Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 18, 1992 TAG: 9202180238
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
CAMPAIGN STAFFS RUSH TO GET BACKERS TO POLLS
ROANOKE'S NEXT MAYOR might be chosen Saturday - not by election but by a party mass meeting. The campaign isn't one most people see, but it's being waged nonetheless. Here's a look behind the scenes.
It's Sunday afternoon, less than a week to go before what might be called Roanoke's secret election for mayor, and the most important cogin Howard Musser's campaign machine is jammed:
The label-printer program onhis personal computer.
He's already used up all the available memory punching in the thousands of names he and his campaign workers have accumulated as potential participants of Saturday's mass meeting that will nominate a Democratic candidate for mayor.
"I usually do that late at night, when I can think and the phone's not ringing," Musser says.
This is what the first truly competitive mayor's race in Roanoke's history - there hasn't been another mayor's race without an incumbent since the city switched to direct election of the mayor in 1964 - looks like: no rallies, no news conferences, no 30-second TV spots.
Instead, the candidate himself stays up late, tapping away on his I've seen one person get a nomination with 12 people at a mass meeting. James Harvey Roanoke City Council member own mailing list.
There's a reason, of course. With no Republican candidate in the field (at least not yet), the mayor's race might go by default to the Democrats - and the party nomination will be settled not through a primary election but by Saturday's mass meeting at William Fleming High School.
That same mass meeting will also decide which three of six council candidates, including incumbent Beverly Fitzpatrick, will survive to face the voters in May.
A mass meeting is more an organizational test than an election - whichever candidate shows up with the most supporters wins. Mass meetings also tend to be fairly incestuous affairs, dominated by the usual cast of party insiders. "I've seen one person get a nominated with 12 people at a mass meeting," says Councilman James Harvey.
With a hot contest between Musser and David Bowers, plus the complication of the council contenders, Saturday's mass meeting will be different. Democrats are braced for a crowd of 1,000 or more. Still, that turnout would constitute only a fraction of the city's population.
As a result, ordinary Roanoke voters might not even know there's a mayor's race going on. The campaign isn't directed at them. There's a lively subterranean campaign taking place nonetheless, as both Musser and Bowers and their campaign staffs try to line up friends and neighbors and anyone else willing to take off a couple of hours on a Saturday to help pick the next mayor.
Dialing for Democrats
" . . . And can you get to the mass meeting?"
Bowers' secretary, Rachel Layman, jots down a definite.
"And get anybody you can," she adds. "Anybody who lives in the city and who is a Democrat."
Another call rings in. This one she punches downstairs to Danny Frei, the paralegal who's running Bowers' campaign.
"Danny, here's another call, someone you sent a letter to . . . "
Hanging around the lobby in Bowers' downtown law office is the only glimpse you'll get of Bowers' campaign.
In politics, as in war, the massing of infantry is often classified top secret. Bowers won't even talk about his campaign plans, except in the most most general terms.
Nor will he let anyone see "The Bunker" - the basement office where Frei toils - without first promising not to talk about its contents (though, in truth, it just looks like a plain old basement).
For Bowers, the mayoral campaign began last August, when he commissioned a poll by Bob Firebaugh, a travel-agency employee and ace numbers-cruncher who often serves as the statistical guru for Roanoke Democrats.
Bowers won't talk numbers, but he says the poll showed he had high name recognition, high positive ratings and low negative ratings.
In January, Bowers spent two afternoons knocking on doors in Williamson Road, the type of working-class and middle-class neighborhood where his class-based message would be expected to resonate most. At 20 to 25 doors an hour, Bowers didn't expect to identify many people willing to turn out to a mass meeting. Instead, the door-knocking was mostly for his own benefit, to test his instincts about voters' moods and gauge their reactions first-hand.
"I wanted to be out there in the cold of January," he says. "It's important for me to reach out and try to make myself available."
Musser, by contrast, started late - not until after Mayor Noel Taylor announced his retirement Jan. 28.
Since then, though, the candidates' efforts can't help but parallel each other.
The real campaign is waged one-on-one, by telephone and mail.
Every good politician keeps his own mailing list of supporters, accumulated through years of precinct work. Now's the time to shower those voters with reminders to turn out - and bring their family, friends and neighbors.
Each candidate also claims a core group of 15 to 25 supporters who have joined them in working the phones. One day Bowers, who must schedule his campaigning around his law practice, called 72 people. Musser, who's retired, may hit as many as 120 in a day.
"By the mass meeting, we'll have probably talked to 3,000 people," says Debbie Jordan, an unemployed secretary who's running Musser's campaign.
The pitch varies. "If you're talking to the business community, you've got to remind them of the things Howard has done for business," Jordan says. "If you're talking to senior citizens, you're going to be reminding them of things Howard has done to help the elderly."
But the real key is not what's being said so much as who's saying it. The goal is to have friends call friends - that's the most powerful kind of sales job possible.
Lack of understanding
On Sunday afternoon after church, about 20 of Musser's friends showed up at his home for a mailing party - probably the last 1,000 notices he'll send out until he can buy more memory for his computer.
Envelope-stuffing is a thing of the past: Bowers and Musser are sending out only postcards. They're cheaper and folks have to look at them before throwing them out.
Instead, everyone gathered around the pool table and slapped on stamps and labels. If any of Musser's friends spotted a familiar name, they scribbled a personal note, like the one Harvey sent to Charles Green, a minister in Northwest Roanoke:
"Rev - hope to see you Saturday. We need your help. Thanks, Jimmy Harvey."
Because the campaign has been so short - barely three weeks since Taylor's exit - Musser finds himself fighting definitions as much as he is Bowers.
"There are still a lot of people we call that we have to explain what a mass meeting is," he says. "They think of mass meetings in the old days, when a few politicians got together in the corner with smoking cigars and decided who got on the ballot. This is just like an election, like an election before we had voting machines. I've had people say `Oh, I'll vote for you but I can't come to the mass meeting.' Well, big deal."
Fitzpatrick finds himself hearing the same thing, and he's even more worried.
The same mass meeting that nominates either Musser or Bowers for mayor will also nominate Democratic candidates for City Council. There are six candidates seeking three slots on the ticket.
"I've had tons of people in the community say `Gosh, Bev, we appreciate your commitment; we can't imagine you won't get re-elected.' I'm saying, `That's not the point; I've got to first win the Democratic nomination.'"
Bowers and Fitzpatrick have long been at odds - to the class-conscious Bowers, the banker Fitzpatrick is exactly the wrong kind of Democrat. So Musser's campaign manager is warning that if Bowers commands a majority at the mass meeting, he may use it to deny Fitzpatrick a nomination.
Bowers says that's not true, that he's not getting involved in ticket-making and he expects Fitzpatrick to be renominated.
Nonetheless, Musser and Fitzpatrick have joined forces. "Howard's asking people he's calling to support Bev, because everybody in this understands Bev is threatened [by Bowers] because of the history of relations between them, and Bev's people are helping us," Jordan says.
Come Saturday, the two mayoral campaigns will move from the identification-and-motivation phase to the transportation phase. In some communities, it's tradition for candidates to charter buses and vans to make sure their supporters get to the meeting place.
Will either Bowers or Musser be doing that?
"I'm not going to tell you all that so you can put it in the paper!" Jordan exclaims.
With the Musser campaign, too, it seems, some things must stay classified.
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