ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 7, 1995 TAG: 9512070100
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Ray L. Garland
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
IT IS hardly appropriate to discuss an election almost two years distant to choose the next governor of Virginia. But I am hoist on the petard of having introduced last week the most likely candidates: Republican Attorney General James Gilmore and Democratic Lt. Gov. Don Beyer. That they are still unknown quantities to most Virginians requires us to go forward.
It is, admittedly, heavy going. Neither man is known for scintillation. While Gilmore has shown more bravado, both are cautious plodders, as befits those with ambitions yet to be realized.
Gilmore, whose highest previous post was commonwealth's attorney for Henrico County, began his tenure as the state's chief legal officer on a bipartisan note, announcing a process of merit-selection for private lawyers doing work for his office. When lawyers were less flush than now, the state's business was eagerly sought and political connections paramount in getting it.
For decades before the election of Marshall Coleman, the state's first Republican attorney general, only Democrats in good standing needed to apply. Coleman made many lasting enemies by displacing all the old Democratic lawyers, defending his action on the oldest principle in politics, "To the victor belongs the spoils." In unveiling his initial list of 175 lawyers who would share fees approaching $10 million a year, Gilmore noted that 53 had served his predecessor, Democrat Mary Sue Terry.
A willingness to let the chips fall where they may has been a hallmark of Gilmore's first two years as attorney general.
If there is a Richmond culture of affluence and influence, radiating from a nexus of old-line corporations and the lawyers who serve them, Blue Cross of Virginia, now Trigon, is near the center. For years, it was something of a sacred cow, regarded by many as a public-service entity of near-philanthropic purpose. That ended, of course, when medical costs went through the roof and Trigon realized it had to make fundamental changes to remain a player in a hotly competitive industry.
When Trigon announced plans to become a public corporation, the attorney general's office raised the serious question of who really owns the assets. It suggested the state should receive a sizable stake in any new company as compensation for decades of preferential tax status. With Trigon estimating its market value at between $1 billion and $1.75 billion, the state's claim for a share of any new stock would start in the neighborhood of its existing net worth of $675 million!
The attorney general's office has also been in the thick of the nasty controversy over discounts medical providers gave Trigon which weren't passed along to policyholders, who made larger co-payments as a result. While obviously unfair to those making claims, such discounts undoubtedly served to reduce the price of premiums for all policyholders.
That there may be more to it can be found in a hard-hitting report on Trigon prepared in the attorney general's office and submitted to the State Corporation Commission. The report said the company's top managers "permitted a corporate culture of callous disregard for the interests of individual patients and consumers."
My own view is that while Trigon has undoubtedly behaved as one who believes it occupies a privileged position, it has been forced to struggle with revolutionary developments in medicine: skyrocketing costs and intense competition to offer large employers the lowest rate. In this environment, Trigon's hybrid status as a nonprofit acting in many ways like a for-profit cannot be long sustained.
Gilmore recently made news - and risked the ire of GOP conservatives - by ruling that state law entitles U.S. Sen. John Warner to seek the Republican nomination next year by primary. Given the extreme clarity of the law, it's hard to see how he could have done otherwise.
The Republican State Central Committee will decide Saturday whether to accept Gilmore's ruling as gospel. Not doing so would risk the spectacle of a Republican attorney general seeking to enjoin his own party.
While Gilmore pointed the way for Gov. George Allen's winning strategy of ending "liberal, lenient" parole, and has been loyal to the governor's policy initiatives, he has been very much his own man. Not knowing what to expect when he stepped from the obscurity of local office to win a place on Allen's ticket, I am impressed by the steadiness Gilmore has brought to the job. Unlike some previous occupants of the office, he has been content to mind his knitting, avoiding the impression of lusting openly for the governorship.
One is tempted to see Beyer as a kind of low-rent Chuck Robb - propelled by family money into the higher levels of state politics in preparation for some future role in the really big show across the Potomac. There is a similar vagueness: conservative rhetoric alternating with obvious liberal ploys, such as championing the "motor-voter" law that President Bill Clinton got through. Of course, any Virginia Democrat with statewide ambitions is obliged to take a similar course.
If Beyer has not collected the dedicated support that bound Democrats to the likes of Robb, they now see no alternative. Regardless of Beyer's lack of charisma or experience, he has given every indication of being a team player, willing to defer to those whose arrival in Richmond long preceded his own. If good breeding means being self-effacing, Beyer has it.
A Beyer-Gilmore contest will make for dull press. But the issue that will divide them is simple: Whether to continue the hard path Allen has charted or go back to the cozier days of the last Northern Virginia Democrat who saw the road to Washington leading through Richmond and upset as few apple carts as possible.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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