Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410100062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To hear Marshall Coleman tell it, he's running against Jay Leno and David Letterman as much as he is Charles Robb and Oliver North.
"Part of my campaign is to get us off the Jay Leno program," Coleman says, perhaps revealing his late-night preferences, if not his political ones. "I think it's time people in Virginia reset their moral compass. The nation is laughing at us. They can't believe these two guys are contenders."
Scarcely a campaign speech goes by that the independent candidate doesn't appeal to Virginia's sense of honor. Take his recent address to the Salem Rotary Club. He didn't talk about where he stood on health care, crime or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Instead, he spoke of Virginia's dignity and pride. "I will not embarrass you," Coleman assured the Rotarians.
Coleman is not the only political figure who considers honor an issue in Virginia's Senate race this year. When Vice President Al Gore was in Roanoke on Robb's behalf, he, too, appealed to Virginia's self-esteem to reject North. Invoking the names of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee as role models, the vice president reminded his listeners that "this is the commonwealth that has put a premium on personal integrity and honor."
A rhetorical device? Not hardly, says Coleman's chief patron, Republican U.S. Sen. John Warner. Honor, he says, "is a very important factor in the race. In fact, that's the primary reason I literally put my political career on the line for Marshall Coleman. I have sat up here and watched the late-night shows." Virginia, he says, needs a senator "who's not snickered at by the late-night shows."
Whoa. Time for a reality check. Is a jab from television comedians whose shows are on mostly after midnight that big a deal? Do Virginians honestly fear offending the ghosts of Jefferson and Lee by their choice this November? Is the Old Dominion's honor really so important that Virginia voters would rank it as a more important factor in casting their vote than, say, the economy?
For some Virginians, the answer is a resounding yes. Bryan Hyler of Roanoke, for one. The 27-year-old sales representative for the Trigon insurance company says he's leaning toward Coleman, partly because he's embarrassed by Robb and North - and he's tired of seeing Virginia being talked about so much on network shows.
"Yeah, it hurts me," he says. "It hurts me as a Virginian that our state could be held up for ridicule ... It hurts me personally if anybody says anything bad about Virginia. Virginia is conservative, and I don't mean that politically. It's a quiet and hard-working state. You don't want all kinds of headlines."
That sense of honor is a trait that is peculiarly Southern - perhaps even peculiarly Virginian, observes Christopher Geist, the chairman of the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and a scholar on Southern culture. "My perception is Virginia is the most admired of Southern states by the North, because it has that genteel image as opposed to the redneck image."
For what it's worth, he says, that's one reason why most Southern romance novels are set in Virginia, not the Deep South.
Virginia's image, though, hasn't been just an image from travel brochures. Political scientists have long documented the impact Virginia's aristocratic heritage had on the tone of the state's campaigns - most famously when Harvard's V.O. Key called Virginia "a political museum piece" in his landmark 1940s study of Southern politics.
"Virginia has a very powerful sense of political decorousness," says William Schneider, a Portsmouth native who's now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., and CNN's resident political analyst. "It's almost gentlemanly.
"As someone who has researched Southern politics, I can tell you that Virginia is the least populist Southern state. Populist currents run weakest in Virginia, strongest in Louisiana. Louisiana is raucous, crude, vulgar. A candidate like Edwin Edwards [a governor with a scandalous past] wouldn't have a prayer in Virginia.
"That's why the appeal Coleman is taking looks like a reasonable pitch. He has a good case to make" - and one that plays directly to the state's self-image.
Part of that image is a reputation for honest, if colorless, politicians. That reputation, Warner charges, is in danger if either Robb, who hung around Virginia Beach parties where cocaine was used and admits he got a nude massage from a beauty queen, or North, who was convicted of three felonies that were later overturned on appeal, wins in November.
"Until these two gents had their problems," Warner says, "Virginia had clean politics. We've not had many county supervisors go to jail for cheating and stealing. Comparatively speaking, we've had far fewer criminal allegations lodged against office-holders, while in other states, it's almost commonplace.
"Every single state that borders Virginia has had a statewide office-holder who was convicted of a felony. Virginia has stood out like an island of integrity."
Perhaps so, but do Virginians really have a greater sense of honor than citizens of other states?
