Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 21, 1993 TAG: 9310210173
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And after four years in statewide office, people still don't know him.
"I'm sorry, I've lost my room key," he tells the clerk on his second night at a Roanoke Holiday Inn. "Could I have the key to room 338?"
"I'll need to see some identification."
"Well, I left my wallet in the car. But I'm Don Beyer."
"I don't know who that is."
"I'm the lieutenant governor of Virginia."
"Do you have some identification?"
Donald Sternoff Beyer Jr., 43, could give her his list of accomplishments: Legislation to make it easier to prosecute sex offenders, a revamped system for tracking down child-support deadbeats, efforts to pair government and business to reform welfare and end poverty.
But these days, Beyer identifies himself more in terms of who he is not. Of whom he is running against. Beyer views his race for re-election against Republican Mike Farris in almost apocalyptic terms, as an epic clash that will affect politics nationwide for years to come.
"One of the reasons I jump up every morning," Beyer says, "is to fight back these people who I consider to be extremists from really being able to get a foothold on American political life. . . . If Mike Farris wins, we will see far-right candidates in perhaps every congressional race in the country next year."
Pretty heavy burden for the anonymous guy who won nearly 1 million votes in 1989 without seeming to sweat, and who sailed through his term as the Cinderella almost no one - not even members of the opposing party - would bad-mouth.
But that's Beyer: reader, thinker, self-styled business philosopher. Everything has to have a deeper meaning.
Riding in the back of his Volvo, traveling Interstate 81 from a rally in Waynesboro to one in Winchester, Beyer is supposed to be napping.
He overhears a conversation in the front seat about a hairy flight in a small commuter plane: Seems this pilot started coming unglued over backed-up medical bills. Doctors aren't the only ones with the power of life and death, the pilot ranted to his passenger. "I could kill you right now! I could kill you right now, and you wouldn't even realize it until it's too late!"
It's supposed to be an amusing story, but Beyer doesn't see it that way.
"Is it the ability to kill, or the ability to heal, that's at play here?" he asks, tossing aside his inflatable pillow. "There's a great Wendell Berry poem ["The Fearfulness of Hands That Have Learned Killing"] about the first time he held a bird in his hand and felt the knowledge of his ability to kill. We all have the ability to kill. It's healing that makes a difference."
Instantly, the conversation is in deep water. "I'm a strong believer in the redemptive possibilities of all human beings," Beyer says.
Then he lightens up. "That's why I like golf."
Then he's out there again. "Golf is also like life. Our humbleness is always being renewed."
It can be dizzying, talking with Beyer at 65 mph as the odometer clicks past 118,650 miles. (The Volvo is only a 1991; Beyer changes the oil every 2,000 miles, both because he is a certified mechanic and because he is, well, Don Beyer).
He can tell his life's story a la Reader's Digest: Born on a U.S. Army base in Trieste, Italy - oldest of six children, Catholic family - nearly a perfect 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test - Phi Beta Kappa and liberal arts degree from Williams College in Massachusetts - accepted at Georgetown Medical School - chucked it to work at his father's Falls Church Volvo dealership - bought dealership from dad, built it into one of nation's top 20 - divorced, remarried, three kids - helped Gerald Baliles get elected governor in 1985 - here he is.
Or Beyer can do the literary version. Battles with childhood health problems gave him deep empathy for the ailing and disabled. He had two complex surgeries before age 10 to correct a deformed right hand, leaving him with three fingers on that side. He also had three surgeries to fix the muscles that control his eyes. One of his sisters is mentally retarded.
So it's not surprising that overcoming limitations shapes Beyer's approach to the challenges of office. Take his response when a newspaper editorial board asked him about international trade: Beyer ticked off five angles to the issue - Virginia's image abroad, the management of state government, education of the work force, technology and money for capital improvements.
As lieutenant governor, Beyer doesn't travel overseas and hasn't been invited to influence the governor's management style, he said. So he bypasses the first two angles and concentrates on the last three. Know your limits, overcome them.
That's what it was all about in 1971, when an earnest young Beyer spent the winter in the Maine woods with the Outward Bound program - testing himself, learning survival. "I thought I was going to die every day," he says, but instead he enlarged his life. "People live within narrow, safe limits without ever realizing that their limits are really much greater. I learned a lot."
If that experience took Beyer into the cosmic consciousness of the day, passing years have dimmed the internal lava lamp only a little. His Volvo dealership mails out an undergroundy newsletter filled with quotes from Jackson Browne, Ovid, Robert Frost and Rainer Maria Rilke and aphorisms such as "Humor is the moral equivalent of war."
His unconventional ideas have enabled Republicans to paint Beyer as a flagrant liberal. Farris labeled him "Big Debt Don," a term that deeply offended Beyer, who considers himself fiscally conservative and pro-business.
But Beyer does have a personal nonconformity that is subtle and complex. For all his tailored suits and refined good looks, Beyer has a true passion - inherited from his father - for fast cars and NASCAR racing. His favorite driver is maverick Dale Earnhart, who Beyer says is "kind of the Darth Vader of car racing."
His bent humor shows on the cassette tape he made to listen to on the road, which goes from Chris Isaak to Mary Chapin Carpenter to the Julie Brown novelty song, "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun." His all-time hero is folk musician Steve Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984 and sang sentimental and wry slices of life, most famously "The City of New Orleans."
Yet Beyer's advice to his 22-year-old campaign driver, Sam Adams, is anything but folksy: "Read The New Yorker every week and listen to "All Things Considered" [on National Public Radio] every night, and you'll always be able to fascinate any girl you meet."
Pulling into Winchester, the sky has cleared, and the stakes are way up there in the blue. CBS News is here. U.S. News & World Report did a story a few weeks ago. MTV has called. It is not that they're so interested in Beyer; the real subject is opponent Mike Farris.
Beyer works the crowd in front of the Winchester Judicial Center with the network camera in his face like a sun. He has to make his pitch heavily, and then make it again in an interview for a "CBS Evening News" story on the political insurgence of the religious right.
"I am running against the most radical ideologue, the most extreme candidate Virginia has seen in our lifetime," Beyer says. "Out of nowhere, he's come suddenly as a candidate for the second-highest office in Virginia. He's far out of step, not only with the Virginia mainstream, but with the core of Virginia Republicans."
For about an hour, at the end of a long day at the end of a long week of campaigning, Beyer hammers his point. Then, drooping just a little, the Defender of the Mainstream climbs back in his Volvo for one more stop: A cocktail party at the palatial home of a Fairfax developer, where the host will proclaim that his guests "deserve" a solution to "the only problem we have in this area as far as quality of life, and that's transportation."
On the way there, Beyer is still keyed up with talk about his political mission. He tries again to relax in the back seat. He puts his favorite compact disc in the stereo system. And in it, as usual, he finds a deeper meaning.
"Steve Goodman has a line, `The devil has a list of those who run,' " he says as the music rises. "It seems to me that's Steve Goodman's idiosyncratic way of saying that you can't run away from a fight. You've got to take responsibility. . . . It's a Tolstoy/Churchill comparison.
"We can be like in `War and Peace,' infinitesimal specks tossed on the sea of history. Or we can be like Winston Churchill, demanding that history revolve around us and telling people what that history meant.
"My answer's always the same: We have to be Churchill."
Keywords:
POLITICS PROFILE
by CNB