Politics in the blood of rural Democrat Deeds

A steady, raw drizzle descends on Petersburg as the Chevy Suburban carrying Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Creigh Deeds pulls into the parking lot of Virginia State University.

On this soggy Thursday night, VSU is playing host to Virginia Union University in the annual gridiron clash between the historically black schools.

Deeds, 51, a state senator from rural Bath County, isn't about to play favorites. To have any chance of winning Nov. 3, he will need just about every eligible vote in the sodden stands.

Deeds, a career politician, is in the battle of his political life. Republican Bob McDonnell, who beat him by 360 votes four years ago to become attorney general, has a healthy lead in the race for governor less than three weeks before Election Day.

After grabbing a sausage in the crowded VSU president's box, Deeds heads into the rain, wearing a slicker over a rumpled suit and a Cincinnati Reds hat atop his retreating hairline. State Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, and Del. Rosalyn R. Dance, D-Petersburg, escort him under umbrellas.

"Do you have a boyfriend?" Marsh asks a coed, who replies that she does not. "Then go get one and tell him to vote for Creigh Deeds."

Tonight, there is no campaign speech for Deeds to deliver, no glare of television lights to record every hesitant word or awkward gesture for an opposition video. Deeds is in his zone, practicing retail politics with a message that is plaintive and simple:

"I need you," the country politician with the big-city dream says earnestly. "I need you."

. . .

When it comes to politics, Creigh Deeds has always dreamed big. His entry in the Bath County High School yearbook declared that he wanted to be president.

"When I was a kid, I certainly had big ambitions -- I still do," Deeds said.

But he said this race for governor will be his last.

"I'm confident that if I'm given the opportunity, I can take Virginia forward for four years," he says. "Then I want to go home and raise cows and practice law."

Robert Creigh Deeds was born in Virginia's capital city, the son of a former Richmond police officer and state worker.

His parents divorced when he was 7, and he moved with his mother and younger brother, Greg, to the Millboro farm of his maternal grandparents in Bath County, where his grandfather, Austin Creigh Tyree, was chairman of the Democratic committee.

Growing up, Deeds worked on the farm, patching fences and tending to hogs. When his mother remarried, his family relocated to a trailer on the farm, which dates to the 1740s.

An avid baseball fan, Deeds listened to the Reds on the radio at night, but he lacked the athletic gifts to avoid playing right field in Little League. He inherited his Uncle Frank's love of Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, but a terrible accident effectively ended his participation in contact sports.

Deeds was 12 when, on Oct. 16, 1970, he went to get a pack of gum at a Bath County High School football game. An unattended farm truck rolled down a steep hill and plowed into the concession area, killing two children and injuring nine. Initially, someone placed a sheet over Deeds. He slipped into a coma but survived, spending several weeks in a hospital.

"It's just a period in my life that was gone -- there were people hurt far worse than me," he says, his voice getting quiet at the recollection. "It was a very traumatic event."

Deeds' mother, Emma, who still works as a letter carrier, said her son's coordination was never the same after the accident. "But the neurosurgeon said that's a small price to pay."

Spending time with his grandfather, Deeds saw first-hand the power of public service and government to have an impact on a community. He also was moved by an encounter during a summer he spent as a teenage counselor at his uncle's summer camp.

"This little boy looked me in the eye and said, 'You mean we eat more than once a day here?'" Deeds recalled.

As a high school student, Deeds appeared on a television show called "Klassroom Kwiz." The faculty "picked the No. 1 student, the No. 3 student and the No. 35 student," Deeds said, noting that there were only 75 students in his graduating class. "I was Mr. Mediocrity."

After graduation, he crossed the border into West Virginia to attend Concord College, a small liberal-arts school. He arrived on campus in the fall of 1976 in a car purchased with insurance money from the accident. He brought along flannel shirts and jeans, four $20 bills his mother had given him and a keen interest in politics and history.

"He knew he wanted to go to law school and got involved in student government very early," said Bobby Taylor, who met Deeds at Concord and became his best friend. "Law and politics were in his blood, but not necessarily in that order," said Taylor, a lawyer in Delaware.

Deeds was elected student body president at Concord. More importantly, he met his future wife, Pamela Kay Miller, while running for the office. He later attended Wake Forest University Law School, and the couple then returned to Bath to settle down and raise a family.

They have four children: Amanda, 24, Rebecca, 22, Gus, 20, and Susannah, 17. Amanda, a graduate of the University of Virginia, and Gus, a junior at the College of William and Mary, have taken time off to join their father on the trail.

Pam Deeds works full time for the Virginia Employment Commission in Covington, over the mountain from the family's modest home on the farm in Millboro.

She has remained largely out of the media spotlight during the run for governor, taking a much less visible role than McDonnell's wife, Maureen, a former Washington Redskins cheerleader.

