Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 19, 1990                   TAG: 9007190522
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-15   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

GOV. WILDER TO DATE: PUDDING WITH EGO THE ONLY THEME

In the first six months of his first term, Mills Godwin established firmly his commitment to enlarging opportunities for Virginians to go to college. Linwood Holton, the first Republican governor in this century, revealed himself (at great political cost) as a disciple of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: He would be the first governor to reach out a friendly hand to blacks.

John Dalton thought the state budget was becoming a runaway train and concentrated on management by fiscal restraint. Charles Robb set out to be the schoolteacher's best friend. Six months into his term, Gerald Baliles had made a vast increase in road funding (and practically everything else, for that matter) the great goal of his administration.

All five of these worthies enjoyed a considerable degree of success in attaining the goals articulated in the critical seedbed of their first six months in office. Thus far, the Wilder administration has been a pudding without a theme.

Or, if there has been a theme, it has been very personal in character. Massaging the governor's considerable ego has appeared to take priority over just about everything else.

The favored sport of the Wilderian inner circle has been to punish those who have managed by one means or another to place their names on the governor's apparently voluminous hit list. This game applies with particular force to those who served his illustrious Democratic predecessors. If you served Robb or Baliles, he seems to be saying, you will have problems serving me.

Or take the strange case of Attorney General Mary Sue Terry, who was removed by Wilder as chairman of the Governor's Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse Problems. The unctuous Ms. Terry has never been entirely to my taste. But fact is, a majority of Virginians in all the state's congressional districts have twice installed her as the commonwealth's chief legal officer. She also happens to be a Democrat in good standing, and one of the party's most bankable assets.

In her role as chief legal adviser to the executive and legislative branches of state government, she might be presumed to have some entitlement to head a task force - however bogus - purporting to deal with the issue of substance abuse.

We might speculate upon the reasons behind this particular slap in the face, but recall that for three years Wilder and Terry eyed each other with a baleful stare to see which would blink first on the question of going after the governorship in 1989.

In the end, of course, the attorney general deferred to the lieutenant governor, as Wilder then was, but the manner of her doing so no doubt stuck in Wilder's craw. And he had to know how many Democratic officeholders and big hitters would have preferred for the arrangement to be the other way 'round.

Then, there is Wilder's gleeful orchestration of a calculated course of humiliation for Senate Majority Leader Hunter Andrews, D-Hampton. Even the most deluded businessman should not mistake Andrews as a conservative, and there's no doubt he can be infuriating. But he is also one of the few members of the General Assembly of a genuinely independent mind and large outlook.

To know a majority of state legislators is to know how far above the ruck Andrews rises, and to understand how much worse off Virginia is likely to be when he's gone. Had Andrews not taken the lead in rescinding a large portion of the giveaway of state revenues to a favored group of retirees - a giveaway for which candidate Wilder had served as head cheerleader - think of the condition the state treasury would be in at this hour.

Andrews took the lead on this politically difficult scut work at the 1990 session and saw it through with minimal assistance from the governor. On the single most difficult issue of the Wilder governorship, it is Andrews who deserves high marks.

The point is that even those who serve Wilder's ends do not always earn his good graces, which might serve as a warning to any Democratic presidential candidate considering the governor on his short list of vice-presidential prospects.

If he is deemed desperately needed to appease forces represented by Jesse Jackson, he will of course be taken on. If not, why take a chance on a man who goes out of his way to show he's incapable of being a team player?

The governor's considerable negative baggage was augmented by recent revelations that he was using state air transportation for personal reasons without reimbursement. This is a tempest in a teapot. As head of state, Wilder is theoretically on duty 24 hours a day. Within reason, he is entitled to the perquisites of his office, even for reasons of personal convenience or mere pleasure.

The larger question is: Can a governor with one eye cocked on his national ambitions govern Virginia effectively during a period of genuine fiscal distress? The record indicates, I believe, that he can't. Nor has he taken steps to assemble a team of skilled managers capable of cutting our coat to fit the available cloth.

State government will largely run itself, and all recent governors have been hard-pressed to find good managers willing to leave other careers to help out for a few years at relatively small pay. But Holton proved it was possible. And Dalton burned the midnight oil to gain a personal handle on state spending.

Having largely wasted the honeymoon that all new governors receive, it is close to being too late for Wilder to embark upon any managerial revolution.