Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 25, 1993 TAG: 9309250212
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A few weeks ago, Lt. Gov. Don Beyer was on his way to a campaign event in Tappahannock when the alternator on his Volvo gave out and left him stranded by the roadside.
Beyer got out to hitchhike. "I'd done a lot of hitchhiking in college and, besides, I had a coat and tie on," Beyer says. "But the first 73 cars passed me by."
At last, a van pulled over and the driver gave Beyer a lift into the Northern Neck town. But the driver had little to say beyond an occasional grunt.
Beyer - spinning the story as his warm-up joke at Democratic Party functions around the state - conjures up one "Deliverance"-style fear after another of what the taciturn stranger might do to him.
"Finally, he looked at me and said, `You know, I'm a Republican,'" Beyer says. "I thought, `Well, at least he knows who I am.'"
The punch line always gets a laugh, and Beyer moves on into the meat of his talk.
But Beyer's point - his low name recognition - may not be a laughing matter to Virginia Democrats much longer.
Conventional wisdom had pegged Beyer, a Northern Virginia Volvo dealer, as an easy re-election winner over Republican Mike Farris, a Loudoun County lawyer and home-schools advocate whose candidacy has been boosted by conservative Christian activists.
Yet over the past month, a series of polls have shown that Beyer maintains only a slim lead over Farris and, for an incumbent, Beyer's numbers are surprisingly low.
The latest poll, conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University, had Beyer leading Farris 35 percent to 31 percent. Factor in the margin of error, and the race is effectively tied.
Why isn't Beyer scoring higher?
After four years in office, voters still don't know much about him. An April version of the VCU poll found 63 percent of those surveyed didn't know enough about Beyer to even offer an opinion of his performance.
"The office of lieutenant governor is not a very prominent platform from which to build a political reputation," explains Scott Keeter, the VCU political analyst who oversaw the poll.
But Beyer has labored under other political handicaps, as well.
"With Doug Wilder in the governorship, it's been hard to attract attention to a white-bread lieutenant governor," says University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato.
Furthermore, says Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton, Beyer has been too serious for his own political good. "He has spent four years dealing with policy rather than publicity," Denton says. "He has been a genuine public servant. But he may have hurt his own re-election because he's dealt with issues and not high-visibility things."
Indeed, the issues Beyer has focused on - child abuse, sexual assault, poverty, building economic links between Northern Virginia and Southwest Virginia - aren't ones that draw a lot of headlines.
Nor has Beyer tried to attract attention in other ways. Friday, he was in Radford to talk to an economic development group and later dropped by the party's storefront office on the Roanoke City Market, but that was his first public appearance in the Roanoke Valley since May.
Beyer - who's spent most of the summer and fall quietly touching base with key Democratic constituencies and raising money - said he's not worried about his low name recognition.
"It's never been my goal to be the most famous, or most popular, politician," Beyer said. "It's my responsibility to offer long-term thinking for Virginia's future, to worry about what Virginia will be like in 2004, and not the next election. That's why I've worked so hard on welfare reform. It doesn't have a political payoff today, but if we can move families off welfare in the next 10 years, that completely changes how Virginia looks.
"That's why I worry about child sexual assault. There's very little we can do with rapists or pedophiles we arrest today except lock 'em up for as long as we can. But if instead we turn our attention to rehabilitating adolescent sex offenders, turn our attention to taking care of children who are sexually assaulted, 10 years from now we won't have as many adults living in agony and we can do something about the 22 percent of our prison population that's been convicted of sex crimes."
That's a typical Beyer monologue, long on policy wonkishness and short on sound bites.
But Beyer does admit he's surprised that Farris - whom the Democrats have tried to brand as an extremist - is running as strong as the polls show he is.
"The greater concern is why is he at 31 percent?" Beyer says. "Our understanding is, in a good year to be a Republican, he has a lot of core Republican support. I'm also confident that if this campaign unfolds as I hope it will, many of them who support him [simply] because he is a Republican won't be with him once they understand his history."
Translated: Beyer is planning an all-out media blitz to depict Farris as a lieutenant of the Religious Right. Radio ads to that effect have already started; television will come later.
So far, political analysts say, the news stories about Farris' conservative views haven't had much effect. "Farris has not yet been successfully painted as an extremist," Keeter says.
But Democrats say once Beyer's ad campaign starts, Farris' numbers will stall. "I think you'll see a tidal wave of voters going the other way," predicts Roanoke County Supervisor Bob Johnson.
The academics who follow Virginia politics aren't so sure, though. "For the first time, Democrats are nervous," Sabato says.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB