Virginia Republicans recaptured the political middle last week, assisted by Bob McDonnell’s strong centrist campaign and adherence to a positive message of economic recovery and job creation. Democrats, meanwhile, could not overcome mounting anxiety over national Democratic policies in Washington, or a lackluster campaign by Creigh Deeds that utterly failed to energize even the party’s base.

WOODBRIDGE Imagine you’re an assistant football coach who finds himself taking leadership of a team in the middle of an uninspiring season. If your first thought is “Wow, I guess they think I’m pretty good,“ you’d be wrong. If your attitude was “Well, I’m here, in charge, I’d better make the best of this,“ then you’d be right. Such is the case with my party, the Republican Party, in 2009. Personally, I think Republicans in Virginia have a pretty good record, certainly superior to past Washington GOP leaders who soured voters by failing to govern in a fiscally responsibly manner. That said, members of the national GOP were not defeated in 2008. They were fired. Democrats were tapped and—like an assistant coach who thinks too much of his abilities—they reached too far, lurched to the left, and did it all with an arrogance and exclusivity that galvanized the GOP base and drove independents into the Republican camp—for now anyway.

Virginia Gov-elect Bob McDonnell said this morning that he hasn’t read the entire health-care bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last night but that the “public option does not seem to be something that’s going to help us in Virginia.“ “I think there [are] legitimate issues of cost and access that have got to be addressed at the state and federal level,“ McDonnell told John King in a brief appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” this morning.

Advisers include Tom Farrell, head of Dominion Resources; Attorney General Bill Mims; and Kay Coles James, a cabinet official for Gov. George Allen and an official in the administration of President George W. Bush.

President Barack Obama called Gov-elect Bob McDonnell late this morning —  reportedly a pleasant, 10 minute conversation.

Whether Bob McDonnell still believes everything he wrote in his 1989 thesis is a fair question. So is this one: Should Creigh Deeds be the one to ask it? As The Washington Post noted in a recent profile, Deeds often calls himself a “work in progress.“ And indeed, he is notorious for switching positions on several hot-button issues, from gay marriage to the gun-show loophole.

Gov. Tim Kaine, Rep. Jim Moran, former DNC head Terry McAuliffe, Doug Wilder—and no doubt many other influential Democrats—have a message for Creigh Deeds: Tell Virginia what you’re for, not just what you’re against. A Washington Post poll shows Deeds trailing badly. If he is to win, something must change. It may be too late. Deeds’ negativism may have been the campaign’s crucial hinge.

The last full week of September ended with the campaigns of both of Virginia’s candidates for governor claiming victory. Both had reasons to be happy. Three polls released during the past week show that Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has closed the gap with Republican Bob McDonnell to within 2 to 5 percentage points. “It’s a reflection of the fact that people are waking up to the race and responding very well to Creigh’s message and show a healthy amount of skepticism of Bob’s message and his record,“ Deeds senior adviser Mo Elleithee said a conference call with reporters.

The two men who want to be Virginia’s next governor pitched their campaigns to the Richmond-area business community this morning, touting their plans to get the state’s sluggish economy moving again. Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds spoke of tax incentives for small businesses, energy issues and their version of a fix for the commonwealth’s economically strangling transportation woes.

Is Bob McDonnell’s thesis fair game? As our editorial, “Thesis Ridiculous” intimated on Tuesday, conservatives who pored over Michelle Obama’s thesis at Princeton hardly have standing to say it isn’t. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus provides a more recent and more trenchant comparison. “Just a few weeks ago,“ she notes, “Republicans were focused on a single sentence from Justice Sonia Sotomayor about the ‘wise Latina.‘ Then, it made sense to focus on Sotomayor’s sentence, not her copious judicial record. Now, it’s unfair to look at McDonnell’s writings when his legislative history is open for all to see.“

Say what you will about GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, one thing is clear: He’s no Michelle Obama. An Internet search about the first lady’s thesis at Princeton—a passionate study of being black at an Ivy League university—turns up 30 times as many results as a search about McDonnell’s thesis at Regent University. Of course, she was the subject of national scrutiny, while McDonnell’s thesis holds little interest outside the commonwealth.

A recent editorial on the GOP and the South quoted a decade-old passage from The Atlantic arguing that Republicans are too conservative, but also “too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat from shrinking the government indicates.“ For close-to-home evidence that the charge still holds, look at the otherwise appealing gubernatorial campaign of Bob McDonnell.

Veteran politicos have seen some very well-run campaigns in the commonwealth over the years, and some very poorly run campaigns. But perhaps not since Ben “Cooter” Jones tried to unseat 7th District Rep. Eric Cantor have they seen a prominent campaign as odd as that of gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds. Deeds won the Democratic nomination through a combination of political aikido—he let his primary opponents throw haymakers while he glided right past them—and a Washington Post endorsement based in large measure on the belief that Deeds “would make transportation his first priority.“

Democratic gubernatorial candidate R. Creigh Deeds said yesterday that if the General Assembly passes a bipartisan bill that includes a tax increase to fund Virginia’s transportation needs, he will sign it. But the state senator from Bath County said during an online chat at the Richmond Times-Dispatch that he would not sign a transportation bill that took money from education or other “general fund priorities” to finance the fix.

A. BARTON HINKLE It’s not yet clear whom Virginia Democrats will pick on Tuesday to run against Bob McDonnell and Bill Bolling, the GOP candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. (The unopposed Democratic candidate for attorney general, Steve Shannon, will square off against Republican Ken Cuccinelli.) But this much is clear: Whatever the Democratic ticket looks like, it will be the most extreme, radical, wild-eyed bunch of borderline psychotics ever to campaign for public office in the history of the universe.