Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410170026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CALLANDS LENGTH: Long
On a clear, warm day at a fall festival framed by blue skies and wispy clouds, only Oliver North is casting a shadow over Rep. L.F. Payne.
As the Democratic incumbent from Nelson County discusses the intricacies of foreign trade policy with a Pittsylvania County businessman, a massive bus pulls up about 50 yards away, decked out with giant blue North banners.
Behind Payne's back, a throng of people start moving, flocking to the bus, surrounding it. TV cameras and boom microphones appear as if from thin air.
Men come out of the bus, holding the crowd back. A chant starts in the air: "Ollie! Ollie!"
The businessman's eyes cut away briefly to the pageant unfolding around them. Payne doesn't even look.
Not too much later, a campaign worker comes and gets Payne. It's time to leave for his next appearance.
As they pull out in Payne's Jeep, Payne and the campaign worker pass North's campaign bus. They can barely make out the faces of Oliver North and Payne's Republican opponent, George Landrith, for all the people around them
It's been that kind of campaign.
With anti-Clinton sentiment running rampant across the nation, few incumbent Democrats in Congress are looking at an easy race this year, particularly in rural Southern districts such as Payne's, which stretches from Charlottesville to Danville.
Here in the 5th District, where conservative home-schooling advocate Mike Farris won a majority in his unsuccessful 1993 bid for lieutenant governor, all signs point to a potentially tough race. North is popular in Southside Virginia - the Mason-Dixon poll shows it's one of his strongest and Sen. Charles Robb's weakest regions in their Senate contest - and some political analysts think Landrith may be able to ride North's coattails to victory.
For Payne, who was elected in 1988 by a landslide and has been re-elected the same way ever since, this is the biggest fight of his political career.
Making this race even tougher for Payne is the fact that the national Republican Party recently targeted the race as winnable - even though Landrith is a relative unknown and Payne is a rising star in Congress who holds a prestigious seat on the policy-making House Ways and Means Committee.
"Landrith's campaign is a very aggressive campaign," Payne said while riding to a campaign stop. "And to some extent, there have been efforts to be intimidating to us."
Unknowingly, the congressman was traveling with a Landrith/North sticker on his front bumper, put there by Landrith supporters. On other stops during the campaign, he has been heckled by Landrith proponents; a Landrith campaign worker once tried to give Payne a Landrith sticker for his coat.
"We're not going to be changing any of our campaign strategies, regardless of what happens on the other side," Payne said.
But in Martinsville, a constituent gave Payne an unwelcome reminder of the recent telephone poll in which Payne's campaign workers informed voters that George Landrith is a Mormon - a question that generated more attention than Payne's campaign wished.
"I'm trying to stay as far away from the Mormons and religion as I can," the congressman said with a chagrined look.
Instead, Payne has criticized Landrith, a member of the Albemarle County School Board, for attending only 80 percent of the board's meetings. Landrith has responded that the meetings he missed were mostly work sessions and not regular meetings. Payne had an almost 99 percent attendance record in the House last year.
"This sends a message about what kind of a congressman George Landrith would be. We don't need a part-time congressman," said Payne supporter and former Rep. Watkins Abbitt Sr. of Appomattox County. "When I was in school, an `80' constituted a D on your report card."
Regardless of what Payne's campaign is saying about Landrith, Payne's supporters have plenty to say about him on their own.
"He's not his own man. He never leaves North's side. A lot of people don't respect that," said Todd Haymore, a legislative aide on leave from Payne's office to work on the campaign.
H.F. Haymore, his father, also is a Payne supporter - with his own criticisms of the Republican candidate. "Four years ago, Landrith was in California. If you had put a tobacco plant on the freeway, he wouldn't have known what it was."
With support from the National Rifle Association, the Law Enforcement Alliance of America and several key tobacco and business groups, Payne paints himself as a moderate conservative who is willing to vote independently of his party and the Clinton agenda for the good of his district.
He's quick to point out that he voted against the crime bill because he disagreed with its ban on assault weapons. He spoke out against Clinton's health care reform package because of what he called its burdensome bureaucracy and its mandate for employer-provided health insurance.
He obtained funding for several major highway projects, including $5 million to study a proposed interstate from Roanoke to Greensboro, N.C. - a highway pushed by business leaders along the U.S. 220 corridor who say it would help bring job opportunities to Franklin and Henry counties.
And in the 5th, where tobacco and textiles are king, Payne pushed for protections for the textile industry and worked to cut the size of a proposed increase in the cigarette tax - from $1.25 to 45 cents. As part of the failed health care bill, even the scaled-down cigarette-tax increase eventually died on the House floor.
Roll Call, a nonpartisan Congressional newspaper, even listed Payne as a possible candidate for switching to the Republican Party, even though Republican House leader Newt Gingrich calls Payne one of "the most liberal Democrats in the House."
Payne himself said, "I've given zero consideration to switching parties. I'm a Democrat and I always have been." But when it comes to representing his district, he added, "It's not a matter of party affiliation, it's community allegiance."
And in the 5th District, much of the community makes its living from tobacco.
Payne cut the deal for a smaller-than-proposed cigarette tax increase by giving Clinton's health care bill one of the swing votes it needed to get out of committee, even though Payne said he didn't support the entire package. Later, when that plan was scrapped in favor of one pushed by House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, Payne said he'd vote against it. As it turned out, even the Gephardt plan died before it came to a vote, but Payne had succeeded in getting all the major health-care bills to agree to limit any tobacco-tax increase to 45 cents.
Now, health care reform and tobacco have become cornerstones of Payne's re-election bid.
Mary Blair, a retired Campbell County schoolteacher and the wife of a Pittsylvania County tobacco farmer, stopped Payne at a recent fall festival and said: "Thank you for voting against the tobacco tax, or at least getting it lower. You've fought real hard for us. Any time you're willing to change to a Republican is fine with me."
Payne spends lots of time talking to tobacco farmers and reminding them of his support for them. As he went through a Danville drugstore a couple of weeks ago, he picked up a pack of Bailey's brand cigarettes.
"Have you seen these?," he said to a friend. "Mac Bailey in Lunenburg makes these. They're new."
While shaking hands in the same drugstore, Payne met Doug Hyler, a 44-year-old former musician who has lung cancer and an insurance problem. Hyler was on his wife's insurance, but she changed jobs recently and can't add him to her new policy with his pre-existing condition. They'll be able to keep their old insurance for 18 months at a rate of $250 more each month. After that, they don't know what they'll do.
"We need to solve the pre-existing condition problem and the portability problem. We need to make sure that somebody can quit their job and take their insurance with them without extra cost," Payne said. "That's something I've been working on, and I will continue working on it next year."
Payne said he is optimistic that Congress will pass a pared-down bipartisan health care bill next year. The Clinton health care bill "collapsed under its own weight, the bill was so comprehensive, so burdensome," he said.
"It went too far too fast, and there was a lot of new bureaucracy associated with it. I didn't think it was a workable health plan, and it proved not to be, politically or practically. Next year, we'll take a targeted approach, we'll do what can get done."
But he added, "of course, nobody knows quite who will be in Congress next year."
Keywords:
POLITICS PROFILE
by CNB