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

DATE: FRIDAY, July 27, 1990                   TAG: 9007270569
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FOR YEARS, STATE GOP UNITY HAS BEEN HARD TO COME BY

Younger Virginians may not remember Dick Obenshain, but anyone above 40 should. It was he who, a decade ago, did what generations of earnest Republicans had sought might and main to do: He convinced them it was better to fight Democrats and win office than to score points against each other.

It was a classic lesson, though a brief one: It failed to halt more than briefly the traditional preference of Virginia Republicans for internecine struggle.

When I was hardly more than a growing boy and a reporter in Richmond, covering politics, the Virginia GOP was - and had been since the end of Reconstruction more than a century ago - a dismal joke. It had little interest in running candidates for high, or even low, state office. It could boast no better than a handful of local officeholders in a few corners of the notoriously remote 9th District. It showed little appetite even for electing Republican presidents. And its leaders - with the impressive exceptions of Ted Dalton and Floyd Landreth, both "mountain-valley" Republicans of visibly more progressive inclination than Virginia Democrats - seemed happy to leave it that way, holding on here and there to local chairmanships that were in fact of little value.

Mostly, the GOP was a strong right arm to Democratic U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. It pulled his irons out of the fire on the few occasions he needed help, such as the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1949. In that year, at Byrd's urging, 9th District Republicans poured into Democratic voting booths to save the Old Dominion from Bolshevism and intelligence in the form of Francis Pickens Miller, a former Rhodes Scholar with New Deal leanings. Presumably, Byrd rewarded the Republicans with a few scraps from the overflowing Democratic table.

But that was about it. Virginia went Republican with Eisenhower in 1952, but that hardly made it a GOP state. Thereafter, Democrats held the governorship, General Assembly and much of Virginia's congressional delegation.

Then came Dick Obenshain, a "mountain-valley" Republican himself, and the simple message, which he was persuasive enough to make even Republicans understand, that the prize was out there, not among themselves, and that being Republican meant nothing unless it won elections.

Thereafter, in election after election beginning with Linwood Holton, the GOP elected governors, congressmen and senators, and regained Virginia for the presidency and the national GOP. It came to a tragic end when Obenshain died in a plane crash outside Richmond, though John Warner replaced him successfully as the GOP senatorial candidate.

Still, that was the message - the same as Ronald Reagan's "11th commandment" for Republicans - and it was a useful one. But the Virginia GOP seemed to forget it, and in quick succession Marshall Coleman, Wyatt Durrette and Paul Trible began their decade-long spat, egged on by their followers, that assured the election of such Democratic worthies as Charles S. Robb, Gerald Baliles and Douglas Wilder, not to mention the Democratic recapture of congressional seats.

Now, apparently realizing at last that their intramural rivalries are creating fatal divisions within the state GOP, Coleman, Durrette and Trible have held a summit and called, like the Germans, for "re-unification."

For that alone they would deserve, in any other year, solemn recognition of their high civic sense. But 1990 is not, alas for us all, any other year.

It is the year of the first black governorship in commonwealth history. It ought to be notable for that, and would be, if it were not for the sorry fact that the first black governor has disgraced himself and everyone else in Virginia by personal carelessness - and not just in his "private life," whatever that is - on a scale few Virginia officeholders at any time and on any level can match.

Thus I award the first Dick Obenshain Prize for the Achievement of Republican Unity to - who else? - L. Douglas Wilder. He may have accomplished what perhaps even Obenshain failed to do: make Virginia truly Republican, and for good.