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.

When I was a boy in Arlington, my brother, Paul, practiced the piano every afternoon, aided by a metronome, a timing device with a wand that swung left, swung right, and eventually settled back in the middle. Years later, that metronome seems a fit ting metaphor for Virginia politics. After Tuesday’s Republican triumph, we might be tempted to draw sweeping conclusions about Virginia’s new political landscape—just as when Barack Obama made history a scant 12 months ago.

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.

Two Republican county officials in South Carolina are apologizing after they disparaged Jews in a newspaper op-ed in support of a fiscally conservative U.S. senator.

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?

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.

A new Field Poll shows California Attorney General Jerry Brown with a strong lead in next year’s race for governor, even before he’s declared himself a candidate and despite months of campaigning by his Democratic rival and three Republicans vying for their party’s nomination.

When it comes to political punditry, Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, and Metro Richmond seem to get all the attention. That’s not entirely surprising. It’s where the votes are, after all. But not all the votes. Western Virginia might make the difference in this year’s race for governor—especially the 6th Congressional District, which includes much of the Shenandoah Valley (I-81 runs through the middle of the district like a spine), and the 9th, which encompasses the commonwealth’s entire southwestern panhandle.

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.

President Barack Obama says there should be an investigation into the hidden-camera video involving employees at the activist group ACORN and a couple posing as a prostitute and her pimp.

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.

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.