For a guy who has many reasons to smile—the presidency of utility giant Dominion, a fat paycheck, such plush perquisites as the rectorship of U.Va., his alma mater—Tom Farrell often wears a pained expression. But he managed to beam this past Thursday as high-school buddy Bob McDonnell announced that Farrell would help lead the Republican’s gubernatorial transition.

Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s gubernatorial election—OK, so a lot of people have a pretty good idea who’s going to win—one thing is certain: The victor won’t have squat to spend. Tight money, perhaps the tightest since the Great Depression, combined with a divided JEFF E.
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statehouse could guarantee impasse, at a minimum, on the new governor’s initiatives.

Chris Jankowski has a hobby that helps his day job. The long-limbed, bespectacled lobbyist, in effect, runs campaigns for Republicans, supplying them with money and polling, advertising and mail consultants. Jankowski’s role: informal, but fully engaged. Republicans win targeted elections in the fall. Jankowski wins targeted legislation in the winter. So he hopes.

Forget about the governor’s election and down-ticket races. The battle for the House? Practically a nonevent. The real action may be in the Virginia Senate, even though it’s not up until 2011. Should Republicans sweep statewide, Ken Cuccinelli, as the next attorney general, would have to quit his Senate seat in heavily Democratic Fairfax. That should be a pickup for the D’s, expanding their caucus to 22 of 40 seats and giving Majority Leader Dick Saslaw some breathing room. Or would it?

What if Virginia goes Republican? Political columnist Jeff Schapiro speculates on the fallout from a possible GOP sweep of statewide offices.

As if the state’s snakebit computer contractor, Northrop Grumman, hasn’t enough to answer for. Add to complaints about rotten service, rising costs and delays in refitting IT systems, this headache: unpaid local taxes, perhaps $15 million. But before you pop Northrop Grumman for another mess, know that the company and tax collectors apparently are working harmoniously to settle this matter, trying to determine what’s been paid, what hasn’t, what’s subject to interest and penalties.

In the 1970s, a common sight across the state was a bumper sticker that read, “Welcome to Virginia: Owned and Operated by Vepco.“ Thirty years later, Vepco—the Virginia Electric and Power Company—has a new name: Dominion Virginia Power. One JEFF E.
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thing hasn’t changed: The utility, along with other big businesses, uses fat contributions and aggressive schmoozing to manipulate state government as if it were a corporate subsidiary.

Jeff E. Schapiro is out of the office. His column will resume next weekend.

With four months left in his term, Gov. Tim Kaine is not quite toast. His legacy will include big bursts of partisanship; bigger holes in the budget. Another tile in the Kaine mosaic: the large number of appointments he’s made to top courts—two each to the Virginia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, one to the State Corporation Commission.

It’s popping up in Northern Virginia. In suburban Richmond, too, it’s become a talking point. Bob McDonnell’s moldy graduate-school thesis and its less-than-politically correct observations on premarital sex, gays, birth control and working women are seeping into races for the Republican-run House, usually low-turnout, friends-and-neighbors affairs in which party affiliation often means little.

Columnist Jeff Schapiro says Gov. Tim Kaine’s plans for painful spending cuts will echo in the campaign to choose his succesor.

Though school bells are no longer ringing for Republican Del. Phil Hamilton of Newport News, they are for other legislators who have a big say in spending your money. Tommy Norment, Fred Quayle and William Wampler, all members of Senate Finance Committee, do as Hamilton, vice-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, did, until the discovery of a smoking-gun e-mail: toil in the groves of taxpayer-supported academe.

Tim Kaine is losing the mojo he may have never had. His four-year term as governor is winding down. So, too, are the chances of the fellow Democrat who hopes to succeed him—at least, this is the whispered worry of the rank and file. As Jerry Baliles, Doug Wilder and Jim Gilmore learned in the closing, controversy-marred months of their administrations in 1989, 1993 and 2001, respectively, Kaine is discovering that a soon-to-be-out-work politician is as useful as last year’s bird’s nest.

Creigh Deeds makes George W. Bush sound like Barack Obama. In a speech Friday streamed on his Web site, Deeds, the Democratic nominee for governor, sought to reboot his struggling candidacy and recast Republican Bob McDonnell as he really is: a very conservative guy on taxes, social issues and equal rights, who—because of his Ron Burgundy-TV anchorman style—doesn’t come across that way.

Referendum on Warner. Columnist Jeff Schapiro says Mark Warner isn’t running for anything, but his legacy on VITA may swing votes in the gubernatorial election.