ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604080043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
TEX WOOD wants to get his name on the ballot as an independent U.S. Senate candidate by attacking the status quo with tough rhetoric and a homespun flair.
As the lunch crowd flows in, Tex Wood sits at a corner table in the Rocky Mount Golden Corral, stirring his coffee with a ball-point pen.
No lunch for him. He's here to talk politics, not eat. To make sure he covers everything he wants to talk about, he's written the word "WASTE" in blue ink on the palm of his hand.
It's one obvious question he wanted to address during this interview: Suppose he manages to get on Virginia's ballot as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate. He'd be a real long shot. Wouldn't a vote for him just be wasted?
He shakes a pack of sweetener, readying it for the waitress to pour him a fresh cup of decaf, as he pauses for dramatic effect. Then he answers his own question with a question.
"What have we been doing with our votes for the last 20 years, if not wasting them? We voted in favor of a $5 trillion debt. We voted in favor of the S&L rip-off, the HUD rip-off. We've been wasting our votes for a good 20 years."
George R. "Tex" Wood is a political outsider with a down-home style. The Patrick County teacher and Vietnam veteran is using the federal courts and a small grass-roots network of volunteers in an uphill effort to get himself on the ballot in November.
He says people are tired of the big-money politics in Washington. And he wants to give Virginia voters a choice besides the two political insiders he presumes will take the major party nominations: Republican incumbent John Warner and Democratic businessman Mark Warner. Or, as he calls them, "Warner A" and "Warner B."
"There ain't a dime's difference between the two of 'em," Wood says. "Might be a nickel's difference, but there's still not a dime's difference."
Both, he notes, are multimillionaires. Both look good on camera. "Better than I," he admits.
And both, Wood contends, are members of parties that are beholden to Washington's "business as usual" - a system of "corporate welfare" and corporate contributions to the same politicians who quietly vote for business subsidies while screaming about out-of-control federal spending.
It's this system, he says, that created the federal Housing and Urban Development scandal and the need for a savings-and-loan bailout.
"That's all the government is right now, is a feeding trough for the wealthy few," Wood says.
Tex Wood is a wiry man with thinning white hair and a ruddy complexion who favors low-tar cigarettes and talks with an educated drawl. He got his nickname because he was born in Texas. He talks often about the needs of average working folk, but he brings an anything-but-average resume to his crusade.
At age 49, he's a published poet and holds English degrees from Duke and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He won a Purple Heart as a Marine rifleman in Vietnam. His campaign resume says he's been a construction worker, real estate broker, newspaper reporter and TV news director.
But he says he knows what it's like to struggle with debt and work more than one job to get by. He's doing that now. He's a part-time English instructor at Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville. He teaches English and math from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. to graveyard-shift workers at a textile mill in Fieldale. And he works part time at a restaurant/convenience store. "I don't sleep a lot," he says.
Wood grew up in North Carolina and attended a boarding school in Urbanna, Va., as a teen-ager. He has lived off and on for the past 30 years in a farmhouse on mountain land his father bought near Woolwine. After his son graduated from college four years ago, Wood, who is divorced, moved to Patrick County full time.
He noted his eclectic background in a recent letter to a reporter: "Slapping a label on me will be easy and convenient, but slapping an accurate one may prove a bit arduous."
Pressed for an accurate one, he offers this: "I'm the soul of an Indiana pig farmer who likes to trout fish. A reasonably educated pig farmer."
As far as his politics, he says, "A progressive in the modern sense of Teddy Roosevelt might come close."
He says that's appropriate for a time when the rich are getting richer and most everyone else is falling behind. The political system has become tilted to the wealthy, he says.
``Take those of us who voted for Ronald Reagan the first time he ran. He had a great saying; we all loved it: `Get the government off our backs.' What that translated into was let the crooks loose.''
Conservatives say the 1980s were a time when the United States won the Cold War and the middle class prospered as the economy grew. The way Wood sees it, though, the country ended up spending billions on weapon-system boondoggles and turned its back as special interests looted the government.
Not much has changed, he says. "This most recent group we've got up there, we have the spectacle of lobbyists writing legislation in the congressman's office. The spin on the situation we have in the country now is somehow we got $5 trillion in debt by spending on our poor people and our old people."
He says the real waste is subsidies for business, such as government funding for U.S. corporations' advertising overseas.
He also takes aim at recent measures such as the Republican's "legal reform" legislation, which seeks to rein in consumers' lawsuits against corporations.
"The nicer the name, the more suspicious we need to be," he says. "They may throw `mother' or `God' in there, and have a wonderful sounding name to the bill, when in actuality it does just the opposite of what it says. What that bill would accomplish is make big business more prone not to care whether they hurt somebody - as long as they get their money."
Wood has gained support from some third-party activists in Virginia. The Green Party of Virginia, which supports citizen activism and environmental protection, is preparing to endorse Wood.
Bill Huff, a Bedford County coordinator for the Ross Perot-inspired Virginia Independent Party, is collecting signatures for Wood. The party hasn't endorsed him, Huff said, but it generally supports widening access to the ballot. "When I'm out collecting signatures, people tell me, `It's about time somebody beside Jerk A or Jerk B is running.'''
Wood tried to get on the ballot in 1994 in the Senate race in which incumbent Democrat Charles Robb defeated GOP nominee Oliver North and Republican-turned-independent Marshall Coleman.
He needed 15,000 signatures from registered voters, but fell short. He sued in U.S. District Court, arguing that Virginia's ballot-access laws are unfair to people outside the major parties.
The deadline for filing petitions for a spot on the Senate ballot is the second Tuesday in June - five months before the election. He argues that doesn't give independents enough time to collect signatures - especially since the deadline comes soon after the Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees.
If Virginians aren't satisfied with the Democrats' and Republicans' choices, he says, it's too late for anyone to mount an independent bid. Except, that is, for well-connected major-party turncoats who can afford to hire private businesses to collect signatures.
True to his form, Wood is representing himself in court. Judge Jackson Kiser will hear arguments from Wood and the attorney general's office Monday.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political commentator, disagrees with Wood's contention that Virginia's ballot laws are too strict. A number of independents have managed to get on statewide ballots over the years, he says. Besides, "the question you want to ask is, do you want anybody to be able to get on any ballot at any time?''
Sabato concedes there's less political activism outside the major parties in Virginia than in many states. But he thinks that has more to do with Virginia's traditional "culture of nonparticipation" than with legal roadblocks. "People don't take part - or they take part gingerly, in limited ways."
Wood, who has driven thousands of miles around the state in a rust-pocked pickup, believes there's more than tradition at work. After wasting their votes time and again, he says, people are fed up with politicians who break their promises and push special-interest agendas in the guise of the public good.
In the end, he says, it's going to take more than just voting in one group and voting out another to bring real change.
"The problem is not in Washington," he says. "The problem is every time we look in the mirror. The problem is out here - our own lack of activity. Until we take our destiny back, our destiny is going to be controlled by the same people who control it now."
Contacting the candidate
Wood for U.S. Senate '96
P.O. Box 227
Woolwine, Va. 24185
(800) WOODCAN
or (540) 930-2383
FAX (540) 930-2155
LENGTH: Long : 165 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. George R. "Tex" Wood persuadesby CNBFrances Wright to sign a petition for his U.S. Senate candidacy
after talking to voters at a Rocky Mount
McDonald's restaurant. color. KEYWORDS: POLITICS CONGRESS