Back in June, pollster David Petts was the man with the answers.

His candidate, Virginia Democrat Creigh Deeds, had just won a thumping, come-from-behind primary victory to capture his party’s nomination for governor. Petts sent a memo laying out in cool, confident language the strategy for him to win the general election.

The advice: Go negative on the Republican nominee, capitalize on his natural advantage with independents, and be wary of two fellow Democrats—incumbent Gov. Tim Kaine and President Barack Obama.

Deeds ultimately followed many of the recommendations laid out at the end of the 24-page strategy document, obtained by POLITICO.

The Democrat’s 17-point loss to Republican Bob McDonnell was the worst blow-out in a gubernatorial election in nearly a half-century. And few people regard Petts as the man with the answers in 2009.

Instead, Deeds’s once-promising campaign is now being dissected on the autopsy table by journalists and operatives for evidence of what candidates should not do as they approach the treacherous politics of 2010. It’s clear that Deed’s punches on McDonnell barely bruised him, he got crushed among independents, and his clumsy, toe-stubbing dance around Obama helped depress Democratic turnout.

In an interview, Petts dismissed much of what his memo said as “dated” and noted that the Deeds campaign made strategic shifts in the months that followed.

Indeed, what is notable about Petts’s memo is not that it is an especially bad example of campaign advice but that it is entirely characteristic of the genre.

Written casually but with an air of authority, filled with jargon of the sort consultants use, it is little different than thousands of such memos that will be churned out over the next twelve months by the political-advice industry.

They are written with the assumption that politics is a science—influenced by variables that can be measured and producing outcomes that can be forecast—with victory a matter of method.

This pretense is more reassuring to the candidates paying for the advice than what is often the reality: voters are fickle, the factors that motivate them are ephemeral, political operatives are often winging it, and even the shrewdest advice often can’t compensate for a weak candidate running in a harsh environment.

All these realities turned out to be on vivid display in Virginia.

But that was not so obvious back in June.

The recommendations in the memo were gleaned from an internal poll conducted in mid-June by Deeds’s polling team of Bennett, Petts & Normington and listed in bullet-point fashion under a header of “Conclusions.” The survey showed Deeds, enjoying a post-primary bounce, leading McDonnell 48 to 44 among likely voters, according a source familiar with the findings.

Told by Petts that his convincing primary win positioned him well with the Democratic base – core Democrats, northern Virginians and African-Americans – Deeds was advised: “The battleground now appears to be for independents outside the DC media market.”

That media market would be the population center of the state, where a third of all voters call home.

Deeds’ advisers had reason for optimism about the vote-rich Washington suburbs. Their candidate had just defeated two local candidates there in the primary and Democrats had surged in the region in recent elections, carrying Fairfax County with 60% of the vote in three consecutive statewide races.

But Deeds, a native of Bath County along the West Virginia border, hardly had northern Virginia locked up. Facing a Republican who grew up in the area before moving to the Hampton Roads region, the Democrat lost the Washington suburbs. He was even was edged out in Fairfax County, which both parties assumed would ne an anchor of the Democrats’ coalition this year.

It turned out to be a faulty assumption.  Deeds had none of the charisma that Obama displayed on his way to wiinning Virginia last year and ceratinly not the issues since the current Gov. is a Democrat and he couldn’t very welll bash Tim Kaine. 

Besides bad advice Deeds also suffered from a little bit of self adulation as he grew to believe that he could actually win  a statewide race.  He had previously face McDonnell for the AG slot and lost that and now had a rematch but for a bigger prize.

The same issues that are dogging Obama came home to roost for Deeds even though he went light on using  the president it was still largely his economic policies that are affecting Virginians and they were ready for  a change. Just not the type the Democrats were counting on.

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