Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993 TAG: 9312270293
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ It was no big deal, really, just a simple bill to mint some commemorative coins marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson.
But to keep from being inundated with these mom-and-apple-pie measures, the House of Representatives has set a high threshold, requiring such bills be co-sponsored by more than half its members before their introduction.
So when Rep. L.F. Payne, the Southside Democrat whose district includes both Monticello and Jefferson's summer home at Poplar Forest, went looking for co-sponsors, it was only natural he would ask his new political neighbor, Bob Goodlatte of Roanoke, to help by rounding up a few Republican signatures.
What he did not expect was how seriously Goodlatte would take the assignment.
Usually, congressmen slough off these requests by gathering only a handful of names.
"He got 50 or 60," Payne says incredulously.
Granted, the fate of the republic will not hinge on whether or not the U.S. Treasury mints a new commemorative coin, but the incident may give us more than two cents worth of insight into the 6th District's new congressman: Could it be that Goodlatte has wrongly been typecast as a policy wonk and is really a consummate back-scratcher instead?
\ There tend to be three molds into which members of Congress fit.
There's the headline-seeker, who is more concerned about ink than impact.
Anybody who figured Goodlatte would be that kind of congressman just was not paying attention to the serious-minded, detail-oriented Roanoke lawyer when he ran last year.
Then there's the policy wonk, the legislator who specializes in a certain issue and carves out a narrow niche as an expert in that field. Given Goodlatte's demeanor, that was the way he generally would have been pegged, at least by political observers back home.
Finally, there are the generalists, who make their mark behind the scenes, schmoozing with the party leadership and setting off on a leadership track in their own right - much the way Payne has emerged as a rising star among centrist Democrats.
Goodlatte never seemed enough of a glad-hander to go that route, yet that now appears to be the one he is navigating.
"The nitty-gritty is he's really trying to network," says Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton, who has picked up rumblings from his contacts on Capitol Hill. "He's not flashy, but he's networking with all the power players. . . . He's low-key, but he's like a laser beam," zeroing in on the right people.
Denton, for one, is surprised, especially in light of the attack-oriented campaign Goodlatte ran last year against Democrat Steve Musselwhite. "We just didn't see the interpersonal skills then that would have led us to see him as a social butterfly."
Social butterfly is probably still the wrong term, but you get the picture, Denton says. "I've had one person from Roanoke tell me he's friendlier as a congressman than he was as a candidate." Moreover, there's evidence that Goodlatte's networking is paying off in Washington.
After all, here is a freshman Republican who does not appear to be in any electoral danger - he is from a historically GOP district and has no Democratic opposition in sight for 1994. Yet, he has been able to pull in three of the nation's top Republicans to make appearances on his behalf.
This summer, the No. 3 House Republican leader, Dick Armey of Texas, joined Goodlatte in Lynchburg for a town meeting on health care. In early December, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich starred at a Harrisonburg fund-raiser for Goodlatte. A week later, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole came to Roanoke to do the same.
It helps to be from a district a short hop from Washington, of course. But Goodlatte has made a special point of cultivating the Republican leaders in Washington, as well.
The first sign of Goodlatte's unexpected lobbying skills came even before he was sworn in.
Goodlatte's predecessors - Democrat Jim Olin and Republican Caldwell Butler - had each served on one major and one minor committee. Goodlatte, though, tried to bag two major assignments.
His top priority was the House Agriculture Committee - a nod to the 6th District's concentration of agribusiness interests in the Shenandoah Valley - but he also zeroed in on the House Science and Technology Committee. When the prospect of a high-tech Clinton administration set off a stampede of more senior legislators to get on that body, Goodlatte focused instead on the Judiciary Committee.
Goodlatte began with one advantage over his 48 fellow Republican freshmen: his ties to Butler, for whom Goodlatte worked as an aide for two years in the mid-1970s.
"You do associate [Goodlatte with Butler]," says Rep. Hamilton Fish, R-New York, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. "You do think of the freshmen in terms of people you know better." And, fortunately for Goodlatte, Fish says, "I was great friends with Caldwell Butler. We all talked to [Goodlatte] and said `How's Caldwell?'"
But Goodlatte did not rely on connections alone. He studied up on the senior Republicans who would be making the committee assignments, and courted each of them - sometimes dropping a casual, but calculated, mention of anything they might have in common.
"He made a good impression," says Rep. Thomas Bliley, R-Richmond, who has become Goodlatte's mentor on the Hill.
The result: Goodlatte got both committees he wanted. In fact, he was a unanimous choice for the seat on the Agriculture Committee.
In the months since then, Goodlatte has worked just as determinedly to forge other connections with senior Republicans - and some Democrats, as well.
He is a regular at Bliley's morning tennis match once a week with a group of other congressmen, as good a place as any to learn the unwritten rules of Washington.
And the enthusiasm he showed for helping Payne line up co-sponsors for his commemorative-coin bill suggests Goodlatte is mastering the fine art of doing small favors. "I was impressed that he did it, and did it so quickly," Payne says - even more impressed because Goodlatte's contribution put Payne's bill over the top.
Don't think Payne won't remember that when Goodlatte comes to him for help in getting a small measure of his own through the House Ways and Means Committee that Payne sits on - as Goodlatte already has.
How does Payne assess his new colleague? "My observation is he's well-respected and well-liked," Payne says. But wouldn't the nice-guy Payne say that about any of his colleagues? "I think I've been glowing, especially considering the fact he's a Republican," Payne says.
In talking to other legislators about Goodlatte, a consistent theme emerges:
"He's hard-working," Dole says.
It is a phrase repeated over and over, by Republicans and Democrats alike.
"When I start talking and ask [committee members] `Do you have a problem with this?' or `Do you know about this change?' he's thoroughly prepared," Fish says.
Rep. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, the senior Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, puts it more graphically: "The thing I like most is he does his homework, and he's not down on the floor making an ass out of himself."
Goodlatte says he has tried to be a "nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy," and that, no doubt, is the kind of work-hard-and-be-quiet legislator that Capitol Hill elders prefer, especially when it comes to first-termers.
Goodlatte may have had an easier time than most in establishing a reputation as a hard worker, because his family - wife, Maryellen, a Roanoke lawyer, and their two children - did not move to Washington with him. Instead, Goodlatte tries to telescope his D.C. work week into three days, from Tuesday through Thursday.
"The fact he didn't move his family to Washington does several things," Denton says. "It gives you the total lack of conflict, so you can put in those 14-hour days. It helps you focus. Also, with his family being here, it brings him home for the weekends," so Goodlatte also can be visible at community events and earn a reputation as a guy who tends his home fences.
What is Goodlatte's potential on the Hill?
Republican colleagues say more than they need to.
"I think the sky's the limit," Roberts says. "I think, without question, he could be in the leadership."
\ Conservative, but looking for compromises
So, Goodlatte has become a favorite of the House Republican leadership; how that likability on the Hill translates into concrete action for the 6th District is harder to measure.
That is where Democrats back home fault him. "He hasn't addressed some of the major concerns that plague the 6th District, such as jobs," says Onzlee Ware, the Roanoke lawyer who is the Democrats' district chairman. "I think he has made himself publicly visible, but I don't see any substantive credits he can claim within the 6th District."
Goodlatte counters that he has worked behind the scenes to help pitch the district to prospective employers; for instance, he was among the politicians who lobbied Connex Pipe Systems to move from Ohio to Botetourt County. More recently, he has taken the lead in lobbying to get the proposed Detroit-to-South Carolina Interstate 73 routed through the Roanoke Valley.
Of course, it is important to remember that Goodlatte still is a freshman. As Tim Currin of Roll Call, a Washington newspaper that covers Congress, says, "Nobody ever does anything their first year." Then, too, Goodlatte's focus has always been on budget-cutting and conservative-tinged reform of Congress.
