ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070114
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
"I think I'm still an outsider, but the difference is now I'm an outsider who can get things done."
ON election day 1995, George Landrith had a lot going for him. It was just a year earlier that the Republican lawyer from Albemarle County made a name for himself by running for Congress and nearly beating Democratic Rep. L.F. Payne.
Now, Landrith was driving through Cumberland County, campaigning for General Assembly candidates. Soon, he planned to cast his own vote and head home to his four kids and his wife, who was pregnant with their fifth.
But in less than a second, Landrith almost lost it all.
A car ran a stop sign, colliding with his, and sending Landrith into the windshield. He was hurled forward so fast that his steering wheel cracked.
"I just thought to myself, 'I'm glad I bought that life insurance'," Landrith recalled. "My next thought was, 'I hope I don't collect on it.'"
Landrith suffered severe bruising and some internal bleeding, but he escaped permanent injury. What did last after the accident were the doubts of a man confronted with his own mortality and presented with a second chance.
"My wife and I spent a lot of time thinking about that before I ran again" for Congress this year, Landrith said. His son Thomas was born shortly after the wreck, and Landrith said, "I remembered many times holding Thomas after he was born and thinking to myself, 'I'm lucky to be able to do this. This almost didn't happen.' And part of me felt like life's too short to give up being able to do this.
"In a very real sense, I not only worked hard for the candidates, I bled for them. If I had stayed at home that day, it wouldn't have happened. You think about that and you think, 'Gee, I almost lost the opportunity to hold Thomas.'"
After a lot of prayer and talk, however, Landrith decided that he could be both family man and politician. He rededicated himself to bringing his conservative message to Congress and has since committed much of his time and virtually of all of his resources toward that end.
In his last campaign, Landrith liked to call himself a Washington outsider, but by now, the two-time 5th District congressional candidate knows his way around Capitol Hill pretty well.
"He's personally acquainted with the Republican leadership from Speaker Gingrich on down," said Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif. "George will have an advantage because he's somewhat familiar with the people around here and very familiar with the Republican leadership."
Doolittle is just one of several Republican congressmen who have helped Landrith by introducing him to contributors and making appearances for Landrith at fund-raisers in Washington.
"It just seems like George knows a lot of people up here," said Roanoke Rep. Bob Goodlatte's aide, Tim Phillips. "He knows [House Majority Leader] Dick Armey, he knows Newt, he seems well connected. A lot of people know who George is. They know the race he ran in '94, and know how well he did, and know there's a real chance he'll be up here."
Landrith, 35, has never been elected to public office but served for three years on the Albemarle County School Board. He lost by 6 percentage points in 1994 to Payne, who announced this year he would run for lieutenant governor instead of seeking a fifth full term in Congress.
Landrith's close loss primed many of his supporters, both at home in the 5th and nationally, for a 1996 run. Big-name Republicans on the order of Newt Gingrich and presidential nomination seekers Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes have appeared at 5th District fund-raisers for Landrith.
"He has some very good ties up in Washington. He would be plugged in well and probably better than most challengers," said Landrith's former campaign manager, Dimitri Kesari.
And this is an outsider? "I still think I'm an outsider," Landrith said. "I mean, it's not like Newt Gingrich is my best friend," Landrith said. "He came to a fund-raiser because I'm running a good race and we can win this seat. And he wants to help good Republicans win seats. It's the same thing with Dick Armey, it's the same thing with [House Majority Whip] Tom DeLay. It's not as if somehow now they're coming to my house for parties.
"I think I'm still an outsider, but the difference is now I'm an outsider who can get things done."
It's probably true that Landrith could get things done. Gingrich, who was instrumental in getting choice committee assignments for many freshman Republicans in 1994, has pledged his support to getting Landrith a seat on the policy-setting House Ways and Means.
Payne sits on Ways and Means, but as Landrith likes to point out, his Democratic opponent, State Sen. Virgil Goode, is a long shot to replace Payne there. That's partially because the Democrats may not have a majority in the House of Representatives next year, but mostly because Goode is a conservative.
"My opponent's going to go up there and he's going to have no connections. He's going to be a minority in his own party," Landrith said. "He's going to be a minority in a minority. And he'll have a cruel choice to make: Either go along with the liberals to get decent assignments and get some help and some acceptance, or don't go along with them, in which case, they'll shun you, you'll get nothing done, you'll be completely ineffective. So, in effect, his choice is to turn his back on the district and become a liberal, or don't do that and be ineffective."
Yet, for all his connections, Landrith likes to paint himself as a regular guy, someone who knows what it's like to scrape to make ends meet.
At 14, Landrith took his first job. He worked at a construction site for free, hauling lumber and sweeping, in exchange for learning how to read blueprints and build a house. "My friends all thought I was crazy because they were all working wherever making $1.25 or $1.35 an hour, whatever minimum wage was then, and I was making nothing, and I was working a lot harder then they were. [But] the next year, I went out and got a job, and I was making $6.50 an hour."
