Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 1, 1992 TAG: 9203020206
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I'm sure it lacked anything like the moment I witnessed at the earlier event.
The meeting was about to get under way. For most of those assembled, it had been a long couple of hours - of patient waiting and registering and filing into William Fleming High School's packed gymnasium. An overflow crowd had been diverted into the auditorium.
I noticed Vice Mayor Howard Musser, the white-haired candidate endorsed by the city's party establishment and major elected officials. He was standing quietly among the politicos at the front of the gym.
Suddenly, David Bowers emerged onto center court. Briskly he walked around the sidelines, chased by a TV cameraman. As he passed before the stands, he pumped his fist in the air. He delivered the thumbs-up sign. His supporters in the bleachers responded with raucous applause.
It was clear in that electric moment, to me anyway, that the politician had received his mandate to give 'em hell, and the nominating speeches and ballot-counting would prove a formality. The scene captured Bowers' appeal just as he was about to capture the mayoral nomination.
This newspaper editorially has said unpleasant things about some positions Bowers has taken. Yet you have to give him credit for boldness. While Mayor Noel Taylor contemplated retirement and others worried, Bowers seized the day. Musser, at meeting's end, was reduced to complaining about the lack of parking, as if more parking might have made a difference.
Of course, passionate moments only punctuate life; they don't comprise the whole of it. If occasionally we are caught up in dramas, including the romance of politics, we also at times must be drama critics.
So I am led to wonder about all that has been made, before and since his nomination, of Bowers' affinity with the common man and his championing of the working class.
Against the myth-making, it may be noted that Bowers' opponent for the nomination was hardly a child of Roanoke's moneyed elite.
Musser has become a familiar fixture in city government, and was favored by his council colleagues over the mercurial Bowers. But don't forget: Musser came to office a decade ago as an opponent of council's pro-business status quo and as an organizer of popular tax revolt.
I don't recall hearing much talk, or seeing much action, from either Musser or Bowers regarding the need to substantially boost support for the city's disadvantaged children, really the most oppressed class.
Organized labor, which organized impressively on Bowers' behalf, is peculiarly influential in Democratic mass meetings. By itself, the Roanoke Firefighters Association reportedly delivered 200 Bowers supporters - a number roughly equivalent to the councilman's margin of victory.
But labor isn't merely the vanguard of the working class: It's also a special interest. Firefighters backed Bowers, said the group's president, because the councilman is willing to consider their concerns.
Bowers has won votes, too, by supporting the view that the labor force for local construction projects should be limited to local workers. It is curious that allegiance to this view is deemed a test of solidarity.
Often class-conscious cultural symbolism rides special interests. Take racing promoter Whitey Taylor. He shuttled Bowers supporters to the mass meeting presumably in part because he doesn't mind thumbing his nose at the South Roanoke set that's nervous about Bowers. Taylor, however, also has an interest in currying favor with a public official positioned to support his racing program at Victory Stadium.
The Roanoke Central Labor Council endorsed City Council candidates Renee Anderson and James Trout. Both won nomination, affirming Bowers' and labor's clout. But then how to explain that the third member of the winning council slate - incumbent Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr. - was also the meeting's biggest vote-getter? He garnered 1,045. Bowers had 896.
Since Fitzpatrick is a vice president at Dominion Bank, a South Roanoke resident and no friend of Bowers, it's hard to say the day represented a complete victory for the forces striving, in Bowers' words, to "take back City Hall" for the little people.
And so one is tempted to dismiss the class-conscious mythology at the surface of Roanoke politics, to observe that its symbolic import far exceeds its real impact.
I might be so tempted, had I not sensed something real and important in the mass meeting last weekend.
My attitude about the meeting itself was ambivalent. I remain bothered that a relatively small gathering - susceptible to influence by small but well-organized groups - might end up choosing half Roanoke's city council.
On the other hand, standing in that gym, I could not but be moved by the meeting's civic spirit, its faithful exercise of democracy, its prevailing sense of community and cause. The common purpose seemed to override divided loyalties.
And if the mass meeting was insufficiently representative of the Roanoke electorate, it was more representative of Roanokers from all walks of life than are most civic events in this city. Black and white, rich and poor rubbed shoulders in line and on the bleachers.
As I saw it, they weren't acting as isolated individuals before an impersonal state. They were collectively making a choice for themselves. They were expressing a yearning for change.
Billy Bova, a Bowers organizer, was quoted the other day as saying "There are only a couple of families that control things - the Cartledges, the Hancocks." (Bowers, he said, by contrast, is "not controlled by big business, the banks.")
Paranoid, distracting stuff, this is. But it gets indirectly at truths.
While it's patently false that a couple of families control things, it is so that ever more families fear loss of control over their economic destiny.
While there are higher callings in politics than to provide a focus for resentment, working people are right to be angry about the shaft they've been served by incompetent, self-centered elites in business and government.
While there is still the question of what to do at City Hall once it's taken back, it is also true that greater participation, from all classes of people, is as much the end as it is the means to reforming government.
The point is to make the revolution continuous and encompassing.
Sending messages can be therapeutic, and we are sorely tempted to place our hopes in the enthusiasms and energies of politicians, such as Bowers, who dominate the spotlight.
But we cannot be sustained by passionate moments. Nor can we leave to others the challenge of changing our institutions. That task we must take up ourselves.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB