ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 13, 1996 TAG: 9610120003
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY AND MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITERS
DAY in, day out for the past eight years, communications technician Jeff Grey has braved heights that would leave most Western Virginians dizzy with vertigo or sweaty with fear.
On narrow steel towers rising from imposing mountaintops, Grey has scaled 180, 250 and 360 feet in the air - sometimes in high winds and freezing weather - to adjust antennas for his employer, Columbia Gas Transmission Corp.
But last spring, the soft-spoken 31-year-old Rockbridge County Democrat and father of two decided to put his job on hold.
Now, Grey is trying to climb the public opinion polls and into Congress. He's challenging Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a two-term Republican from Roanoke who is flush with campaign cash and political connections throughout the 6th District.
For a political unknown, it hasn't been easy.
Virtually bereft of political funds - less than $10,000 to Goodlatte's $455,000 as of July - Grey is running a shoestring campaign with a volunteer staff. Former Rep. Jim Olin, one of Grey's chief backers, had to go begging friends for donations so Grey could buy some billboards, the only advertising he's been able to afford.
An article in the respected Politics Now newsletter tagged Grey as one of a handful of political "Don Quixotes" and "longest of the long shots" in this year's congressional races.
Goodlatte, Grey says, has turned down a slew of opportunities to debate him (Goodlatte's staff says they have accepted two invitations) and Goodlatte never mentions Grey.
On a personal level, the campaign has also been tough. Grey has depleted his savings and borrowed on his house to cover personal expenses while on unpaid leave from his job.
He spends 16- and 18-hour days driving from one end of the district to another: a Labor Day rally in Covington; a luncheon with a handful of hospital employees in Salem; a radio interview in Staunton; handshaking jags in at least five cities on the Fourth of July.
"What I've been doing is spending almost 100 percent of my time meeting people," Grey said Aug. 29.
When asked recently by the Rockbridge Advocate to name any three living people he'd like to spend a day with, Grey's response was a weary: "Right now, I'd like to spend a day with my wife and two children."
From Libya to Lexington
Grey is young, trim, short (5 feet 5 inches tall) and looks a bit like movie star Tom Cruise. But he carries no Hollywood aura. His demeanor is serious, his voice soft.
More than anything else, he projects empathy for working families. That's probably in part because of his own status as a blue-collar worker, his upbringing as a factory worker's son and role as president of his 200-member union local for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.
His interest in politics goes way back - to his birthplace of Louisville, Ky. As a third-grader in public schools, Grey and a small band of fellow students staged an impromptu protest against a court ruling ordering busing to achieve racial integration in public schools.
At that young age, Grey couldn't fully appreciate the injustice of the discrimination the court was trying to eliminate. To an 8-year-old, the unfairness was more visceral:
"We no longer had a choice of what school to go to in our neighborhood. We had to spend an hour on the bus to go back and forth," he says.
But the demonstration also had some unintended consequences.
"My parents had a fit," Grey recalls wryly.
His father, a tinter in a paint factory, and his mother, a department store clerk, took Grey out of public schools a year later and sent him to a private Christian school. He returned to public schools in the 11th grade, and his experience in both taught him private schools are not necessarily better, he says.
"The private school could not offer the infrastructure or academic level of the public schools," Grey recalls. "They didn't have the resources to compete with the public schools."
Grey's parents divorced when he was 17. The divorce, he says, left his family financially devastated. There was no money for college, so he entered the Navy immediately after graduation from high school, hoping to learn a trade.
While in the Navy, he married Debbie Lemmon, his high school sweetheart. He also saw nail-biting duty aboard the USS Caron, a destroyer in the Gulf of Sidra during the United States' bombing of Libya in 1986. The Caron was the first ship in that conflict to cross south of "the line of death" demarcated by Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi.
"To my knowledge, we destroyed several Libyan ships that day and there were no survivors," Grey says. "I cried for the enemy, these young men who died for their country because their leader let his ego get in the way of his good judgment. Human life is much too valuable. That experience taught me to not act entirely on my own but to listen to wisdom and seek advice."
After his discharge from the Navy in 1988, Grey was hired by Columbia Gas Transmission Corp. in Rockbridge County, a job that takes him all over Western Virginia.
In 1990, he and Lemmon moved to a modest three-bedroom home on a narrow gravel road in the Kerrs Creek section of Rockbridge County, about seven miles west of Lexington. She is a public school teacher in Staunton. They have two children: Chelsea, 6, and Cody, 3.
Grey sees his working-class background as an advantage in running against Goodlatte, a Roanoke lawyer who graduated from a prestigious and expensive New England college and from Washington and Lee University Law School.
"One basic thing I have in common with voters: I work a 40-hour week," Grey says.
Gary Waldo, a Roanoke Valley Democratic activist, agrees. "Jeff Grey is a laborer," Waldo says. "He doesn't have a college degree. He's one of the closest things we've ever seen to a true 'man of the people' around here."
Cites incumbent's votes
But Grey is not depending on that to carry him to the House of Representatives. He believes his election depends on the issues.
Goodlatte, he says, has been on the wrong side of them consistently. He links Goodlatte to the House's controversial and unpopular Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, calling Goodlatte "a Gingrich clone."
"[Goodlatte] tries to come across as moderate, but you look closely at his votes and it shows what an extremist he is. Over 93 percent of the time, he votes with Newt Gingrich," Grey says. "Is [Goodlatte] representing the voters of the 6th District, or is he representing corporate America?"
Name the issue, and Grey will cite chapter and verse on Goodlatte's voting record in Congress: the congressman's vote for private school vouchers; for cutting anticipated increases in Medicare funding by $270 billion; for giving a $240 billion tax cut to wealthy Americans; for voting against increasing the minimum wage.
"Seventy-seven Republicans broke ranks and voted with the Democrats on it. Bob Goodlatte maintained his extremist point of view and didn't go with the increase," Grey says. "When 83 percent of the American people are in favor of a minimum wage increase, what's our representative doing voting against it?"
Goodlatte consistently casts anti-abortion votes. Grey, a Baptist and former deacon at his Baptist church, is for abortion rights.
"All through the Bible, God gives people choices," Grey says. "And he tells people what the consequences are, if you do that or if you don't. [Abortion] is a moral choice that I hope we make between ourselves and God the father."
Grey says his first priority will be working families.
"We've got to make our families a priority, he says. "What was once a 40-hour workweek has become a 60-hour work week. We're working more hours for less money that we were in 1991. We have a high divorce rate, a high teen-age pregnancy rate, drug problems. We've got to allow Mom and Dad to spend enough time with their families, to pass along family values."
Grey would cut taxes "slightly" for families with incomes under $150,000, but increase them slightly on families earning more. He'd vote to cut defense spending on military hardware and high-tech research, but supports proposals to pay servicemen and women higher wages.
There are some issues on which Grey draws a moderate-to-conservative bead. For instance, children born to illegal aliens in the United States shouldn't automatically be granted citizenship, he says. Grey is also in favor of establishing English as the official language of the United States, a cause championed principally by conservatives.
As a hunter and weapons owner, he's against more stringent gun control legislation than is already on the books. And he's against increasing taxes on tobacco, although he says the government should work to keep it out of the hands of minors.
Taking on Goliath
But a question that looms over the issues is: Can Grey get elected? It's something Grey confronts almost wherever he goes.
Even with anti-incumbent fever on the rise in the electorate, little-known congressional challengers face long odds.
According to the newsletter Politics Now, of the 255 political novices who entered 1992's congressional general elections, only 14 won their contests. And six of those sank $100,000 or more of their own money into the races. The proportion in 1994 was nearly identical.
Those figures suggest Grey's chances of winning hover somewhere between 18-to-1 and 13-to-1 - if he had a lot of his own money to sink into the campaign. He doesn't.
At a Labor Day rally in Covington, Grey portrayed himself as David in a David vs. Goliath-style political race.
Everyone knows who won that contest. But in this one, Grey's rhetorical rocks seemed to be bouncing off Goodlatte with little effect.
"It's going to be a good year for Democrats," says Covington's Tammy Scruggs, the self-described "Democratic-leaning" executive director of the Allegany Highlands Arts Council.
"But I don't know if Grey will ride that wave or not," she adds. "It'll be difficult for him, because Bob Goodlatte is not a poor representative. If he were doing a bad job, it would be different. But he's representing his constituents in a way that's acceptable."
"We've got to make our families a priority, he says. "What was once a 40-hour workweek has become a 60-hour work week.
``We're working more hours for less money that we were in 1991. We have a high divorce rate, a high teen-age pregnancy rate, drug problems. We've got to allow Mom and Dad to spend enough time with their families, to pass along family values."
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