Wash Post: How McDonnell overcame thesis paper.

Not much on the role of the Washington Post macacaing the hell out of the guy while trying to drag Deeds to the finish line.

The Washington Post learned of the thesis in a mid-August interview with McDonnell and obtained a copy from Regent's library, where it is publicly available. The Post planned to publish a story on the thesis Sunday, Aug. 30. On Thursday, Aug. 27, the paper provided a copy of the thesis to the McDonnell campaign and asked for comment. "I won't forget that day for the rest of my life," said McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin. At least four McDonnell advisers hunkered down that Thursday night and all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday to deal with potential problems: Cox; Martin; Jasen Eige, the research director; and Ed Gillespie, the campaign chairman. Eige took a first pass through the document with a highlight pen and orange index stickers. Then the group divided the paper into sections, scouring them for potentially damaging passages. "There were certainly a lot of problem areas," Cox said with a laugh. "We were reading the footnotes to try to determine how it was framed. It was such a big document that it took some time. We said, 'Look, we are going to have to deal with this.' We recognized immediately that it was going to be a part of the campaign from that day through to Election Day." At the top of the campaign's concerns was what McDonnell wrote about working women, who were a crucial part of McDonnell's strategy to appeal not only to exurban independents but also to Northern Virginia moderates. At the same time, McDonnell enjoyed deep support among conservatives outside of Northern Virginia. The trick was to disavow the more problematic parts of the thesis without alienating that base. That predicament encapsulated a central tension of McDonnell's campaign: how to attract crucial votes from the middle without alienating conservatives who had backed him for years. "Bob was in a box," said a Republican strategist from Northern Virginia who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "The thesis was solely an inside-the-Beltway issue. He couldn't disavow the thing because the right would have abandoned him. They would have said, 'What do you mean you don't support these things?' " McDonnell decided to disavow anything that suggested opposition to women entering the workplace. He emphasized a pledge to hire and fire only on the basis of merit and not gender or sexual orientation. And he planned to make clear that he still believed many of the ideas in the thesis, notably that family is the "bedrock" of society and that government cannot step in and do what is rightfully the role of families.