On that score, he has been an active participant in the large Republican freshman class, which has tried - with some success - in bucking the Democratic majority, to change some of the House rules that stifle initiatives not favored by the Democratic leadership. (Among their successes: They have cut the number of House committees and pushed through a rule making it harder for House leaders to bottle up popular bills in committee.)
That focus has won Goodlatte plaudits from the other big political force in the 6th District: Ross Perot's United We Stand America organization. "We say, at this point, he looks like he's on the plus side on things we're concerned about," says Dick Lorette of Rockingham County, the group's district chairman.
Goodlatte's voting record is predictably conservative - although not reflexively so.
"A lot of people feared he'd become a spokesman for the right wing, and he hasn't done that," says James Madison University political analyst Bob Roberts. "He hasn't proven to be an ideologue. He's much more a traditional conservative in the mold of a Caldwell Butler."
Goodlatte's votes on non-ideological issues may be the most revealing. For instance, he voted against funding the space station, on the grounds that the project is a waste of money. But he was among a minority of congressmen who wanted to continue funding the atom-smashing supercollider project in Texas. His official reason: Particle physics holds great promise for job creation. He also was mindful that Babcock & Wilcox, a major employer in Lynchburg, holds some of the contracts on the supercollider.
And then there is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Goodlatte ran as a free-trader last year, and the 6th District is stacked with industries that depend on exports (especially the poultry industry in the Shenandoah Valley), so his support for NAFTA was no surprise. Still, Goodlatte withheld making a formal commitment until the debate reached its peak.
Even then, his support hinged on the details. Under NAFTA, the United States would lose $2.5 billion in tariffs - in effect, taxes - that it otherwise would have collected on goods passing over the border. For a time, Clinton was suggesting that he would make up the revenue without raising taxes. Some pro-NAFTA legislators - Goodlatte among them - threatened to withhold their votes if Clinton did so. In the end, Clinton relented, opting to forgo $1 billion in revenue and make up the rest through other means.
"When people ask me what I got for my NAFTA vote, I tell then a billion-dollar tax cut," Goodlatte says.
Another indication of what kind of congressman Goodlatte has become lies in the woods of Amherst County, and the biggest local controversy with which he has had to deal. Goodlatte ran as an opponent of designating parts of the national forest as "wilderness areas," which are off-limits to just about any kind of human activity.
But once in office, he discovered that the Amherst County Board of Supervisors was pushing to have the Mount Pleasant section of the George Washington National Forest declared a wilderness area as a way to protect the watershed for the county's water supply from logging.
To complicate things, the wilderness push had become a volatile issue in Amherst - and a tricky one politically for Goodlatte.
One of the county's largest employers, the Virginia Fibre timber company was vehemently opposed to creating any new wilderness areas. The company's president, Charles Chandler, says he never opposed a ban on logging in the county's watershed; he just didn't want to open the door to bans on logging elsewhere in the region. Furthermore, Chandler had been a key Goodlatte supporter and fund-raiser in the 1992 campaign.
"It was pretty polarized," says Dolph Bell, the editor of the Amherst New Era-Progress, the county's weekly newspaper. "No one had ever thought there'd be any middle ground. It was either wilderness or no."
But Goodlatte searched the law books and came up with a rarely used designation - having Mount Pleasant declared a National Scenic Area - that would protect the watershed the way the county wanted but not give the "wilderness" designation that timber interests found so offensive.
"He defused the controversy very well, and neither side had a whole lot to say negatively," Bell says. "I was kind of impressed."
\ GOODLATTE'S BILLS
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, has introduced three bills during his first year in Washington. They are:
To add Roanoke, Roanoke County, Radford, Montgomery County, Rockbridge County, Lexington and Buena Vista to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
(Co- sponsored with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon.)
In committee.
To create the Mount Pleasant National Scenic Area in the George Washington National Forest in Amherst County.
In committee.
To change the way excise tax is computed on certain equipment, a measure designed to aid the Roanoke-based Tread Corp., which builds the machinery that mixes explosives used in mining.
(Originally introduced by his predecessor, Rep. Jim Olin, D-Roanoke.)
Status: committee.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB