Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502130012
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
He has embarrassed his party's leadership by raising Cain about the rules.
He has miffed his party's governor by suggesting the chief executive may not be practicing what he's preaching.
And he has built a reputation as a shrewd tactician who is not easily outfoxed in either the written or the unwritten ways of the legislature.
No matter how things change in Richmond, there's one constant in the state Senate - the gentleman from Botetourt County has a knack for unpredictability and discomfiting his political elders.
For 16 years, that seat was occupied by Dudley "Buzz" Emick, a straight-talking Democrat for whom the adjective "maverick" was all but part of his given name and who spent much of the 1980s making life difficult for Democratic governors.
For the past four years, it has belonged to Emick's former law partner, Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo, an equally straight-talking Republican. His brand of moderate politics and blue-collar style isn't easy to pigeonhole, but it doesn't fit neatly within the buttoned-down, conservative ideology of the Allen administration's A-team.
The comparison between Emick and his successor has been drawn ever since Trumbo's freshman year, when he showed up at a Senate Finance Committee meeting - "That's another thing my predecessor told me, every spare chance you get, go check out Senate Finance, let 'em know you're around" - wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
Emick was known for similar tastes in fashion, and Trumbo's attire drew the attention of the patrician Senate Finance Committee chairman, Hunter Andrews.
"Are all elected officials in Botetourt County issued cowboy hats and sunglasses?" Andrews inquired.
"No," Trumbo replied, with a quick one-liner that would have done justice to his predecessor. "Just the good ones."
This year, however, the question of whether Trumbo is living up to Emick's iconoclastic legacy has become more than just idle banter in the galleries.
Being the guy responsible for almost single-handedly shutting down the legislature on its opening day has a way of inviting such comparisons.
You can tell how heavily the weight of the Emick legacy rests on Trumbo's shoulders by how often he cites some political lesson his predecessor imparted. But does Trumbo consciously set out to emulate Emick?
"I don't like to admit it sometimes, but I do," Trumbo said. "The guy knew how the place worked."
That's another of those lessons Emick passed on before he retired from politics and took a judgeship: Learn the Senate rules, because not everyone in Richmond bothers to do so.
Now the rules have become something of a Trumbo speciality.
"Emick seemed to be more of an orator," said state Sen. Charles Hawkins, R-Chatham, "but Bo tends to work the procedure."
The first sign that Trumbo knew how to make the rules work in his favor came in 1993, when the General Assembly was wrestling with the issue of disparity in school funding.
The House had proposed spending more money on rural school districts, but Senate leaders from suburban districts tried to kill the measure and blocked attempts to work out a compromise.
Trumbo, who backed more funding, sought a parliamentary solution to the impasse. Colleagues told him he couldn't do that.
"The hell I can't," Trumbo responded. "Here's the rule."
The rules fight over disparity, Trumbo said, was "the one conscious moment" when he found himself wondering what Emick would have done. "It was me and some Democrats, and I looked up at them and said, `I wonder what in the hell Buzz would do?' And one of the Democrats said, `I know what Buzz would do.' And I said, `Yeah, I do, too, and that's why we're going to do this.'''
Trumbo marched into the Senate chamber and made a show of stacking books on parliamentary procedure on his desk.
The Democrats, sensing a revolt in their ranks among rural and urban senators whose districts would benefit from the disparity funding, abruptly adjourned for a caucus, where they agreed to set up a committee to look into the issue. The committee didn't cough up any additional school money that year, but the following year the Assembly voted $102 million for poor school districts. "I think I at least had a small part in that," Trumbo said.
To be sure, there are plenty of differences between Trumbo and Emick. Politically, Trumbo is more conservative. And their personalities diverge, too. "Trumbo strikes me as a real easygoing, affable guy," said former state Sen. Ray Garland of Roanoke. "Emick had that acerbic side to him."
It's the stylistic similarities that catch the eye. "Bo's a conservative gadfly and Buzz was a liberal gadfly," said Scott Leake, chief staffer for the Republican caucus. "It's a populist sort of style. But that runs up and down the mountains."
Trumbo even employs the same legislative aide Emick did. "Both guys have a lot of similarities," Loretta Parr said. "The similarities are, they don't mind going up against whoever they have to go up against and they don't even think about it. Another similarity is, they go through the back door to get things done and don't care about a lot of glory."
Trumbo harrumphs about colleagues who send out a lot of news releases. He doesn't bother.
"I don't like talking to you folks," he said about reporters. "I just go about my business."
Parr said he sometimes phones from a committee room to see if any reporters are hanging around his office. "He'll call and say, `Is it clear to come up?'''