Landrith, a Mormon, was born and raised in Northern Virginia and went to college at Brigham Young University in Utah. He attended law school at the University at Virginia. While there, he served as scout master for his church's Boy Scout Troop and was a seminary teacher for high school students, which meant getting up to instruct the teens from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. every day.
"A lot of [UVa] students come and go in our church, but very few have had the degree of commitment George had to serving," said James Skeen, who serves as bishop of Landrith's church and is also his former law partner.
Landrith has been a leader in his church in many ways, Skeen said. One time, Landrith led about 125 teens on a 150-mile trip by covered wagon, so they could learn what it was like for the first Mormon settlers to cross the plains.
Another time, Skeen recalled, Landrith and he took the church youth group to Ohio and, "George took the midnight to 6 a.m. shift to drive. That's the sort of commitment he has. He's always willing to take the hardest, most demanding job."
Ever since he gave the speech nominating home-school advocate Mike Farris for lieutenant governor in 1993, Landrith has been closely identified with the Christian Right, and many of his political beliefs can be traced to his faith.
"I think it may be accurate to say that some of his political views are in harmony with the Moral Majority, but he's certainly not a product of it," Skeen said.
"He wants to eliminate impediments to good family life because he believes in families. He believes in hard work. There may be some people who may see a hard edge in George because of the strength of his beliefs, but they need to look at his personal life and see the kind of service he provides to others."
Landrith counsels other families in his church. And like other church members, he and his family fast one day a month and donate the cost of two meals to a fund for the needy.
Helping provide for others is a basic foundation of the Mormon faith, Skeen said. In times of dire need, the church has a virtually unlimited fund that can be used to pay for church members' mortgages, clothes, food or just about any other bills. But, "one of the tenets of our welfare program is we believe in self-reliance," he said.
"If somebody needs help, we'll also make work assignments consistent with their abilities, so they don't feel like they're getting a handout. I think that is very consistent with George's beliefs. He believes in self reliance."
Landrith said of himself: "I am a strong believer that we need to help others and I am a strong believer in compassion, but it's really not very compassionate when government takes something from somebody by force of law and gives it to somebody else. I feel infinitely more compassionate when I'm out doing something to help somebody else - like a widow this last winter, I helped shovel her driveway three times in two weeks - than I do when I pay taxes and realize that they're taking my money away to give it to somebody else who may or may not need it."
Members of Landrith's church are also strongly encouraged to have a one-year supply of food and enough savings for six months.
Landrith has apparently taken that to heart, because he's depended on his life savings to keep him afloat during recent years that he's been campaigning. However, much of his savings came from an inheritance and Landrith says he'll be out of money in November. He also paid for his family's health insurance last year with donations to a political action committee he formed to help General Assembly candidates.
Nevertheless, fiscal responsibility is something Landrith preaches on the campaign trail, and it was a key concern when he served on the Albemarle County School Board.
His conservative faith and beliefs also showed in discussions of other issues. Landrith supported smaller classes, a basic education curriculum, and more rights for parents. He supported giving children who are taught at home the right to come into public schools for access to certain classes.
Landrith also favored allowing parents to opt their children out of state approved sex-education classes in favor of a program called Teen Aid, which teaches abstinence instead of contraception as a method of birth control.
"Teaching contraception, to me, is a little like preventing school violence by handing out bullet-proof vests," Landrith said.
"Because the message with contraception is, effectively, 'You're going to do it, we know you are, so this is how you avoid the worst impact.' But the fact of the matter is, teen-agers aren't ready to do that. Teen-agers shouldn't be smoking, and they shouldn't be drinking and they shouldn't be engaging in intimate sexual relationships."
Landrith supports the right of parents to opt their children out from learning about other topics they might not agree with, too, like evolution.
In Congress, he would support a Constitutional amendment that would ban abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is endangered, even though he says that he thinks that the life of the mother is the only legitimate exception.
Landrith's beliefs drew mixed reactions reactions from those who served with him on the School Board.
"All of us have different family values," said former School Board member Sharon Wood. "I have a difficult time with someone telling other people what families should be. Mr. Landrith has definite feelings of what a family should be.
"For me, I'm a very religious person, but I felt strongly that children should be taught an in-depth [sex education] curriculum. My comment during a board meeting was, 'I would love to raise my children in the world that existed in the Bible, but that world doesn't exist anymore.'"
However, School Board member Susan Gallion has a different view of her former colleague:
"I think he's going to be a strong advocate of families. Parents know more about their children than the government and I think you'll find him to be a strong supporter of parents and children. He's got five or six children himself and he's an excellent father."
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