Republican blogs Bearing Drift and Too Conservative are having fun with this video, claiming that Creigh Deeds "agrees" with Bob McDonnell on education and even that Deeds "thinks former Gov. Mark Warner and Gov. Tim Kaine have done a poor job funding higher education." Now, I don't believe for a minute that Deeds thinks this way (or, even if he did, would say it in public), but here's the video and a transcript so you can decide for yourself.
Lots of good things have happened while Governors Kaine and Warner have been in office. But there's one thing that's not been so good. You have a public system of higher education that gives every person a chance to succeed, a chance to engage in the economy, a chance to live the American dream. They're Harvards and they're Yales, they're Washington and Lee's, and I'm proud of all of them...but we have a public system so everybody can [unintelligible]. The last 8 years, we have disinvested in higher education to the tune of over $3,000 per student. The result of that has been tuition in our four-year system has increased by 78 percent on average, and that was before last week a lot of schools announced increases...of 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 percent.By the way, several days ago the Deeds campaign bizarrely claimed that "Terry McAuliffe Attacks Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, And General Assembly Democrats" on the issue of payday lending. That's utterly ridiculous, of course; Terry McAuliffe did nothing of the sort. To the contrary, what Terry's consistently said in this governor's race is that we badly need to win back the House of Delegates from Republicans - not Democrats, obviously - who have stymied progressive reforms like on the issue of payday lending. The question is, why would the Deeds campaign attack Terry on this when they know that the guy's one of the fiercest fighters for Democrats around? Very strange.
