Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 14, 1993 TAG: 9307140287
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROB EURE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ACCOMAC LENGTH: Long
"These downtowns don't have hardware stores anymore," says Allen, the Republican gubernatorial candidate. "Where are the general stores, the pharmacies?"
There to greet him are a handful of local Republican muckety-mucks. Everyone else in Accomac is staying inside, out of the sweltering heat.
But Allen is undaunted. He poses in the sun with the local GOP leaders for a photograph for the local paper and charges inside to meet everyone and anyone he can find.
"Hi, I'm George Allen and I'm running for governor. I could use your help."
Over and over, Allen repeats the mantra, handing out a blue pamphlet about his candidacy. When he finds a sympathizer who says he hopes Allen will win, the last line changes to "with your help, we will."
Allen, 41, the underdog in his race with Democrat Mary Sue Terry, will spend the summer trying to make up ground with retail campaigning: one vote at a time.
Though it is midsummer and too early for most Virginians to think about the fall gubernatorial race, Allen is retracing the steps dozens of predecessors took on their way to the governor's mansion.
He started the tour in two areas where voters complain that they live in a forgotten corner of the state - far Southwest Virginia last week and the Eastern Shore this week. He is spending the rest of this week in Southside and Hampton Roads, and next week travels again in Southside.
His tour - billed as "George Allen Listens" - is off to a slow start. The July heat wave has emptied the main streets of the hamlets Allen visits.
But he takes encouragement where he can find it. In Smithfield on Tuesday morning, Allen finds his small-town hardware store, along with a man who questions him about housing policies. Allen talks about his ideas for a voucher system for public housing tenants and workfare - winning, he hopes, a convert.
Allen won't be torn away from a conversation, even when a crowd is waiting. Later, in Petersburg, he stops to chat with a North Carolinian on the street before entering a restaurant where nearly 100 area Republicans wait for a Dutch-treat lunch in his honor. It is the largest crowd Allen will see in several days.
Though lagging far behind Terry in fund raising, Allen takes encouragement from the money he gets. On the four-day Southwest Virginia leg of his tour, Allen said he collected $2,800 "without even asking."
That may wilt in comparison with the millions Terry has raised, but to Allen, it is a sign of support from regular people. "You know, when certain people come up and put $50 or $100 in your hand, that's a lot of money for them. We may not have as much money as Mary Sue, but we have as many contributors, and that's important to me."
Campaigning is energizing, Allen says; his spirit stays high in the face of difficult questions or awkward encounters.
As he charges out of the records room at the courthouse in Isle of Wight, Allen strides smack into a low-hanging steel door frame - a 6-foot, 4-inch man victimized by a doorway built to the height of Colonial Americans.
It nearly knocks Allen off his feet. He recovers, rubs his head and makes an offhand joke about it being the only part of his body he can do without. The rest of the morning, he gingerly rubs the lump left on his scalp by the encounter.
Allen appears to stay well-briefed on local issues. Monday, he starts a conversation with Jack White, the Northampton County administrator, by asking about the proposal to build a maximum-security prison there to house inmates from the state's populous urban crescent.
White believes there is public support for the prison, which is still in the planning stages and with no location announced. Seven hundred prisoners would mean 500 jobs in White's county. "If I had to vote this evening, I'd vote for it," the administrator says.
He adds, though, that some prisoner advocates complain that an Eastern Shore prison would create a hardship on prisoners' families who want to visit.
"That's a tertiary concern to me," Allen said. "What I look at in prison location is, first, what is most cost effective, and, secondly, how the locality feels about it."
In the next county, he is more cautious on the issue of the day. Accomack County voters are poised to decide the fate of a proposed $51 million school bond. "It's their decision," Allen says.
The most common concern he hears, Allen says, is local officials complaining about state mandates lacking money to pay for them. "I hear that everywhere," he says.
Which is better than what he was hearing even earlier in the campaign, back when he had to drive himself from place to place in his own car. Last spring, Allen says, he was somewhere in Buchanan County and stopped at a roadside market.
"I'm George Allen, and I'm running for governor," he told the woman at the counter, handing her one of his blue pamphlets.
She studied his picture on the handout. "You are!" she exclaimed. "You ARE George Allen. You're the most famous person who's been in here since the guy selling `2,000 Flushes' came through. And now he's on TV!"
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB