Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 5, 1994 TAG: 9407050099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL McKELWAY RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
But in interviews and at public functions, the longtime politician and former state attorney general cannot help giving the impression that the scars from her ruinous, $6 million campaign last year still are mending.
"I've given myself some time to come to closure," she said.
At 46, an age when most professionals are hitting their full stride, Terry finds herself molding a new life, a task she likened to her early law career when "there were only two women who put their shingles out" from a law school class of 300 at the University of Virginia.
"When I start wondering if I'm on the right track, I remind myself that I've been in this position before," she said, referring to her beginnings as a practicing attorney in her native Patrick County.
While she made news a few weeks ago with her unexpected endorsement of Democrat Virgil Goode for the U.S. Senate, Terry has gone virtually unheard since her defeat last fall by Republican Gov. George Allen.
She made only one foray onto the campaign trail for Goode, who lost decisively in the June 14 Democratic primary. Now that her one-time mentor, Charles Robb, is the party nominee, her political role during the four-way slugfest for Robb's Senate seat appears uncertain.
Asked about her plans in coming months, Terry steered clear of politics and focused instead on outings she will take with her niece and nephews.
"I'm trying to find a way to get some Oriole tickets," she said at one point. A few days later, she would come up with 10.
It is an unfamiliar position for the political veteran who was seen by most observers a year ago as the virtually unstoppable heir apparent to Virginia's highest elected office. Even now, according to some insiders, she remains the state's most favorably regarded Democrat.
She was so dedicated to the task of politics, she once told a reporter, that she set aside thoughts of marriage or romance, fearing that the burden of public life would be too heavy for someone to share.
Her political life, in the making for two decades, was smothered by the Allen platform of change, intraparty dissension, President Clinton's declining popularity and Terry's admitted inability to project her best attributes.
Allen captured 58 percent of the vote in November and left Terry a footnote in the political record books for her 300,000-vote loss. It was the largest margin of victory for a Republican Virginia governor in modern times.
Asked about her future in politics, Terry said, "I'm not closing the door on any options."
But she also repeatedly stressed that the Allen campaign and the increasingly bitter tone of Virginia politics have soured her taste for another run for statewide office any time soon.
Determined to show that she can rebound from stinging defeat, she said she will emerge in coming months as a central player in still-nascent business dealings and not-for-profit public service endeavors.
In the meantime, she has been retained by an out-of-state firm that assists children with disabilities and expects to be named to a number of corporate boards.
"I've always been an entrepreneur and a builder," she said. "I've always been close to public-policy issues, but I'm not obsessed with the form that association takes."
She has turned down offers to head a national group for nonprofit agencies because it would take her away from Virginia, she said, and she is not interested in finding work at a high-profile law firm.
"That's just not me. I'd die."
In a sense, Terry is wading cautiously into a life that is free of scrutiny, and she is aware that her lack of specificity about her current endeavors could generate an impression that she is foundering.
"Nothing could be farther from the truth," she said. "It all sounds a little bit like a snake-oil salesman, but I'm exploring a lot of opportunities right now and I plan on making a difference."
Among her interests is possible development of a statewide foundation dedicated to women's issues.
While she has lived in the same near West End home in Richmond for eight years, Terry now seems to delight in experiencing the simple, broadened opportunities of life outside the political fishbowl.
She laughed at the recent image of herself rummaging through dry cleaning at a laundry trying to locate her misplaced clothes. People still stop her in the grocery store or at the Price Club.
"In some ways, I'm still a public figure, I guess."
But gone now is the furrowed brow so familiar to voters in the heat of the campaign, which she admits was in trouble as early as June 1993.
It was then, she said, that she realized she "was suddenly being regarded as a liberal for the first time in my political career."
Her most glaring shortcoming, she said, was her failure to "show Virginians what I'm really like, that I had accomplished things that were a benefit to a lot of people and I was trying to do what is right."
She remains adamantly in favor of a five-day waiting period for handguns, abortion rights, the admission of women to Virginia Military Institute and not giving in to federal retirees' demands for payment in the costly tax-refund case.
In a recent talk in Tampa, Fla., to hundreds of women political operatives from the South, Terry chided Allen for his now-famous exhortation at the Republican convention in Richmond last month to kick the teeth of Democratic politicians in Washington "down their whiny throats."
"How can we expect to build true communities and what message are we sending to our children?" Terry asked. "Is this the standard for conduct in other areas of our lives?"
Terry lashed out at the public's and the medias' difficulty in coming to terms with a woman candidate, telling her audience in Tampa at one point that it was important during her campaign not to look tired.
"If a woman looks tired, she's perceived as somehow not looking well, while for men it means they're working too hard," she said to a round of applause.
In demand as a speaker around the state, Terry said she delights in writing her own speeches now and does not hesitate to talk about her efforts to recover from the loss.
Favorite anecdotes touch on the liberating aspects of helping build a playground at an elementary school near her home and on an uplifting meeting with a young leukemia patient in the days after her defeat.
"It was in that ward that evening that I experienced the buoyancy and rebounding strength that can come only from those who've been tested - sometimes severely - and yet in the face of being tested found the will and the way to bounce back, enriched and even stronger," Terry wrote in one speech.
by CNB