Let’s conduct a mental exercise. Let’s pretend it’s the fall of 2005, when Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore were running neck-and-neck in the gubernatorial polls, and let’s pretend we have no foreknowledge of events to come.

Last fall, Kaine was campaigning on a transportation platform that detailed wide-ranging reforms but made no mention of new taxes. Indeed, he specifically stated that he would not increase taxes until a Constitutional amendment protected the Transportation Trust Fund from budgetary raids — putting off any prospective tax increase for at least three years. Kaine’s campaign rhetoric cut along the same lines: Virginia can’t pave its way out of congestion, he said repeatedly. As an alternative to Business As Usual, he proposed strengthening the power of local government to block rezoning projects in the absence of adequate roads.

Now, let’s imagine that Kilgore attacked Kaine as a tax-and-spend liberal. Oh, that’s right, he did attack Kaine as a tax-and-spend liberal. And he got his butt handed to him. Kaine was indignant. Editorial writers in most of Virginia’s major dailies rushed to Kaine’s defense. How dare Kilgore run such a negative campaign — appealing to peoples’ fears? Kilgore’s charges gained no traction, and he fell behind in the polls.

Of course, even Kilgore never imagined the switcheroo that Kaine would pull. Even Kilgore could not conceive of the audacity, less than two months after winning the election, of unveiling a plan to boost taxes by $1 billion per year, and then stumping the state for a proposal he never hinted at during the campaign, and launching an expensive radio advertising blitz in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to convince voters to support a spending program that he’d implied was unnecessary only months before.

Of course, the pundit-apologists who run Virginia’s editorial pages (outside of Richmond) all shifted direction in lock-step. Rather than castigating Kaine for breaking faith with voters in such dramatic fashion, they’re castigating House Republicans for failing to follow along.

It is interesting to note how Kaine is pursuing his P.R. campaign, however, Jeff Schapiro hit the right now in this morning’s Times-Dispatch when describing the radio ads: “Gov. Timothy M. Kaine doesn’t use the ‘t’ word in his radio commercials urging higher taxes for roads and transit.” Instead, the Governor touts the benefit of his transportation-funding plan over that of the House of Delegates, as if there were no price tag.

This is an interesting laboratory experiment in just how stupid voters are, and how short their attention spans are. Will voters follow, lemming-like, Kaine’s call for more spending without realizing that there’s a bill in the form of a $1 billion tax increase? Will they forget that only a few months before, they voted for a guy who said nothing about big spending programs and higher taxes?

Maybe Kaine’s tacticians are right. Maybe the voters are too stupid to put it all together. Maybe they do have the memories of fruit flies. With the pundit-apologists in Virginia’s editorial pages providing cover, maybe voters will suffer collective amnesia. But maybe the tacticians are wrong. Maybe, just maybe, voters will say, this isn’t what we voted for. And maybe the duplicity will boomerang.