Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303280283
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The most powerful political boss in the Roanoke Valley lives in Vinton.
But it's not who you might think.
House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell? No, a Republican housewife named Trixie Averill.
More on that later, but first a lesson in how politics really works.
Most citizens labor under the mistaken impression that November is when they get to choose who will represent them in office. Like much else in politics, that's only about half-true. The bigger decisions - who will be on the ballot at all - are being made now, if they haven't been made already.
For the past few weeks, there have been dribs and drabs in the news about Virginia Democrats and Republicans going through the arcane mechanics of selecting the convention delegates that will nominate their candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. The popular perception is that this is a Byzantine process dominated by party insiders. That's true, but again only half. It's dominated by party insiders simply because party insiders usually are the only people who show up.
And just who are these so-called party insiders?
That's both the awesome beauty and the dirty little secret of politics: When it comes to nominating candidates, the most powerful people in politics aren't the big names you hear about in the news - the congressmen, the state legislators, the elder statesmen of offices past. Fact is, a lot of times endorsements by the bigwigs don't mean much at all.
Instead, the people who really count are people you've likely never heard of, people who, for lack of a better term, get lumped together under the phrase "grass-roots activists." For the most part, they're ordinary folks, except for the fact that they've done something extraordinary - they've gotten involved in politics.
That's why Trixie Averill's vote counts more than yours. And that's why Debbie Jordan's counts more than yours, too. And so does Tommy Jordan's and C.W. Toney's and Al Thomason's and Ron Adkins' and those of dozens of other folks in the Roanoke Valley.
They're housewives and secretaries and railroad foremen and painters and retirees and insurance salesmen. But they're politically powerful because they're the ones who always show up at party meetings in the Roanoke Valley and can be counted on to turn out their friends and neighbors to vote the way they do.
These are the people that statewide candidates spend months - and sometimes years - courting.
Here's how you, too, can become a political boss, and make aspiring governors and senators and other officeholders come to you on bended knee.
Rolodexes and Newton's First Law of Motion
First, let's turn to Exhibit A: the rout Bedford County prosecutor Jim Updike recently suffered in his bid for the Democratic nomination for attorney general.
How does it happen that a celebrity prosecutor with an impressive record of convictions and high-profile cases couldn't even line up a single person to be a convention delegate on his behalf in many localities outside his part of the state?
It's not for lack of charm. By all accounts, Updike wowed audiences wherever he spoke.
It's not because he's from a rural county on the wrong side of the state. Granted, Updike's Bedford address didn't help him any. But geography hasn't stopped Salem Del. Steve Agee from mounting a credible campaign for the attorney general's nomination on the Republican side. And the last time we checked, Mary Sue Terry still called a crooked spot in the road in Patrick County home.
It's not even that Updike got a late start. After all, he first voiced his intention to run in the spring of '92, more than a year before a single convention delegate was chosen.
No, the real answer is that Updike, for all of his savvy in the courtroom, was a political neophyte who didn't understand the process by which party nominations are won. Don't blame him. It's pretty complicated, and the most important rules are the unwritten ones.
Campaigns for party nominations are not really about issues or personality or who would make the best candidate in the general election or even who would make the best officeholder, although on a good day all of those factors may be present at some level. Instead, campaigns for party nominations are primarily contests of organizational strength. Rolodex is bigger than your Rolodex. The most important science in political science is physics: Who can move the most number of people from point A to point B, point B being the local mass meetings that select delegates to the state convention. And the operative rule here is Newton's First Law of Motion, which goes more or less like this: Nothing happens by magic. You gotta give things a shove.
Updike traveled the state for a year, speaking at party barbecues and clam bakes. But it's not enough for people to applaud your speech and say they like you. The candidate must follow through by prodding them to sign up and recruit others on his behalf. Can I use your name? Will you come out to a mass meeting for me? Will you be a convention delegate for me? Will you talk five, 10, 15, 20 of your friends into coming out for me? Will you be my precinct/county/regional coordinator? That's how campaign organizations are built, on phone-trees and 3-by-5 cards and mailing lists.
That's where Updike's campaign never got started: To put this kind of organization together takes a staff, and Updike didn't get around to hiring one until January. The campaign manager he finally hired, Billy Sublett, said Updike winced when Sublett told him all the work Updike had done in the previous year had pretty much gone for naught. "Jim is a great candidate," Sublett says. "He just didn't know all of this had to be created.
But it does. Political parties are not like clubs or committees or any other type of organization with a fixed membership. In practice, they consist simply of whoever bothers to show up at a musty high school auditorium on a dreary night in March to sit through an hour or so of parliamentary procedure. Power doesn't belong to the people; it belongs to the people who show up.
There's no question that Updike, by virtue of the international spotlight that shone on his prosecution of Jens Soering, is better known with the general public across Virginia than Bill Dolan, a soft-spoken Northern Virginia lawyer who's rarely done anything to make news. But it's Dolan who's going to be the Democratic nominee for attorney general, because he's spent the past few years quietly traveling the state, visiting in living rooms and workplaces with the people most likely to show up on those dreary nights in March.
