Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 12, 1993 TAG: 9310120276
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
U.S. 58 wends its way across Virginia's southern border from the coalfields to the coast.
But Mary Sue Terry, the Democratic candidate for governor, apparently believes it also leads straight to the governor's mansion.
Whenever Terry is speaking to an audience west of Richmond, she rarely fails to mention her support for four-laning U.S. 58.
In September, Terry forsook the state's population centers and devoted nearly a week to stumping in the small towns and cities along U.S. 58, places such as South Hill and Galax and Hillsville, to draw attention to that support.
Now, at a time when her campaign has been faltering statewide for lack of grass-roots enthusiasm, Terry has commandeered the airwaves in the Roanoke-Lynchburg and Bristol television markets to blanket Southside and Southwest Virginia with a television commercial about U.S. 58.
"A lot of politicians talk about helping our part of the state - and then hit the road," Terry says as she stands by the highway. "I'll be a governor who finishes the road."
Republican George Allen also mentions his support for U.S. 58 whenever he's speaking to a business group in the region, as he did recently before the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, though he's done little else to play up the issue.
Behind Terry's focus on U.S. 58 lies an old policy debate:
In the late 1980s, legislators from two of the state's most economically stressed regions, led by then-House Speaker A.L. Philpott, crusaded for a four-lane road to connect their regions with the ports, saying it was the best way to jump-start their stalled economies.
Unable to finance the project through regular Transportation Department appropriations, Philpott called in his chits and rammed a special financing package through the General Assembly in 1989.
But Allen voted against it - twice. Allen maintains he was never against the project itself, but simply objected to the state's issuing $600 million in bonds without voter approval. Nevertheless, Allen says, the state now has made a commitment, and he intends to keep it.
The catch: The first $200 million worth of bonds have been issued, and construction is under way on bypasses around Danville and Martinsville. But the state's budget crunch has delayed the issuance of the bonds needed for the next phase, including the Martinsville-Hillsville stretch, and Terry questions how hard Allen would work to see that they're ever issued.
Terry's infatuation with U.S. 58, though, raises a political, as well as policy, question: Do voters in this part of the state really care so much about the road that they'll base their vote for governor on who's most in favor of it?
Along the Danville-Martinsville stretch of the road, they might, insists Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Martinsville.
"Yes, I think people care with a capital `C' down here, and here's why," Armstrong says. "The single biggest issue on people's minds in Henry County is jobs. When you look at what it takes to promote economic development in Henry County, it's to four-lane U.S. 58 at least as far as Interstate 77 [at Hillsville], so it'll become an interstate connection."
Armstrong cites two examples of how the lack of a four-lane connection to I-77 - which runs south into the Carolinas and north to Ohio - economically holds back his corner of Southside Virginia.
"The manager of Goodyear Tire in Danville told me that 58 is so bad he has to send trucks up U.S. 29 to Interstate 64 at Charlottesville to send shipments into the Midwest," Armstrong says. "If he wants to expand his plant, he's at a competitive disadvantage."
Even worse, Armstrong says, Henry County recently was on the short list of sites for an unidentified company that would have employed 300 people. But the company would have handled 100 tractor-trailers a day, "and because no one could tell them the definite date when 58 would be completed, we were scratched off the list," Armstrong says. "I can't tell you we'd have gotten them, but you can't have economic growth without it - it's that important."
That's a good explanation of why voters along U.S. 58 should care.
Still, the question remains: Do they? The Rotarians and Chamber of Commerce types might, but what about ordinary folks in this blue-collar slice of Virginia?
Armstrong acknowledges it's a struggle at times during this election season to keep the jobs issue - read U.S. 58 - front and center on his constituents' minds.
He suggests that Terry is highlighting U.S. 58 in Southside and Southwest as a way to counter the corrosive effect the gun issue is having on her base in rural Virginia.
"I think what she's up against is she's taken a vocal and visible position on gun control, the five-day waiting period. While that is an extremely popular position in Northern Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater, it's much less so in Southside and Southwest, and that has hurt her with hunters in this area - and there are a lot of folks that fit in this category."
He's hopeful that, in the end, fear of losing a job will overcome voters' hysterical fears about losing their guns. "If we don't get a handle on our economic development, there won't be anybody left in Martinsville and Henry County to purchase any firearms," Armstrong says.
But a prominent Republican commentator believes that if Terry's counting on U.S. 58 to energize voters in Southside and Southwest Virginia, she's counting wrong.
In fact, former state-legislator-turned-newspaper-columnist Ray Garland believes Terry's focus on U.S. 58 reveals what he sees as her fatal flaw: She's boring, and too fixated on policy at the expense of politics.
"I've known her a long time, and Mary Sue Terry has a very legalistic mind that works in terms of linear logic," Garland says. "She very often lapses into jargon, like `DUI,' even when she's speaking to a larger audience" that may not understand the term.
Garland says Terry has made a mistake in thinking that, because U.S. 58 has been a big issue with the legislators and business leaders who have her ear, it's a big issue for everyone in the region.
"Mary Sue probably got a message that she's in trouble, and the people who gave her that message were white businessmen and lawyers. They probably said: `Talk about 58.' I could see Mary Sue thinking, as many news stories have been written about it, that everyone knows about it and knows what the issue is."
Wrong, Garland says. "It's always a mistake for people who read a lot to assume that everyone knows a lot about the issues."
One nonpartisan political analyst who lives along the U.S. 58 corridor - Tom Morris, the president of Emory & Henry College - sides with Garland's analysis.
"It's not a burning issue down here," Morris says. "It's not an issue that's going to change the dynamics of a campaign."
Yet Terry's camp obviously thinks so. Moreover, instead of buying just radio ads - which she could have used to target just the narrow band of communities along U.S. 58 - she's chosen to beam the message to every viewer this side of Richmond.
Should they all care whether U.S. 58 is four-laned? Should the Roanoke Valley and the New River Valley care?
George Mason University geographer Jim Fonseca, who has studied Virginia's transportation network, says no.
A widened U.S. 58 will have some "incidental benefits" for Roanoke, he says. But the road that the Roanoke Valley ought to be lobbying for, Fonseca says, is an interstate-quality road to Lynchburg and Richmond.
"That would give you a good-quality connection with the state capital," Fonseca says. "That would give you better access to Hampton Roads."
Communities along U.S. 58 argued that they needed a direct road link to the sea. "Roanoke and Lynchburg should be saying, `We need our connection to the sea,' " Fonseca says.
However, Armstrong, the Democratic legislator from Henry County, says Terry's U.S. 58 pitch shouldn't be narrowly interpreted as just a call to four-lane a specific road from Cumberland Gap to the Atlantic Ocean. Rather, he says, U.S. 58 stands as a symbol of Terry's understanding of the rural, western part of the state.
"If someone's talking about money for 58, to me, that does indicate a willingness to look at Virginia west of I-95," he says.
In some ways, Terry does use the U.S. 58 spot to make a regional appeal. She talks about how she grew up not far from the road, at Critz in Patrick County. And she refers to "our part of the state."
Political analysts, though, think if that's Terry's only attempt to play up her favorite-daughter status in Western Virginia, it's not a very good one.
"It's dry. It makes her come over as a technocrat," Morris says. And that accentuates, not counterbalances, one of the problems of her campaign, he says. "There's no emotion in her campaign. If emotion is a problem in the campaign, Route 58 ain't going to turn it around. It's almost like she's running a campaign from another time, when there was a great deal of satisfaction among the voters."
While Terry is talking about widening a road, Allen is striking more inflammatory themes. "He's talking about `Mary Sue Antoinette' and saying `we'll have a revolution,' portraying her as the ultimate establishment candidate, portraying her as a boring, dry technocrat."
Roanoke College political analyst Bill Hill has another take, though. Terry's emphasis on U.S. 58, however dry it might be, does serve to offset whatever disadvantage her gender presents in rural Virginia, Hill says.
"It's not the kind of stereotypical issue you'd expect a female candidate to be interested in," Hill says. "Stereotypically, female candidates are interested in education. What's the opposite of that? Let's do a bricks-and-mortar ad. Let's do a `male' kind of issue."
\ TELEVISED DEBATES\ VIRGINIANS HAVE A CHANCE TO WATCH - OR AT LEAST LISTEN - TO TWO DEBATES\ TONIGHT.\ \ Lieutenant governor
At 7 p.m., the candidates for lieutenant governor - Democrat Don Beyer, who's seeking re-election, and Republican challenger Mike Farris - take the stage in Roanoke for their only televised encounter, which will be broadcast statewide over public television.
In Western Virginia, the hour-long debate will air on WBRA-TV (Channel 51) and WVTF-FM (89.1)\ \ Governor
At 8 p.m., the candidates for governor - Democrat Mary Sue Terry and Republican George Allen - will meet in Richmond for their second televised debate. Western Virginians can listen, but not watch. Here, the hour-long debate will be carried on only on radio, WVTF-FM (89.1).
The final Terry-Allen debate will be Oct. 18. It will be carried on WSLS-TV (Channel 10).
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB