Deeds ad links McDonnell to Bush

Battling anti-Obama headwinds in the dash for governor, R. Creigh Deeds is trying to hang another unpopular president on Bob McDonnell in a brace of fresh television and radio ads.

Deeds, a Democrat, is pairing Republican McDonnell with George W. Bush, whose policies McDonnell -- in remarks as recently as last month -- credited with leading "an economic revival in America."

The television commercial, posted yesterday in all regions except the pricey, vote-rich Washington suburbs, follows a GOP attack ad that depicts Deeds as a spendthrift with taxpayer dollars.

Deeds said that spot, by the Republican Governors Association, fails to point out that in proposing $1 billion in budget revisions this year, he was seeking funds for programs even McDonnell favors, including pushing teacher salaries to the national average.

The RGA is running a similar advertisement on radio.

Deeds' commercial, as the ad it replaces did, links him to governor-turned-U.S. senator Mark R. Warner, a Democrat with broad bipartisan support. Deeds again makes no mention of departing Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, whose popularity has been hammered because of the recession and his part-time job as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

McDonnell spokesman J. Tucker Martin dismissed the Deeds commercial as a sign that he is "desperate and down in the polls." Deeds trails McDonnell in published polls by 7 to 15 percentage points.

"The polls . . . aren't about him; they aren't about me," Deeds told a news conference in Richmond's Shockoe Slip. "They express people's concern about what's going on nationally."

Though he carried the state last year, President Barack Obama's favorable ratings are falling here, apparently because of the economy, among other reasons.

And with polls showing an accompanying drift to McDonnell, Deeds is attempting to tap into voter concerns about Bush-era economic policies.

"Bob McDonnell just called George W. Bush's economics a 'revival,'" an announcer says in the Deeds TV ad. "Tax breaks for the super-wealthy. Job losses and foreclosures for the rest of us. Virginia calls the McDonnell-Bush approach a failure."

The Deeds radio commercial presses the same theme, conjuring a conversation between parents on the sidelines during a junior high school football practice.

Said McDonnell's spokesman: "Creigh Deeds continues to run a backwards-looking campaign, using the same old tired Democratic playbook. Not only does he have no original policy, he has no original attack."

Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or .