Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 23, 1993 TAG: 9309290330
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ray L. Garland
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Until the terminal stage of his long struggle against cancer made further political involvement impossible, Smith was still on the case, doing what he could to uphold the conservative cause he had served all his life. His last great effort came in 1990 when he sparked a late but highly successful drive to defeat amendments to the state Constitution allowing both the commonwealth and local governments to issue billions in new debt without troubling to ask voter approval in a referendum.
Months went by and proponents had the field all to themselves. But when the frost appeared on the pumpkin, so did Roy Smith. When the votes were counted, the amendments were soundly defeated.
The lopsided vote suggests the people were properly leery, and may have refused to ratify even if organized opposition had never materialized. But there was a vote - perhaps as much as 10 percent of the total - that Smith and his cohorts in the "Coalition" could move from one column to another.
Their greatest cause was to keep Henry Howell from becoming governor, and they twice succeeded. Smith could not abide J. Marshall Coleman, the Republican moderate who defeated the last old-guard Democrat offered for statewide office, in the 1977 contest for attorney general.
When Coleman ran for governor four years later, Smith led prominent members of the Coalition into Charles Robb's corner. Not only did they strongly back the Democratic candidate, they savaged Coleman, allowing Robb the luxury of taking the high road.
But things didn't work out entirely according to plan. The Coalition also hoped to elect the GOP candidate for attorney general in 1981, Wyatt Durrette, and position him to succeed Robb. But Durrette went down with Coleman, albeit by a much smaller margin, which might calibrate the degree of Coalition clout.
When Durrette got his chance to run for top spot in 1985 - with enthusiastic Coalition backing - the game was up: The Democratic ticket of Gerald Baliles, Douglas Wilder and Mary Sue Terry made a clean sweep. After that, from Smith's point of view, things went to pot: another Democratic sweep in 1989 and a liberal majority in the state's congressional delegation to boot.
Smith himself never lost an election. But the highest office he sought was House of Delegates, where he served from 1954 to 1973, rising to chair the committee on Appropriations. Even political foes respected his strong sense of duty and the disciplined attention to detail he brought to all matters in which he took an interest. His greatest achievement was the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, now a toll-free superhighway linking two of the state's oldest and most troubled cities.
But a turnpike couldn't save Petersburg from decline, as Smith tacitly acknowledged when he built a house just beyond the city limits for his retirement years. Ah, there it is, the race card, played so often in the political events of his era.
It is mandatory now to say that a man can be a conservative without being a racist. While I served with him in the House for five years, and maintained casual contact after that, there's no way for me to say what his personal feelings were on the subject of race. Certainly, he lived to see Petersburg transformed from one of the most hopeful cities in the state to one of the least hopeful.
But his hatred of liberalism and all its works was very real. He believed he understood clearly the destination of any state or nation embracing the politics of tax-and-spend. When he was leading the charge from the right against Coleman in 1981, I made it my business to do a little research. My idea - in the first bloom of Reaganism - was to have Coleman demonstrate how it was only natural for Smith to support Robb since he had done the same thing for his father-in-law, Lyndon Johnson, the Big Daddy of the welfare state.
Virginia Democrats such as Gov. Albertis Harrison and Lt. Gov. Mills Godwin were scrambling to get right with LBJ in his gathering landslide. But my plan went awry when I discovered that Smith was the only prominent Democratic officeholder in Virginia to shove his way through the adoring crowd and proclaim his dissent. Under the circumstances, it was no small act of political courage.
Still, I believe, undercutting the Republicans in 1981 was Smith's greatest political mistake. While many factors could be cited in Coleman's defeat, the Coalition's refusal to accept him cast a long shadow. It certainly contributed to a string of liberal successes in Virginia politics, beginning with three congressional seats in Robb's first year. And Robb's own voting record in the Senate, especially this year, should convince anyone with eyes to see that he was hardly the conservative that people such as Smith advertised him to be.
In the life and times of W. Roy Smith we see the old Virginia Democratic Party in which he had been raised utterly destroyed; the Republican Party transformed from progressive to hardcore conservative; and a new Democratic Party arise, hardly distinguishable from its national counterpart.
Yet, there is a difference. We have a Democratic governor whose hymns to fiscal conservatism would make a Taft Republican proud, and a Democratic candidate for governor who is careful to repudiate large chunks of the program of the incumbent Democratic president. In that sense, perhaps the Coalition of which Smith was the embodiment continues. Whoever is elected Nov. 2, it may still be possible to say of this Old Dominion, "No matter who's in office, conservatives are always in power."
\ Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
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