Ken Cuccinelli can scrub his website, but he can't erase E.W. Jackson
In an article about how Ken Cuccinnelli, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, is trying to focus on safe issues like government transparency instead of the hot-button social issues that made him a darling of the extreme right, TPM's Hunter Walker
writes:
Cuccinelli’s evolution is apparent on his campaign websites from when he first ran for the state senate in 2002 until the current campaign. Hot-button issues like abortion, gay marriage, immigration, and gun rights featured prominently in the past have gradually disappeared from his campaign websites.
Indeed a search of Cuccinelli's website for "
transparency" yields more than
four times as many hits as "
marriage," "
abortion," and "
guns" combined. It's actually seven times as many mentions if you factor out the references to Cucinnelli's own marriage. Moreover, while Cuccinelli's transparency agenda
gets a mention on his issues page, his social causes are nowhere to be found.
Of course, this isn't a reflection of some sort of moderation on Cuccinelli's part. Instead, he attempts to focus on things like transparency to distract from his continued support for the far-right. The good news is that Cuccinelli's plan to make himself appear more centrist than he really is won't be easy, given that his running mate is the certified whack-a-doodle E.W. Jackson. Cuccinelli may want to run from his party's extreme conservatism, but he can't hide.