“These left-wing, anti-rule of law, politically correct folks,” wrote then-Sen. Ken Cuccinelli II, referring to the organizers. He deployed an all-capital-letter flourish to denigrate their planned boycott of businesses as a way to “show how much we need ILLEGAL aliens.”
Cuccinelli proposed his own response to the demonstration, which he noted fell on May Day, “an old international socialist holiday — coincidence?”
“We’re going shopping, of course!” he wrote. “Shopping is the perfect free market answer to this absurd protest. It will also give you the chance to see which retailers are cheating by employing ILLEGAL aliens.
“Let’s help take back our country with our wallets.”
Throughout Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate, has cast Cuccinelli as a tea party extremist, incapable of forging the centrist consensus necessary to manage the commonwealth. The portrait has stuck, according to recent polls; McAuliffe appears to be ahead in the race — and Cuccinelli’s conservatism is a leading reason.
For years, he articulated that conservatism in the Cuccinelli Compass, honing a combative political persona and providing opponents with material that has now driven up his negative poll ratings and lifted McAuliffe. At the same time, Cuccinelli has accused Democrats of turning him into a caricature, seeking to scare off voters by distorting and lying about his record as a state senator and Virginia’s attorney general.
