Verrry interesting; thanks to Rick Sincere for shooting this video of Ken Cuccinelli speaking this morning at the Albemarle County GOP breakfast.
I met with the LG a couple weeks ago for about an hour and one of the things I told him was I didn't meet with him sooner because everything I saw him saying suggested that even if we were on a desert island together he didn't want to talk to me...We talked for a while, and it wasn't the most comfortable set of circumstances...I've worked with Bill for many years, he has over 20 years of great Republican service. Frankly, when we were in the Senate, our voting records, there was hardly a hair's breath of distance between us...
I have a lot of good things to say about Bill...he's going to make his own decision here, he's set an announcement for March 14, and obviously I hope this will be a one-on-one race. But I also don't want you to get too wrapped up in that...the two polls I've seen that included him, he's drawn as much from McAuliffe as he has from me...
It would be a more difficult year, we'd much rather run with Bill as an ally and a supporter and continuing as a Republican as he has been for so long, and I hope that's the way it goes, but it will not be solely determinative of the outcome of the race. I expect that unless he thinks he can win, that he isn't likely to get in...he's got to formulate a path to do that somehow, where he and I have very, very similar political records. That presents a challenge intellectually for him to think through how that would happen and then to get behind it...
By the way, one amusing - also highly telling - thing about this video, is that it's pretty much one conservative, older white guy after another asking questions; no Latinos, no Asian Americans, no African Americans, no LGBT Americans, no young people, no women (at one point Cuccinelli practically pleads for a woman to ask a question...none do, at least that I saw on the video). That's why the Republican Party keeps losing national elections, and it's a huge challenge for them going forward. We'll see how they respond.
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