Commonwealth’s attorney general and
spending all those years in the House of Delegates.

So the question that will now haunt some observers is whether McDonnell has merely toned down any of his past ultra-conservative views for political expediency to get to the governor’s seat, or has his
1989 thesis-thinking evolved to the point where, if elected in November, he could truly represent more than a fringe element of voters whose issues calendar still reads “1889.”

John Merli lives and works in Prince William County and has held various media posts for more than 40 years. He’s been a News & Messenger columnist since 1985. He can be reached at
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