When Trumbo ran for the Senate in 1991, opponents criticized him for being too low-key to stand up for a rural district in a suburban-dominated legislature. But Trumbo says that's the way he works best. Take Gov. George Allen's effort last year to win funding for Disney's America.
Trumbo withheld support, letting it be known that he was more interested in funding for economic development agencies in his district, which sprawls from Bath County to Pulaski County.
When Allen sent word that he'd agree to the funding, "then all of a sudden I thought Disney looked real good," Trumbo said with a devilish grin. "You gotta know what's important to people, and at the time [Republican] solidarity was important to the governor."
Trumbo's days of working quietly behind the scenes ended abruptly on Day1 of this year's legislative session, though. That's when he almost single-handedly shut down the General Assembly for two days.
Both party's leaders had signed off on new rules that would have given the Democratic leadership the same power to introduce bills late in the session as the governor. Trumbo rose, rule book in hand, to voice what he thought would be a lone challenge to this change - just the kind of obscure objection Emick would have raised.
But other Republicans gleefully fell in line behind him.
The parliamentary ruckus rapidly got out of hand, the Democrats adjourned the Senate for the day, and Allen delivered that night's State of the Commonwealth address directly into the TV cameras from his office.
Trumbo found himself staring into TV cameras, too. Parr was flabbergasted when Trumbo firmly instructed a Washington TV crew that they weren't allowed to show his ample girth - then proceeded to tell the interviewers he didn't like the tone of their questions, either.
The viewers in the Washington suburbs apparently had never encountered a pol like Trumbo on their television screens. The next day, one high-ranking state official from Northern Virginia was bombarded with calls from friends back home. As Trumbo tells the tale, chortling all the way, "They were asking him, `Who in the hell is that cracker you've got down there? Just where is Fincastle?'''
Democrats accused Trumbo of conspiring with Allen to give him a public relations advantage; Trumbo denies it.
Indeed, Trumbo has not exactly been a Republican team player. He felt blindsided when he discovered that Allen's budget would eliminate the proposed New College of Global Studies at Radford University, and he has proposed budget amendments to restore funding for many of the classes the college would have taught, if not the school itself.
More pointedly, Trumbo keeps a coffee mug bearing the college's logo on his desk - "to remind me," he said. "If you don't like Global Studies because you think it's all frilly, fine, but Southwest Virginia needs something of that category. Don't cut the whole damn thing. Let's see if we can redefine it."
And that wasn't all.
Trumbo was most unhappy that Allen's budget would have eliminated a mental-health agency in Covington and merged it with one in Roanoke.
"That looked like a decision made by someone pushing paper as opposed to someone who knows the folks," Trumbo said. "You're forgetting we have mountains; you're forgetting we have 70 miles between Covington and Roanoke."
Trumbo said he agrees with Allen's goal of cutting spending; he just disagrees with how. His response? A well-publicized proposal to slash the staff of the Cabinet secretaries back to the levels they were 10 years ago.
"I've got to send a message," Trumbo said.
He thinks it was received. Allen summoned him for a chat in the governor's office; Cabinet secretaries trooped by Trumbo's office to see what they'd done to offend him.
It's unclear whether Trumbo's gambit to restore some of the funding for projects in his district will succeed, although the Senate's version of the budget does reinstate funding for Radford University and the Covington mental-health group.
Regardless, Trumbo has established a reputation as an independent-minded cuss not afraid to cross his own party's governor. "I don't know what they think of it on the third floor [meaning, the governor's office], but they love it back home," said Parr, who said she has fielded calls from constituents congratulating Trumbo.
Allen loyalists contend Trumbo's maverick streak is overrated. "I think his break with the Allen administration was overstated," Leake said. "Stylistically, he's a real mountain-valley independent, but when you look at the roll call votes, he's with us."
After all, when Republicans tried to force the entire Democratic-controlled Senate to vote on the Allen tax cuts that Democrats had killed in committee, they turned to Trumbo - and his ever-present rule book - to lead the parliamentary charge.
The move was doomed to fail on a predictable party-line vote, but Trumbo worked himself into a red-faced, arm-waving frenzy nonetheless as he made his party's case on the Senate floor.
"This idea of him being a maverick comes because he's independent," Hawkins said. "He's not a maverick. He remembers his constituency comes first, and that's an admirable trait. Nobody but nobody wants a legislator to be a rubber stamp for any executive."
Maybe that's why Democrats these days are more forthcoming about their colleague than Republicans are. Said state Sen. Madison Marye, D-Shawsville: "I think he's pretty much his own man."
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PROFILE GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
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