I awakened this morning proud to be a Virginian. Not that I don’t do that every day, but today I actually thought about it.

Yesterday, by an overwhelming margin, Virginians rejected the slash and burn personal destruction tactics that have been so popular in recent national elections, the inane, simple-minded focus on issues designed solely to frighten people, but don’t do diddly about anything that really matters in government, again bucking a national trend, and rejected fiscal philosophy that has time and again been discredited every time it’s been tried, personally enriching a few elites temporarily while neglecting infrastructure needs and generally leaving a mess for adults to come in and clean up.

If the narrow victory of George W. Bush in 2004 was a solid &uot;mandate&uot; as he and the mainstream media claimed, then Tuesday’s election of Tim Kaine as governor was a freakin’ landslide.

Interestingly, Kaine’s coat apparently didn’t have long tails. Sen. Bill Bolling, who espouses basically the identical idiotic cut tax and spend more policies of Jerry Kilgore, his party’s standard bearer, nonetheless managed to squeeze out a win over Democrat Leslie Byrne.

The only explanation for that win was that Byrne wears a skirt. Had she worn pants, its likely Bolling would have been defeated.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about Jerry Kilgore, he was just unlucky because of timing and circumstances, received some poor advice and made some poor decisions. It happens to us all.

And state Democrats are delusional if they think the results of Tuesday’s election are any type of signal of a sea change in state politics, just as I’m delusional if I think Tuesday’s repudiation mud-slinging in Virginia in New Jersey is going to raise the level of political discourse. Virginia is and remains a reliably conservative state, but hopefully, politicians are realizing it’s a sensible conservative state that puts progress and fiscal responsibility ahead of party loyalty. We should all be proud of that.