Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994 TAG: 9406070099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER NOTE: above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Two decades and three defeats later, Marshall Coleman has yet to give up his childhood dream of high office.
His critics may ridicule him as the "Harold Stassen of Virginia," a derisive comparison to another one-time rising star who went on to become a perennial presidential candidate.
Even old friends such as former Rep. Caldwell Butler of Roanoke, whom Coleman fondly refers to as "my mentor," shake their heads in dismay at Coleman's latest comeback attempt. "The difference between Marshall and Lazarus," Butler says, "is Lazarus admitted he was dead."
Nonetheless, Coleman appears resolved to embark on his boldest gambit to date - an independent bid for the U.S. Senate, in which he would attempt to position himself as the only scandal-free candidate in a crowded field likely to include Oliver North, Charles Robb and Douglas Wilder.
In telephone interviews with newspaper reporters around Virginia on Monday, Coleman said only he was "inclined" to run, but that seemed only a diplomatic cover for what aides said was a definite go. Coleman himself seemed to say as much: "I'd be surprised if we didn't talk on a pretty regular basis."
If Coleman runs, it will be the fifth time he has sought statewide office.
His only real success came in 1977, when he was elected attorney general in a campaign that saw the moderate Republican run to the left of his Democratic rival, a former segregationist - a strategy that won Coleman the votes he needed but drove a rift between him and the state's conservative establishment that never healed.
In 1981, Coleman lost the governorship to Robb, partly because some of those conservative money-men saw Robb as more cautious, more predictable than the high-energy Coleman.
Determined to make a comeback, Coleman in 1985 took the path of least resistance, or so he thought, and tried to win his party's nomination for lieutenant governor. Conservatives, vowing to get rid of Coleman once and for all, ganged up on him at the convention, and handed the party's nomination instead to a little-known state legislator - who went on to lose a "sure thing" election to Wilder.
In 1989, Coleman staged yet another comeback. The one-time moderate recognized the growing power of conservative Christian activists, and set out to woo them with a tough stand against abortion. Coleman stunned political experts by winning a Republican nominating process that had been rigged against him, but his opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, became a flashpoint in the fall. He lost the governorship to Wilder by an agonizing 6,741 votes, the closest governor's race in Virginia this century.
Most politicians cannot survive a single defeat; how has Coleman managed to keep bouncing back?
"He's driven, possessed," says columnist Ray Garland, a former Republican legislator from Roanoke who was a strategist in Coleman's 1977 race. "To some people, to give up the dream is to die. He's been so close and he's tasted so much, that great victory in 1977. I just think that there are certain people who can't give up the dream.
"Marshall is just a person who loves that adulation of the crowd, who loves to be the star, who loves coming into a room and having people applaud."
But it's not just Coleman's own ambition that has kept him politically viable. In each campaign, he's made himself a factor by "constantly reinventing himself," as Garland puts it. Witness Coleman's courtship of liberal groups in 1977 and the religious right in 1989.
Coleman also has been sustained by a personal following that has believed in him nearly as much as he believed in himself. "I have always felt in my heart that somehow, someday, Marshall Coleman would be governor of Virginia," says Libby Beamer of Montgomery County. "He may not be the youngest governor, like he wanted to be."
But, even after all those defeats, she felt he still had a future. "I thought he had charm, charisma," she says
Throughout his political life, Coleman also has had a base among the moderate "mountain-valley" Republicans of Western Virginia. It's a base, the Waynesboro native says, he's counting on being there again in 1994.
But will it be? Even in Western Virginia - perhaps especially in Western Virginia - the old-guard moderates have been eclipsed in GOP circles by the rising power of what's loosely billed "the religious right." North's strongest source of support in the convention battle came from west of Charlottesville.
Moreover, many of the party activists in Western Virginia who were die-hard Coleman supporters in '89 were North organizers this time around, such as Beamer and Trixie Averill of Vinton.
Now, Averill says, "it breaks my heart to see what he's doing." She thinks Coleman is being manipulated by anti-North activists. "All you have to do is feed him a little bit and Marshall blossoms like a flower. Frankly, I think he's being exploited. These people are not Republicans. They're willing to use a nice guy who's extremely vulnerable."
Even more traditional mountain-valley Republicans who have worked for Coleman in the past say they can't go along with him this time. "I really do believe belonging to a political party is like a marriage," says Roanoke developer Gilbert Butler Jr. "You're in for the duration. You can't step inside and outside the tent at your convenience."
That will make it hard, if not impossible, Butler says, for Coleman to find the workers needed to put together a statewide organization. Coleman acknowledges that many Republicans won't be able to support him "publicly." But he seems undeterred.
Why should he be? asks University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. "This is a free shot he never thought he'd get. He knows he's finished. This is an extra, like being given a bonus round."
The key will be whether Coleman can present himself as the surrogate for U.S. Sen. John Warner, Sabato said. "If by the end of the campaign, voters look at Marshall Coleman and think 'John Warner,' he has a good chance."
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by CNB