Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 20, 1992 TAG: 9202200398
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WHEN IS AN ELECTION NOT AN ELECTION?
Roanoke, this is your wake-up call for the '90s.The first mayor of the post-Noel Taylor era - a mayor who might serve into the 21st century - likely will be chosen Saturday.
If you think the election snuck up awfully fast, you're half wrong.
There is no election.
Instead, the key decision on who Roanoke's next mayor will be comes through an archaic, misnamed, parliamentary process known as a mass meeting open only to those willing to pledge at least temporary fidelity to the Democratic Party.
These numbers don't crunch:
Just under 100,000 people call Roanoke home.
Exactly 38,505 of those are registered to vote.
But maybe only 1,000 - and that would be a big crowd - will participate in Saturday's Democratic mass meeting that will nominate either Councilman David Bowers or Vice Mayor Howard Musser. (Estimate courtesy of Musser's campaign manager.)
Yeah, yeah, maybe the Republicans will prod Willis "Wick" Anderson, a "boy wonder" mayor when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, into making an encore run.
Or maybe they won't. Anderson sometimes makes New York Gov. Mario Cuomo look like a man given to split-second decisions. Anderson let the Republican nomination for Congress slip away in December because he still was hemming and hawing while another Roanoke lawyer, Bob Goodlatte, was frantically telephoning party leaders to line up their support.
Even if Anderson does overcome his stage fright, the city's fundamental Democratic slant makes his bid about as uphill as the old Mill Mountain Incline.
Yeah, yeah, there are other possibilities, too. Maybe Musser will bolt the party and run as an independent if he loses the nomination. He won't rule out the possibility, his written pledge of party loyalty notwithstanding, and there's bound to be sentiment for Anybody-But-Bowers among those with deep pockets downtown.
But right now, this much is certain: There are only two announced candidates for mayor, and Saturday's mass meeting will pick one of them.
For all practical purposes, that could be tantamount to the election. Certainly it is if you're a Bowers supporter; he's vowed to abide by the outcome.
A mass meeting is a more democratic method of picking the next mayor than leaving the choice up to, say, newspaper editorial writers or WROV-FM's "Cram It or Crank It" call-in show. But it's still not an election and doesn't pretend to be, even if Saturday's nomination will be decided by secret ballot rather than a show of hands.
Mass meetings are won not by the candidate with the most popular message or even the most number of potential supporters - but by the candidate with the biggest motor pool.
Whoever can turn up enough warm bodies willing to spend a Saturday sitting through several hours of tedious parliamentary procedure and deliver them to William Fleming High School by 11 a.m. - not a minute later - wins.
These body counts are open invitations to intrigue, manipulation or plain simple cleverness. Last year in Botetourt County, backers of then-chief deputy Jerry Caldwell complained that chief investigator Reed Kelly packed the mass meeting with cousins and aunts and uncles to win the Democratic nomination for sheriff.
If so, that was pretty tame. Once, in the coalfields, a Democratic nomination was decided when the sheriff emptied his jail and marched his prisoners into the mass meeting. Talk about trusty supporters.
If Warner Dalhouse and the captains of industry convened one Saturday morning in a private assembly to chart the future of the city, these same two populist Democrats running for mayor would be howling like scalded cats. Instead, Bowers and Musser are too busy lining up car pools for Saturday to raise a peep of protest about the process.
So how did the future of Roanoke's political leadership come to depend on such arbitrary decisions as whether to spend Saturday at the mall or the mass meeting?
One answer is that the deadline for the Democrats to choose their nominee through a primary election passed in December - long before Taylor announced his retirement and the political talk of the town turned to picking his successor.
But the larger answer is that Virginia never has been keen on this democracy thing.
True, Virginia Democrats routinely chose their nominees by primary during the days of the Byrd Machine. But that was when poll taxes and literacy tests kept the voter rolls small and, uh, reliable. Read that: white, rural and conservative.
In the late '40s, Harvard political scientist V.O. Key was so appalled by Virginia's tiny electorate that he observed: "By contrast, Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy."
Once ordinary folks started voting in Democratic primaries, though, extraordinary things started happening. Exhibit A: Howlin' Henry Howell's "upset of the century" in the 1977 gubernatorial primary. Case closed.
Democratic leaders promptly scrapped primaries, believing that party leaders could better control the nominating process in sparsely attended mass meetings. They could, too. Sometimes.
But the secret of mass meetings is that liberals love them, too. That's because mass meetings are often so small they can be easily dominated by groups that otherwise might not command a majority. Get a labor union fired up enough that its entire membership shows up - or find a church willing to bus in a whole congregation - and the nomination is yours before party leaders know what hit them.
Who'll show up Saturday is anybody's guess. But anyone who doesn't may find that, when they finally enter the voting booth in May, the choice of mayor already has been made for them.
Dwayne Yancey is a general assignment reporter who knows a thing or two about politics.
Keywords:
POLITICS