Like their mother, the Deeds children have never known him not to be politically active.

"I think some people run for office just because they can afford to run for office," Amanda Deeds said. "They can dabble in politics, they can play in politics. They can do it and afford to lose and come home at the end of the day -- but this is his life. This is what he's always wanted to do, and he can't lose it."

Deeds was elected commonwealth's attorney in Bath County at age 29. In his first run for the House of Delegates in 1991, he leapfrogged the party's designee for the spot and knocked on every door in his district to secure a victory.

"You won't ever outwork him," said Susan Swecker, a longtime friend who managed Deeds' 2005 campaign for attorney general.

Deeds won a special election in 2001 to fill the state Senate seat of Emily Couric, who died of cancer. The district extends from Charlottesville to the Alleghany Highlands and to the West Virginia border. It includes Bath -- the third-least populous county in the commonwealth, with roughly 5,000 residents and no stoplights.

Outspent nearly 3 to 1, Deeds lost the 2005 race for attorney general to McDonnell by the slimmest margin in modern Virginia history. It was his first defeat, and it was trying for the family.

"We were always used to Dad winning -- there was never even a worry," Amanda Deeds said. "And then when that day came and he lost, . . . we realized, if I had gotten everyone in my apartment complex to vote, he would have won this election. If my siblings had done the same -- just these little things."

. . .

The day after the election, Deeds hitched a ride back to Bath with his old Concord buddy, Taylor, who had driven to Richmond to be with his friend on election night.

It was a quiet ride, but the mood wasn't heartbreak, Taylor said. He recalled that he parked his sports car at the bottom of the rutted dirt road leading to Deeds' home. He said Deeds told him: "Keep your chin up. There's going to be more battles to fight."

Four years later, Deeds faces McDonnell in a different battle on a different battlefield.

Deeds said running for attorney general is like flying in a single-engine plane at 7,000 feet, while being at the top of the ticket is "flying in a jet at 35,000 feet." His schedule is nonstop; the pressure to raise money even more intense, as are the media spotlight and the role ads play in shaping a candidate's image.

Democrats also face strong head winds this time around.

"The economy is tough, people are hurting and when they hurt they want to lash out, and it makes it very tough," Deeds said.

Deeds' folksy drawl and his unpolished public-speaking style apparently struck a chord with Democratic primary voters. He stayed out of the fray while his polished Northern Virginia rivals attacked each other. But on the big stage of a general election campaign for governor, Deeds' country roots are proving a more difficult sell.

"McDonnell appears more in tune with suburban voters this time around, and the less-than-hot reception to Deeds is the fact that he's perceived to be a country candidate," said Quentin Kidd, an associate professor of political science at Christopher Newport University.

"I don't think it's a bad thing to be a country guy," Deeds says. "I've always just tried to look people in the eye and be upfront with them and deal with problems head-on and be honest.

University of Virginia political science professor Larry J. Sabato said Deeds "is a perfect one-on-one campaigner" because "he's unlike most politicians. Most politicians talk and don't listen. He listens rather than talks, but he can't meet a couple of million voters individually."

"He's great one-on-one, but he's a really awful public speaker."

Deeds has stumbled rhetorically in attempting to explain his plan to raise revenue for transportation. He says he would be willing to raise taxes if the solution arises from a bipartisan consensus, and that there must be a "nexus" between the funding mechanism and transportation. But he has been unwilling to say that he would support an increase in the gasoline tax, an approach he favored in 2008.

Deeds' rhetoric has made him the target of Republicans who have forsworn any tax increases and accuse him of having no plan or leadership on the issue. Deeds' supporters say voters are seeing the authenticity of a candidate -- a self-admitted "work in progress" -- who thinks through issues and chooses his own path.

Swecker, who grew up in nearby Highland County and has known Deeds for 20 years, said her friend is "not the smoothest talker in the world or the most eloquent speaker, but what comes across is Creigh. He is genuine, he is authentic, he is real, and I think that's what people are looking for in today's leaders."

As the election nears, it's Deeds who is looking for the people.

At the VSU game, Dance, the delegate from Petersburg, takes a break from pressing the flesh for Deeds and sizes up the task. "It's going to take everything we've got," she says.

Deeds, a confident underdog, says: "I wouldn't know what to do if I was running as a favorite."

After two hours of shaking hands in the rain, Deeds seems less weary than when he started. He settles into the Chevy, with Amanda and Gus in the back, to the sounds of The Allman Brothers.

"Eighteen," Gus says in the dark. Eighteen days until the people vote.

Taylor said he will be there again on election night to support his old friend, win or lose, and drive him back to Bath if he wants a ride.

"He's got a lot of courage," Taylor said. "People who are winners are the ones who aren't afraid to lose. The other people just find a way to be safe. There's no safety in what he's doing."

Contact Jim Nolan at (804) 649-6061 or .