Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130298
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Long
When Harvard University convened a conference on "Race, Politics and the Press" recently, the Virginians in attendance were struck by how the nation's first black elected governor was dismissed, discounted and ignored, even by other blacks, as a role model worth studying.
"An oddity," Harvard's scholar on black politics, Linda Williams, has called him.
A unique case, many other conference participants concluded, the product of unusual local circumstances that can't be duplicated in their states.
The conference's denigration of Wilder's achievement angered one invitee in particular: Paul Goldman, Wilder's top political strategist and now chairman of the state Democratic Party. He called it an example of Ivy League bias against the South.
"There are some people who are treating it [Wilder's election] as the exception that proves the rule that it can't happen," he told reporters afterward. "But you know, we're on the Charles River. It might be helpful if they came down and did one of these conferences on the James River. They may find people in Virginia are leading the way."
Nevertheless, the Harvard conference's reluctance to consider Wilder as the forerunner of a trend highlights the difficulty he may have exporting his centrist "New Mainstream" message, at least to the nation's intellectual establishment and the liberal activists who traditionally dominate the party's presidential nominating process.
The Harvard conference involved journalists, academics, politicians and political operatives, from former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb to Georgia civil rights leader Julian Bond to former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis' issues adviser, Harvard law professor Chris Edley.
It focused mostly on New York Mayor David Dinkins and U.S. House Majority Whip William Gray of Pennsylvania as examples of how black politicians must overcome racial prejudice among journalists as well as voters.
Curiously, some of the very things that aides to Dinkins and Gray cited as handicaps - being written off in the press, journalists' ignorance about how big the black turnout in their elections was likely to be - were things that Wilder either turned to his advantage or actively encouraged.
For instance, in his 1985 campaign for lieutenant governor, Wilder's campaign played up his underdog status, partly to lull Republicans into a false sense of security and to put pressure on Democratic contributors to pony up lest they be blamed when Wilder lost big.
And in his 1989 campaign for governor, Wilder again tried to hide his well-organized get-out-the-vote drive so as not to tip off the other side.
But whenever Wilder's name came up, conference participants, black and white, quickly offered reasons to explain away Wilder's success.
One black local official from Georgia thought Wilder was simply a creation of Chuck Robb - a suggestion that would surprise Virginia's junior senator, whose differences with Wilder over the years have been well publicized.
A Dinkins aide insisted that Wilder owed his election to Jesse Jackson because blacks certainly would not have turned out in Virginia unless Jackson's organizers had told them to. The aide cut off suggestions that Wilder commanded his own following among both black and white voters with a brusque "that's our position."
Hulbert James further insisted that Wilder's election vindicated Jackson's ideology, because Wilder "moved left" during the campaign to energize liberals who otherwise would not have voted, a contention that drew blank stares from Virginians who remember Wilder hugging the political center to woo business leaders, suburbanites and rural voters.
Throughout, many participants adopted a view that someone else had to be responsible for Wilder's election because he could not possibly have won in a conservative Southern state in his own right.
The suggestion that maybe Wilder had found a new way for blacks to win office - by crafting a non-racial message that defined himself not as a black politician but as part of a larger "New Mainstream" of shared middle-class values - left many conference participants cold.
Those who believed it saw that as evidence Wilder had "sold out" either his black heritage or his once-liberal reputation to get ahead.
"The African-American community is proud of his accomplishment, but they think he had to make a lot of compromises to do it," said one Philadelphia journalist. "He couldn't come into North Philadelphia and do those things. That kind of campaign wouldn't work in Pennsylvania. There wasn't a militant black voice in Virginia saying `you can't do this.' "
Goldman is convinced, though, that Wilder is so far out in front of conventional thinking about how blacks can win office that he's simply off most analysts' radar screens.
"Doug Wilder is the Chuck Yeager of his generation," Goldman said. "He's pushing the envelope about as far as it can go."
To be sure, Wilder has not gone unnoticed among fellow politicians.
Among moderate Democrats and political commentators, talk of a Lloyd Bentsen-Doug Wilder ticket in 1992 is as hot as Texas jalapenos and Virginia barbecue. It's been touted recently on the "McLaughlin Group" TV show and in the Chicago Tribune.
And Wilder has inspired imitators elsewhere in the South:
In North Carolina, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt was emboldened to seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate after he saw Wilder win in Virginia last year and solicited advice from Wilder advisers. Gantt, who stressed health care and education, led a six-man field in the first round of the Democratic primary last Tuesday, falling just 2 percent short of winning outright. He now goes into a runoff for the right to face Jesse Helms in the fall.
In Georgia, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young has carefully heeded Wilder's advice to pay special attention to rural whites as he seeks the Democratic nomination for governor against three white opponents. The primary is in July; Young led the latest Atlanta Constitution poll by 29 percent to 23 percent over Lt. Gov. Zell Miller.
But before "the Wilder way" wins academic acceptance, Harvard's elite apparently will have to see evidence that it works in places closer to home. From the way people talked last week, though, it might take a Wilder victory in the New Hampshire primary to get their attention.
by CNB