Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509250016
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Why do they think I'm the archangel of death?" Del. Richard Cranwell growls when he learns about the latest broadside fired at him from the governor's office. Given that he almost always seems to speak in a half-shout, it's hard to tell if the House majority leader's indignation is real or feigned.
Whatever his feelings, this isn't the first time Cranwell has invoked apocalyptic language to describe the way Republicans are treating his re-election campaign.
Earlier this summer, when he learned that much of rival Trixie Averill's money was coming from GOP figures around the state closely aligned with Gov. George Allen, Cranwell groused that they were ganging up on him "as if I'm the antichrist."
Of course, to Allen loyalists, he is. Averill has called him "the biggest roadblock" to Allen's agenda, and she's probably right.
Without Cranwell rallying opposition to Allen's proposed budget cuts, tax cuts and other conservative initiatives during this year's General Assembly session, Allen might well have prevailed.
"You'd have had a number of people caving in without Cranwell and his strong back," says Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg. "You'd have been surprised at the amount of whining and fear and trembling that you had" among the majority Democrats when the session commenced.
By now, the strident 1995 session has been reduced to a crude, but generally accurate, shorthand - Allen vs. Cranwell.
Headlines proclaimed "Cranwell the Conqueror." Hastily printed T-shirts showed a mock-up of the Virginia flag with a caricature of Cranwell standing atop a fallen Allen: "Sic Semper King George." One of the most memorable photographs from the session came on the final day, when Cranwell pointedly turned his back to the chamber when a particularly scathing message from Allen was read to the House.
The framing of Virginia politics as Allen vs. Cranwell seems so natural that it's easy to miss a key point: This wasn't inevitable.
Remember that Allen had cruised through his first year in office, pushing his plan to abolish parole through a Democratic-controlled General Assembly with relative ease. Some Democratic backbenchers carped that Cranwell and other party leaders weren't doing enough to oppose Allen.
In November 1994, Democrats nationwide were shell-shocked by their devastating congressional losses. When Allen dramatically announced his plan to cut taxes a month later, many political observers felt that Democrats would be afraid to oppose him.
They hadn't counted on Cranwell's ability to make the Democrats' bare three-vote majority in the House stick together.
Cranwell says it's a mistake to characterize his opposition to Allen's policies as simple partisanship. Instead, Cranwell charges that Allen has his eye on the vice presidency and simply was trying to keep up with another GOP prospect, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who made headlines in 1994 for her tax-cutting program.
"I think the policies were driven by an aspiration for national office," Cranwell says. "If you recall, that's where [former Democratic Gov. Douglas] Wilder and I got out of whack, too."
No one, he says, should be surprised that he'd fight an effort either to cut taxes or to cut certain spending. He ticks off Virginia's ranking as a low-tax state as other people remember baseball statistics - "... lowest sales tax in the country, third-lowest corporate income tax ... "
He rattles off another laundry list of Roanoke Valley projects whose funding would have been cut or eliminated by Allen, from Center in the Square to the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center.
Give him enough time, and Cranwell will start dissecting Allen's plan to cut the size and cost of state government, computing inflation rates at the top of his head to make his points. "They don't have a concept of how to get where they want to get," he concludes.
Observes University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato: "Cranwell may be the smartest, shrewdest man in the General Assembly, for sheer brain power and political ability, whether you agree with him or disagree. I've heard Republicans admit that."
Ray Garland, a former Republican lawmaker from Roanoke who now writes a syndicated newspaper column on Virginia politics, also factors in Cranwell's high energy level. "He has tremendous stamina. You have to respect that tremendous will."
Yet, while all that has long made Cranwell a legislative power, none of that made it inevitable that he'd emerge as the obstacle to Allen's priorities.
There are, after all, three other Democrats ahead of him in the General Assembly pecking order - Lt. Gov. Don Beyer and Speaker of the House Tom Moss. And, simply because of the way the legislature is organized, Senate Majority Leader Hunter Andrews has a more powerful chokehold on the state's budget-making process than Cranwell.
But Andrews often is wrapped up in the minutiae of government, Beyer is a nonconfrontational figure who was virtually invisible during the past session, and Moss has retreated from much of the partisan debate since he became speaker. So that left Cranwell, a 24-year legislative veteran, to lead the party's fight.
