Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060153
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
One year ago, when Virginia Republicans gathered at the Salem Civic Center to attend to some routine party business, Steve Agee peered down from the balcony at the armies of volunteers plastering the hall with posters, and mused about the statewide campaign he'd just embarked on.
He felt confident, he said, that he knew how to run a general election campaign against a Democrat. That would be the easy part.
The hard part, Agee said, would be negotiating his way through the often Byzantine world of intraparty politics to win the nomination in the first place.
That was a process, he admitted, he didn't fully understand.
His self-analysis was prophetic.
Agee's campaign for the attorney general's nomination - and, he says, his political career - ended Saturday beneath an avalanche of hastily-printed campaign literature attacking him as a dangerous "liberal."
In a steamy Richmond Coliseum jam-packed with first-time GOP delegates from the Religious Right who didn't know much about either candidate but were looking for the most conservative one they could find, the flurry of fliers from James Gilmore's campaign told them all they needed to know.
"The liberal label stuck," sighed Floyd County GOP chairman Chris Nolen, as he watched the votes being tallied. "Gilmore had a constant message, that Steve Agee is a liberal. Our message that you can't trust Gilmore never got through."
"Agee just died out there," said Jo Ann Strickler, an Agee supporter from Fairfax County.
Indeed, the campaign for attorney general - between two law school classmates who once had been friends and political confidantes - had been considered the tightest of the three at the Republican convention. It was tight, in part, because so many of the delegates, drawn into the party to back home-school advocate Mike Farris for lieutenant governor, hadn't paid attention yet.
But Saturday, those so-called "Farris delegates" broke heavily in Gilmore's favor, giving Gilmore a victory of landslide proportions: 60 percent to 40 percent.
Waiting out the long roll call of results in the cool privacy of an air-conditioned trailer in the coliseum's loading dock, Agee was calm and philosophical. He gambled his 12-year career in the House of Delegates for a chance to run statewide, and said all along that if he lost, this campaign would be his last.
"This was it for me," he said. "I thought we ran a good campaign, an honorable campaign. It's hard when it all boils down to the last two days."
Especially two days like the ones just past.
Friday morning, Agee's phone banks of the 14,000 delegates registered for the convention were showing him pulling slightly ahead of Gilmore, but with as many as 40 percent of the delegates still undecided.
With the outcome that uncertain, both sides resorted to the most dangerous weapon at their disposal - the photocopier.
Before dawn Saturday, Gilmore volunteers fanned out through hotels in downtown Richmond where delegates were staying. Under each door, they shoved a copy of "The Gilmore Express," a newsletter that blasted Agee on issues designed to inflame the deeply conservative Farris delegates who controlled the outcome.
It accused him of waffling on abortion. Even worse, from the Agee campaign's point of view, the Gilmore brochures reprinted a story from the Washington Post that described Agee as a "moderate."
"The Post doesn't award that label to conservatives," the newsletter declared. "When the Post says `moderate,' Republicans know they mean `liberal'!"
Furthermore, the Gilmore newsletter drew attention to a a 1989 newspaper column Agee had written in which he predicted Republicans would continue to lose elections if they let "conventions oriented to the church buses shape our messages, our candidates, and our campaigns."
That's not the sort of analysis of party fortunes the Farris delegates - many of whom arrived at this convention in church buses - wanted to hear, and the Gilmore campaign made sure they heard it.
"Agee condemned Republican newcomers," the newsletter declared.
As delegates streamed into the coliseum to take their seats, they were confronted with more Gilmore fliers, repeating the same charges. "Knock it Off, Steve! . . . You are the liberal . . . Delegates! To see Agee's votes, ask your Gilmore unit coordinator for `The Fact Book.'"
Agee's campaign photocopier, working at a speed of 130 copies per minute, cranked out counterattacks of their own, but it was clear as the convention began that Gilmore's "liberal" name-calling was having its intended effect.
In the Tazewell County delegation, one of those most dominated by first-timers turned out by the Christian Coalition, Marsha Richardson intently studied all the literature she'd been given. "I don't like what Agee said about the church buses," she said. "If it sounds like what he meant, that's sad."
Throughout the hall, there were delegates just like her, quietly reading everything they'd been handed - and making up their minds then and there to vote for Gilmore.
Nolen, the Floyd chairman charged with trying to persuade undecided delegates from Southwest Virginia to go Agee's way, suddenly found he had a tougher job than he thought.
"Once we got in here, the dynamics changed," he said. "I had delegates that I thought we would win, but we lost. I think the literature had a big effect on them. It was their first convention and they wanted to get their hands on anything to read. Most party regulars are inoculated against things like that, and know it's a lot of crap, but the Farris people weren't, and the liberal label stuck."
Or, as Renee Gardner, Agee's coordinator in Virginia Beach, described the Farris delegates: "They're honest people. They can't comprehend the deceit."
Agee staffers, wired with walkie-talkies, frantically hustled their candidate - his radio code name was "Gunslinger" - from one pocket of Farris delegates to the next, hoping a one-on-one appeal would counteract the Gilmore surge.
But mostly, they banked on the nominating speeches to turn the growing Gilmore tide.
Gilmore, who staked his campaign on his reputation as a tough-talking prosecutor, didn't mention abortion, or home schooling, or any of the social issues that most animated the Farris delegates.
Agee did.
Going one step further, Agee arranged for Anne Kincaid - the state's best-known anti-abortion crusader - to second his nomination. Kincaid delivered a passionate address about how "during the General Assembly, I've literally lived in our cultural war zone, the Courts of Justice Committee, and I've learned who to trust," implying that Agee's record on abortion is more consistent than Gilmore's rhetoric.
Agee had hoped Kincaid's presence would send a powerful signal to Farris delegates.
It didn't.
"We have four sections of Farris people and they're still confused," lamented Gardner, Agee's Virginia Beach organizer. "The problem is, they don't know who Anne Kincaid is."
In the end, the race turned as much on perception as positions. Even if Agee could have neutralized Gilmore's attack on abortion, he couldn't match Gilmore's argument that as a commonwealth's attorney he's got the experience of fighting "on the front lines" against crime. Agee's retort that the attorney general is a legal adviser to the state, not a prosecutor, fell flat with most delegates.
The way Chris Klicks, a Farris delegate from Fauquier County, measured the two men was typical: "Gilmore's tougher on crime. Agee's squishy on a lot of crime."
Craig County GOP chairman Bill Wilcher agreed. "Crime control is a big issue for Republicans and with Gilmore being a prosecutor, that played to our Republicans very well."
Nor was there much Agee could have done to change the stylistic quotient in the race. The aggressive, hard-charging Gilmore simply looks and acts more conservative, and this was a conservative crowd looking for soulmates.
So this is how a political career ends: Down in his trailer, Agee sat beside the still-warm photocopier, quietly thanking the stream of campaign staffers who shuffled in to pay their respects.
What now?, he was asked.
"I go back to spending time with my family," he said.
Outside, his 5-year-old son, Zach, bounced a beach ball, oblivious to the campaign staffers who sat on the concrete floor, their heads bowed, their eyes misty.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB