Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 8, 1993 TAG: 9305100266
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: ROB EURE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
\ A couple of Sundays ago, an 11-year-old girl came up to Mary Sue Terry in church and asked for her autograph.
"I try to go back to when I was in the fifth grade and visualize a woman running for governor and how that would make me see the world differently," Terry said this week, recalling the moment. "It's hard for me to go through the mental exercise, much less deal with it emotionally."
Terry's 15-year political career has been full of such encounters, but she has rarely if ever reflected on them in public. Now, as she prepares to claim the Democratic nomination for governor, Terry also may be ready to display a new public persona.
Widely viewed as calculating, cautious, indeed sometimes timid Terry throughout her career, Terry, 45, has shown a more combative and self-assured style in the past year. And in interviews this week, she has for the first time talked openly about her "special opportunity" as a female candidate for governor.
"I'm beginning to allow myself to feel all that has been accomplished, to feel the support . . . to feel the possibilities," she said.
Terry, whose nominating speech today will be given by a high school student, has planned a convention that highlights children and the changing face of American politics.
"There was nobody for me to look up to or have the opportunity to meet in a position like this when I was their age," Terry said of the young girls she greets while campaigning. "The early discrimination, that moved to tolerance, that moved to wait-and-see, has now moved to excitement in some quarters and even celebration.
"That's not to say it's universal. It's not to say that the fact I'm a woman makes an otherwise bad decision a good decision - it doesn't," she added.
But "I do get a thrill" from meeting young women whose horizons expand when they consider that a woman might be governor.
Terry said her willingness to discuss the historic nature of her candidacy is part of a growing confidence about her readiness for the six-month campaign and the job of governor should she win.
"I think she's come a long way," said Elsie Heinz, an Arlington lawyer and member of the House of Delegates when Terry arrived in 1978.
Heinz and others who remember Terry as a freshman delegate say they have never doubted her ambition or determination to reach the Executive Mansion.
From the start of her career, Terry has been pegged as an ambitious politician carved from the mold of Southside Democrats - conservative, cunning and colorless.
She established a reputation as a woman able to work her way inside the power structure of white males - a habit that disappointed some members of the fledgling women's caucus.
She shied away from endorsing the Equal Rights Amendment until it was too late to be helpful, but posed for a photograph participating in a tobacco- spitting contest.
She shudders at the memory of that image now. "It ran all over the place. I got calls from law school classmates in Delaware." But the picture sat well with her tradition-minded Southside constituents.
Terry's highest-profile legislative work was on drunken-driving laws. With then-Gov. Charles Robb's backing, she wrote the measure reducing the blood-alcohol level for drunk driving to 0.10 percent. Later, as attorney general, she pushed through an even tougher measure: a 0.10 alcohol level now brings virtually an automatic conviction.
If Terry is a consummate establishment Democrat - her campaigns always have been financed by mainline Democrats and Virginia business - the care and caution with which she has pursued her career has led critics to suggest she is consumed by her ambition to be governor. Those traits also have sparked criticism that she ducks fights and tough issues.
"I think you mature a lot," Terry said. "A lot of it is, people have historically tried to measure me by somebody else's yardstick. Could I fight politically like this person? - when I never aspired to. They operated on the assumption that in politics you had to do it like it had always been done."
Terry was on a collision course with Douglas Wilder for the 1989 gubernatorial nomination, but announced 18 months before the election that she would run for a second term as attorney general. She says she wasn't avoiding the Wilder fight, she just wasn't ready to run.
In the months leading up to the 1989 election, when Terry won a second term and led the ticket in votes for the second straight time, she stumbled into trouble in the Southwest Virginia coalfields.
An aide told a reporter Terry was "outraged" by video she saw of the treatment striking miners received from state troopers. A week later, another aide withdrew the remark, claiming Terry neither said nor authorized it. The waffling angered miners, already suspicious of Terry's ties to coal operators and company executives.
Her tentative style brought Terry more trouble in the federal lawsuit against Virginia Military Institute's all-male admissions policy.
Wilder was a defendant in the suit and Terry represented him and the school. When Wilder, who had acquiesced in the policy for months, suddenly declared his opposition and sought to be dismissed from the case, Terry dropped out as counsel as well. Her claim that she couldn't satisfy the conflicting policy desires of the governor and the college's board of visitors brought criticism from VMI friends and foes. And she continues to refuse to say how she personally views the VMI policy.
\ Tangling with Wilder
Terry seemed to learn from the affair, however. She has been faster and steadier with her political moves since then. And last year, she became one of the few politicians to tangle with Wilder and come out undamaged when her office investigated and criticized operations at the Virginia Retirement System.
Her report on VRS outraged Wilder, whose appointees run the retirement fund. He tried to fire Terry as the fund's lawyer, and she responded by suing him - and winning.
"The thing that sets her apart from other politicians is she's not afraid to fight," said House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell of Vinton. "She sure stuck it to the governor. She was more tentative earlier in her career, but she's grown out of that. The baseball saying goes: `I know you can play ball, but can you hit fast pitching?' She can."
Heinz says that's apparent in Terry's campaign. "From what I hear, she is not a stand-pat candidate," Heinz said. "She acknowledges there are flaws in Virginia. On the subject of the facilities available for children, she's downright convincing."
Terry was visibly upset after a recent visit to Chambliss Elementary School in Wakefield, where she saw 30 kindergartners in a class with one teacher, and no computers or gymnasium for the 300 children in grades K-3.
"People ought to see this," she whispered as she headed into the cafeteria not large enough for the 300 students to sit on the floor. "This is Virginia."
Terry says her commitment to reducing disparities in school funding between the state's wealthy and poor areas is "foundational. If ever anything starts to compete with that commitment, all I have to do is let my mind's eye turn to experiences like Chambliss," she said.
Terry grew up in an education family. Both her parents taught in Patrick County.
She said politics was not a childhood ambition. "When I was in the second grade, I wanted to be a clerk," she said. "I didn't get an allowance until I was in the fourth grade, so I was fascinated with change."
If experience has made Terry more comfortable talking about herself, she remains cautious when the questioning turns to the kind of governor she wants to be. Rather than programs, she emphasizes her leadership style, one she said will "work with and through people."
On the other hand, it's a style that doesn't hesitate to draw a line, but only draws a line as a last resort, she said. "I'm not combative by nature, but I am prepared to fight for what I believe in."
\ MARY SUE TERRY
Party: Democrat
Age: 45
Born: Sept. 28, 1947, in Martinsville.
Profession: Lawyer
Education: Bachelor's degree in political science from Westhampton College of the University of Richmond, 1969; master's degree in government from the University of Virginia, 1970; law degree from UVa, 1973.
Public Service: Assistant commonwealth's attorney in Patrick County, 1973-1977; private law practice and member of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1978-86; attorney general, 1986-1993.
Personal: Single.
Keywords:
POLITICS PROFILE
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.