Capital punishment is slowly losing ground in Virginia, as everywhere else in the US Of course, a majority there support it. Mr Kaine has followed the first rule of dirty campaigns (if your opponent gets rough with you, hit back fast and hard) and denounced Mr Kilgore's "vile attempt" to use an emotional issue for political gain. You might think that the ad is wowing punters in the run-up to next week's election.You would, however, be wrong If anything, the ad has backfired on Mr Kilgore. His contest with Mr Kaine remains a statistical dead heat, but some pollsters report that voters are less, rather than more, likely to back the Republican after seeing the ads.There are several possible explanations.
It is rivetting stuff, featuring a soft piano in the background and one of those oily-husky voice-overs peculiar to American political attack ads, cynically exploiting the moral authority of bereavement. In a country where legal representation of defendants in capital cases is often next to nonexistent, a decent lawyer in an appeal from death row is the minimum a civilised society should offer.Not content with that, the advert twists a considered reply to a newspaper interviewer into the statement, "Tim Kaine says Adolf Hitler doesn't qualify for the death penalty". What Mr Kaine, a practising Catholic, actually said was that, as a rule, "God grants life and God should take it away", but that in especially heinous cases, including Hitler among others, the death penalty might be deserved.But by the standards of the black arts of political propaganda, this one would made Karl Rove proud. They are fixated on the death penalty - or rather, the opposition of the Democratic candidate, Tim Kaine, to the death penalty, which his Republican opponent, Gerry Kilgore, has seized on as an issue to split the Democratic vote.Mr Kilgore has been running TV ads featuring a father whose son was murdered 12 years ago. His killer was executed, but not before Mr Kaine had represented him as a court-appointed lawyer for death row inmates The ads are despicable. Three years on, however, the mindset may be changing - if Virginia's current campaign for Governor is anything to go by.There are any number of pressing issues for Virginia's voters: immigration, local taxes, suburban sprawl, the traffic that is choking the state to death or the miserable performance of the man in Washington who runs the country But the candidates aren't talking about any of this.
That was why the bloodthirsty former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, insisted the snipers who terrorised the Washington area in 2002 be tried in Virginia (where they killed one person) and not Maryland, where they killed six.Virginia, he said chillingly, had "the best range of available penalties" - including a readiness to execute juveniles like John Lee Malvo, the younger sniper, who was 17 when the crimes were committed. Though it currently has a Republican Governor, Maryland is among the most solidly Democratic states in the land. Virginia is the exact opposite, eternally Republican but with a Governor who happens to be a Democrat. And their views on the death penalty are equally at odds. Maryland has the death penalty, but rarely applies it.