Sometimes a housewife has more political clout
Which brings us back to Trixie Averill.
Maybe she's not really the most powerful political boss in the Roanoke Valley, although she's pretty close. This year, at least, she's powerful enough that Republican gubernatorial candidate George Allen has made her his coordinator for the western part of the state. Averill's Christmas party last year drew almost as many luminaries as the famous holiday power-parties hosted by Roanoke industrialist John Hancock - Allen, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Salem Del. and attorney general hopeful Steve Agee, Fincastle state Sen. Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo . . .
But the fact is, there are dozens of Trixie Averills in the Roanoke Valley, and in every community across the state. We could just as easily talk about Kathy Hayden, another Republican activist from eastern Roanoke County who's rounding up support this year for GOP lieutenant governor contender Mike Farris. Or Billy Bova, a health products salesman who helped turn out the crowd that nominated David Bowers for mayor last year. Or Tommy and Debbie Jordan, the Buchanan couple who have been regular organizers for various Democratic candidates over the years.
Most of them don't want anything in return, at least not in the sense of offices or favors or other pay-backs. They just want to see their side win and to see their philosophy of government prevail.
That sounds a trifle Pollyannaish but tends to be true, and Averill is as good an example as any.
Her motives are straight out of a civics textbook. For her, voting on Election Day is "the bare minimum" expected of a citizen. "If you don't get involved at the grass-roots level, you don't have cause to complain," she says. "The major decisions are made before Election Day, when you choose candidates. I want to make sure that my candidates have a chance to get on the ballot. It all starts locally. So many people don't understand that by the time you go to the polls on Election Day, all the major decisions have been made."
So she signs up early with her favorite Republican hopefuls. She recruits her friends to be convention delegates, and then she tries to pack the mass meeting to make sure they get elected. And what does Averill think of the power she's accumulated by getting involved early? "I don't look at it that way," she says. "I look at the short term, getting to go to the inauguration." Other than that, she says, "I have absolutely no ambitions."
Averill's involvement in politics tends to baffle her nonpolitical neighbors. "They're amazed," she says. "They ask `What are you doing politics in March for? Or in December, when we just had an election?' But work goes on year-round."
The influence of the Trixie Averills of the world also tends to confound some aspiring politicians, who haven't figured out what a bottom-up process politics can be.
That's a big reason why George Allen is likely to be the Republican nominee for governor and Northern Virginia businessman Earle Williams isn't. Allen plugged into the network of grass-roots activists around the state more than a year ago; Williams didn't.
And that's a big reason why candidates need experienced consultants and campaign managers, to guide novice candidates to the people who really matter. Go to a reception packed with 50 Roanoke Valley Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter), and a candidate who didn't know any better might think the most important people are the businessmen and other officeholders in gray suits who want to talk to him about the issues. But a smart campaign manager knows that an endorsement from the housewife with a shoebox full of telephone numbers and time on her hands to call them all is worth more in a nomination fight than a roll call of names at the Shenandoah Club.
For that reason, the Trixie Averills of the world sometimes thoroughly exasperate each party's major financial contributors.
Take what happened a few weeks ago. A confab of conservative big-money boys in Richmond got together to audition the three candidates for the Republican nomination for governor. When the performance was over, these old-line businessmen put out the word that they thought George Allen was a lightweight who ought to forget about anything so lofty as the governorship.
The result? Zilch. Nada. The Allen bandwagon rolled on. The thumbs-down from Main Street Richmond may turn out to have serious consequences in the general election this fall, if these traditionally GOP contributors withhold their cash or send it instead to Democrat Mary Sue Terry. But in terms of the nomination, their advice to Allen has about as much impact as the pope's did to the Big Three at the Yalta. Stalin, it is said, turned to Franklin Roosevelt and asked dryly, "And how many divisions does the pope have?"
The same principle of force applies here.
How many people can these big contributors turn out to a mass meeting to back Williams?
We know Trixie Averill will get her people there for Allen. But the big financial contributors are more likely to spend mass meeting day on the golf course, complaining all the while about how the parties never take their advice.
The wonderful thing about grass-roots democracy is that just about anyone can set himself or herself up as a kingmaker for a party nomination.
Labor unions and certain churches and other special-interest groups do it all the time. In the early 1970s, college students backing George McGovern took over the Democratic Party in many localities.
Last year in Rockingham County, a mountain hollow full of folks still upset that the government condemned their families' land in the 1930s organized themselves, overwhelmed the party regulars at the local Democratic mass meeting and helped tip the party's congressional nomination to Steve Musselwhite.
Now, some Virginia Republicans are quaking in fear that followers of Pat Robertson are seizing their party by turning out people by the church busload to back home-schooling advocate Mike Farris for lieutenant governor.
Of course, it's remarkably easy to take over a political party. Getting disinterested people interested enough to do it is the hard part.
After all, you could organize your block, your subdivision, your co-workers or your civic club to march down to one of the party's mass meetings and take it over on behalf of a certain candidate.
But the odds are, you won't.
Instead, the Trixie Averills of the world will make the big decisions for you.
by CNB