That's a difficult question to quantify, although some chauvinistic Virginians have tried.
"It's just my stupid general opinion, but I think it's very much stronger in Virginia compared to other states," Hyler says. "It's just the history."
Indeed, pollsters who have probed public opinion across the South say they're hard-pressed to find another place where the prospect of sheer embarrassment was as much of a campaign issue as it seems to be in Virginia this year.
Del Ali of Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research, a Maryland polling company, says the closest comparable situation he remembers was the 1991 governor's race in Louisiana that pitted the infamous Edwards against the even more infamous David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. Embarrassment elected Edwards, Ali says. "If it weren't for David Duke, Edwin Edwards wouldn't be in the governor's mansion. It's that simple."
But just how big an issue is honor in Virginia this year? Perhaps not as much as the vice president and the independent "alternative" think.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch recently polled voters to ask if they thought this year's campaign reflected poorly on the state. Perhaps surprisingly, 55 percent said it did not.
Coleman dismisses the poll's findings. "There may have been a little defensiveness in that. People don't want their state seen in a bad light."
But some political analysts wonder how much the appeal to Virginia's history and honor that Coleman and Gore have made resonates in a state that has undergone such profound demographic changes.
"Is that a self-image of Virginia that is still relevant to a suburban-based population?" asks Scott Keeter, who has conducted Virginia Commonwealth University's polls this year.
"The Virginia Coleman is talking about did exist, but has vanished very quickly," says Marshall Fishwick, a Virginia Tech humanities professor and the author of three books on what is loosely defined as the Virginia tradition.
Even some of Coleman's own supporters fret that his appeal to honor is a throwback to a bygone era when offended gentlemen settled their scores by duels, not 30-second spots and direct mail.
"We've got an influx of people who don't have the same ideals as Virginians," grumbled one woman who attended a luncheon of Coleman supporters last week in Bedford but refused to identify herself. "It takes more than moving into the state and getting new license plates to be a Virginian. I'd rather my children be dead than dishonored. It says who you are. Unfortunately, with the influx of people, things like that don't seem to matter much."
Virginia's new demography aside, this appeal to the state's history and honor may have other limitations.
"I don't think it's tangible enough for people to grasp hold of," says Billy Bova, business manager of Local 891 of the painters union in Roanoke and a Democratic activist.
Moreover, analysts say, it's likely to be overwhelmed by the other passions swirling through the electorate this fall - especially voter hostility toward President Clinton.
"All evidence shows the electorate this year is combative and surly," says Michael Salster, a former Republican operative who now runs a weekly newspaper in Amelia County. "Reaching for the better angels of our nature is going to be difficult. Protecting the state's good name does not rate with crime or sending Bill Clinton a message."
There's another problem with the honor argument, too, Schneider says, especially the way Coleman is trying to use it against both Robb and North. Voters don't tend to be embarrassed equally.
"The only way Coleman gets votes is if people say, `I'm equally outraged by Robb or North,''' Schneider says. Otherwise, they're likely to be inclined to vote for whichever candidate has the best chance to stop the one they detest most.
And so far, that's not Coleman - who's running a distant third in most polls.
In the meantime, Gore's appeal to Virginians' honor to stop North may not work for another reason, Fishwick suggests.
He contends North, rather than running counter to "the Virginia tradition," actually lives up to much of it. "The cavalier tradition is very military. Many of the presidents we produced were military men. So he draws on that."
Moreover, North has skillfully employed some key Southern symbols to help consolidate his base among the most tradition-minded constituency in Virginia - rural voters in Southside and Southwest Virginia.
North is often seen hunting or fishing. He even rallied to the defense of the Confederate flag. North may not be a native Virginian, or even much of a Southerner - he was born in Texas, but grew up in New York. However, Fishwick says, "what's clear about North is he understands the heritage and is exploiting it."
In that sense, North also is appealing to Virginia's honor, Fishwick says. His values-based campaign plays to Virginia's sense of "lost glory."
"Virginia is caught in a cultural paradox," Fishwick says. "We have a great past, which cannot be revived but cannot be forgotten. So what do you do with it?"
This year, the answer seems to be: Campaign on it.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB