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

DATE: TUESDAY, March 24, 1992                   TAG: 9203240364
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CALL HIM `THE VCR CANDIDATE'

But Steve Musselwhite is hoping his new video will be a hit at least with local Democrats.

Musselwhite, one of three candidates battling for the party's nomination to succeed Rep. Jim Olin in Congress, gave reporters a sneak preview of the nine-minute campaign video at a news conference Monday.

It wasn't quite the Cannes Film Festival. But then nobody would mistake Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Vinton, or former Gov. Gerald Baliles, who are featured in the video, for Arnold Schwarzenegger, either.

Someone did mention, however, that Musselwhite bears a slight resemblance to Robert Redford.

Musselwhite's campaign has 50 copies of the video, and it was to be premiered Monday night at house parties from Roanoke to Harrisonburg.

"There's no way I or my family members can get out to see everybody" in the 6th District, Musselwhite said. He hopes the video will be the next best thing. But he's not going to slack up on face-to-face campaigning, either, he said.

As far as he knows, this is the first time a candidate in this part of the state - and maybe in all of Virginia - has used video this way, Musselwhite said.

It is "the cutting edge" of political campaigning, Cranwell said.

For what it would cost to buy nine minutes of advertising time on local TV stations, "I could produce 15,000 of these," Cranwell said, possibly exaggerating in the Hollywood tradition.

"It's much less expensive that anybody thinks," Musselwhite said, although he - also in the Hollywood tradition - declined to disclose the bottom line.

And the video allows him to zero in on the small, but important, audience he wants: Democrats who are likely to turn out at mass meetings on April 11 and 13 to nominate their party's candidate.

The video begins with Ned Jeter, whose family's 150-year-old farm in Botetourt County was threated by plans for the Alternate U.S. 220/old Virginia 604 leg of the eastern Roanoke Valley bypass project. Musselwhite is on the state Transportation Board, and he persuaded highway planners to simply add a new lane to Alternate 220 rather than building a new road from U.S. 11 to U.S. 460 through the Jeters' farm.

"Had it not been for Steve Musselwhite, I think we would have lost this farm," Jeter says.

(The Highway Department has scrapped plans to extend the eastern bypass from U.S. 460 to U.S. 220 south of Roanoke.)

The video gives a quick biography of Musselwhite, a 43-year-old insurance executive, and includes testimonials from Baliles, Cranwell, state Sen. Elliot Schewel of Lynchburg and others.

In it, Musselwhite speaks of his commitment to affordable health care and his support for a middle-class tax cut and a shifting of money from the defense budget to education.

He pledges not to raise his own pay as a congressman and not to waste taxpayers' money on junkets.

He zaps "George Bush and his rich Republican friends." And he says the government should "butt out" on abortion.

Musselwhite is fighting Roanoke lawyers John Edwards and John Fishwick for the Democratic nomination.

Keywords:
POLITICS