"It's part of Dickie's character to size up the problem and then fix it, be it a legislative problem or a political problem," DeBoer says. "Dickie is a fixer, a general utilitarian repairman."
He cites the way Cranwell intervened to negotiate a settlement to the federal retirees' pension tax lawsuit after the Allen administration's efforts faltered. "I think Dickie did that almost single-handedly," DeBoer says. "He did that in person, at his own expense."
From the Democrats' point of view, though, the Allen administration wasn't interested in fixing problems, but, rather, in scoring political points to use in the upcoming election.
Then, too, there were fundamental differences in philosophy: Allen wants, as conservatives like to say, to get government off people's backs. But Cranwell is a committed to the belief that government can be used as a positive force to improve people's lives.
Scarcely a speech goes by that Cranwell doesn't talk about increasing school funding for Southwest Virginia, an issue that he says goes back to his college days when he found himself taking noncredit English and math at Virginia Tech because his Tazewell County high school hadn't prepared him well enough.
Finally, DeBoer says, Cranwell "resented the shift in the tone from political debate to personal attack. It seemed to rub him harder. Probably a lot of people let it run off their backs. But he got his back up. He lost his temper on the floor more often than I've ever seen him do.
"It's hard for you to portray Cranwell as the kicked dog, but I think the party was the kicked dog, and it finally snapped."
At one point in a floor debate, Cranwell stopped just short of calling a Republican legislator from Chesapeake a liar, asking how Del. Randy Forbes could sleep at night saying the things he did - a charge for which Cranwell later rose to apologize.
At another point, Cranwell lashed out against the "insidious, invidious word merchants" who were pushing charter schools in the name of "school choice," saying they were the same people who would blockade abortion clinics and "even resort to violence to deny that choice."
As the strident fight between Allen and the General Assembly Democrats escalated, "Dickie's enthusiasm grew," DeBoer says. "It gave a lot of courage to people who otherwise had no courage. He was an inspiration to a lot of Democrats.
"Dickie became the dispenser of passes. 'OK, you need to duck on this one, you can do it.' And we'd very carefully take a count. Never was there any threat of discipline. It just grew."
In the process, Cranwell has, in effect, usurped Beyer to become, if not the titular head of the party, then its spiritual leader. This year it's been Cranwell who's been headlining Democratic tours around the state, it's been Cranwell who's been speaking to Democratic-leaning interest groups such as organized labor, and it's been Cranwell who's been recruiting and advising legislative candidates - at the risk of neglecting his own campaign.
"It takes a lot of time," says Susan Swecker, a Richmond lobbyist and former Democratic Party operative. "It's sheer grunt work, coaxing and cajoling candidates into running and then hand-holding them."
For Cranwell, though, this year's challenge isn't simply to win re-election, but to help his party retain control of the House of Delegates in the face of an unprecedentedly strong Republican challenge.
"At some point, if one party is in power for 100 years, people will want a change," Sabato says. Many political analysts had assumed 1995 would be the year Republicans finally took control of the General Assembly; all the trend lines pointed upward for them.
"If Cranwell pulls this off [retaining a Democratic majority], he'll have done it against the odds," Sabato says. "If he staves off that challenge, he really does become the party leader, and there might be a boomlet for Cranwell to be on a statewide ticket. He swears he won't."
And if the Democrats lose, will any blame attach to Cranwell? Sabato doubts it. "If the Democrats lose, the consensus will be it was the tide of history."
\ RICHARD CRANWELL
Party: Democrat
Age: 53
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Vinton
Family: Divorced, four children.
WHAT THE CANDIDATE HAS TO SAY ABOUT HIS:
CORE VALUES: "I think the way we handle tax dollars in this state ought to be a model for the rest of the country. That's the reason I've had some of the struggles I've had with this administration and the previous one. I don't want Virginia to get into the problem the federal government has of having too much debt. One of the major commitments of government ought to be economic opportunity, to prepare people to raise families and earn a living by giving them a good education. If we don't educate the next generation, we won't continue to be the superpower we are. I think we really do need to make an investment in people."
INDEPENDENCE: "I support the governor when I think he's right and oppose him when I think he's wrong."
VISION: "The biggest challenge is making sure that Southwest and Southside Virginia have the same opportunities as the urban crescent. If we don't, this part of the state will get left out."
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