Deeds, McDonnell spar over job creation

HOT SPRINGS — If the driving issue of Virginia’s marquee 2009 governor’s race is job development, Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell said Saturday that the state has to do it by creating new and improved road systems.

However, neither candidate would commit to new taxes as a necessity for reducing a backlog of delinquent highway construction needs that officials estimate is at least $100 billion and growing.

McDonnell said he wouldn’t consider taxes if elected, and instead pitched a patchwork of proposals announced Tuesday as varied as selling state-owned liquor stores, tolling freeways and using existing sales taxes for highway funding in northern Virginia.

Deeds wouldn’t say whether he’d consider new taxes, something Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine unsuccessfully sought from the General Assembly twice since 2006 to ease gridlock in the state’s crowded northern Virginia and Hampton Roads regions.

Each candidate spent as much time labeling the other as a disciple of extreme policies that have either have failed or are future risks as he spent explaining his own initiatives.

McDonnell asked Deeds to join him in writing Virginia’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Jim Webb and Mark R. Warner to urge their opposition to oppose cap-and-trade energy legislation and the pro-labor “card check” bill. McDonnell claimed both bills would harm businesses.

The energy bill, intended to curb carbon gas emissions blamed for global warming, would increase energy costs and boost taxes, he said, while the labor bill threatens Virginia’s long ban on union membership as a condition for employment.

Deeds wouldn’t bite.

“I wonder if you’re running for governor or for Congress,” Deeds said to McDonnell.

Deeds said he was confident that any labor bill would protect the right of workers to vote secretly on whether to unionize their workplaces. He called the energy bill unwise in a poor economy, but said he was confident Warner and Webb and U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., would protect southwestern Virginia’s coal mining interests.

Then Deeds confronted McDonnell, noting that he voted with anti-tax GOP conservatives in the House of Delegates in 2004 in opposing a tax package Warner backed as governor. That measure had support from state business groups and passed the decisive House vote with support from 17 GOP moderates. Deeds also said McDonnell had embraced former President George W. Bush’s economic polices and challenged him defend it.

“You said they worked well for this country, now I want to know where have you been the last eight years,” Deeds demanded.

“In 2001 and 2003, ... the federal government under Republican leadership put together significant cuts in taxes: corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, killed the death tax,” McDonnell said. “These were policies that Democrats and Republicans said in 2004, ‘05 and ‘06 that this is the reason that we had this economic revival. We saw overheating in the real estate market, the stock market during that time.”

But both candidates kept returning to transportation as the foundation necessary to rebuild the state’s economy. The differences arose over paying for it.

Deeds pledged to address transportation in a special legislative session in fall 2010 if elected. But he repeatedly refused, in the debate and interviews afterward, to even acknowledge that new taxes may be necessary.

“I’m running for governor, I’m not running for dictator,” he said. “A whole lot of options are on the table and I’m not going to presume what will or won’t pass the General Assembly next year.”
McDonnell’s 12 funding proposals, Deeds countered, would drain $5.4 billion over 10 years from public education by detouring money to highways from the general fund, which funds core services of government.

McDonnell was unequivocal in defending his plan: no tax increases no matter what.

“You heard the plan from me,” McDonnell said after the debate. “This is my plan: my plan is not to raise taxes, to set transportation as a priority and to use creative thinking like the bonds and offshore drilling,” and selling state-owned liquor stores to private owners.

The 80-minute debate before the Virginia Bar Association’s annual summer retreat at the posh Homestead resort was collegial one minute, terse the next. It’s the first time the two have debated as their parties’ nominees in a governor’s race that will serve as an early job-approval referendum for President Barack Obama and an allied Democratic Congress.