THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 26, 1995 TAG: 9506260023
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVID M. POOLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long : 205 lines
They were the odd couple of the 1993 campaign trail.
There was George Allen kicking back between campaign stops, dipping tobacco and yucking it up with reporters about everything from high school football to the perils of pimples.
Then, there was his top aide, Jay Timmons, working his pocket telephone and rapping on his laptop, impervious to the hijinks around him. The tight-faced Timmons cut off a reporter who tried to draw him into a friendly conversation, saying: ``If the question is, `Do I have a personal life?' the answer is no.''
Now, Timmons, 33, maintains the same automaton-like work habits and devotion to Allen in his role as the governor's chief of staff and organizational wunderkind.
He sets the pace for Allen's inner circle of thirtysomething GOP political operatives, who see themselves fomenting the same kind of conservative revolution in Virginia that Ronald Reagan brought to the federal government in the early 1980s.
``Jay has the plus of not having a wife or a significant romantic interest to distract him from the task at hand,'' said Barbara Moak, a friend and Republican activist who also works in the Allen administration. ``He is so engrossed in what he is doing. I think this is his life.''
Democrats - and some Republicans - say Timmons personifies the administration's fundamental flaw: The governor's inner circle is filled with GOP campaign workers who have little experience in state government and little inclination to compromise their political ideology. These critics say the administration has no one who can soften Allen's combative attitude toward the Democrat-controlled General Assembly.
``Jay doesn't always see the big picture,'' said one GOP lawmaker who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``He has a real difficulty believing there is a second valid or even a second competing point of view.''
Timmons took issue with that description; he said he and others in the administration have been open to negotiation and compromise.
But he looked perplexed when he was asked to list compromises that Allen has been willing to make during his 18 months in office.
``None come to mind,'' he said. ``We've done pretty well.''
Timmons has been Allen's alter ego for the past four years. He ran Allen's successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991; he served as Allen's chief of staff in Washington; he worked as communications director of Allen's gubernatorial campaign.
The contrast in the two men's personalities is reflected in the decor of their adjoining offices on the third floor of the state Capitol.
Allen filled his quarters with mounted game, animal pelts and snapshots of his wife, Susan, and their two children, giving a folksy flavor to the august building designed by Thomas Jefferson.
Timmons keeps a sparse and formal office with gilded portraits, including a life-size painting of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson that Timmons - a Yankee - selected as a tribute to his boss's interest in the Civil War.
One of the few private keepsakes is a framed photograph of Allen giving a rather stiff Timmons a lesson in how to dip tobacco.
The governor once tagged Timmons with the nickname ``Sgt. Friday'' after the humorless detective on the old ``Dragnet'' TV series.
``He's a friend of the family,'' Allen said. ``The kids know him well, and Susan knows him well. I wouldn't call him a relative, but it's a very close, personal relationship.''
For Allen, Timmons is the ultimate gatekeeper who stays in the shadows, keeps the administration focused and remains vigilant for any hint of disloyalty.
``I don't want to go overboard on this point, but Jay is very committed to George Allen, and he's not going to let other political or personal agendas get in the way,'' said a veteran Republican who counts Timmons as an ally. ``It can be translated into being very dedicated, or it can be translated as ruthless.''
Despite his role overseeing radical change in state government, Timmons is virtually unknown outside the inner sanctum of the Allen administration. Even some people who work closely with him admit they have no clue where he grew up or what he does with his spare time.
Timmons spent the first years of his life in Chillicothe, a small town in southern Ohio. He is the only child of an industrious couple, Warner and Mickie Timmons. Warner managed the men's department at the local Sears store; Mickie worked at the town newspaper.
The Timmonses moved to a small farm outside of town when Jay was in grade school. The boy soon inherited the responsibility of mowing and manicuring the yard - all 8 acres of it.
Most kids would have looked at all that grass as a never-ending chore. Jay saw it as an opportunity to come up with an efficient system.
He developed a three-day process. The first day, he knocked out the open areas with the riding mower; he came back the next day with the push mower; and he finished up with the hand trimmer on the final day.
Timmons remembers exactly how long the entire process took: 26 hours.
Hard work was expected. Warner Timmons used to do paperwork late into the night so his administrative duties would not take him away from customers during the day. Mickie Timmons rose through the ranks of the Chillicothe Gazette and became publisher by Jay's junior year in high school.
Jay was a precocious child who liked to please his adoring mother: His first career steps were toward journalism.
``When I look back,'' she said, ``I couldn't have had a better son."
Friends at Logan Elm High School recall that Timmons stood out because of his maturity and ambition. He was elected president of his 129-member class of 1980 not because he was a popular athlete or the most gregarious, but because he had a certain earnestness.
His most memorable feat at Logan Elm was transforming the mimeographed school newsletter into a full-size newspaper.
The project presented Timmons another organizational challenge: How to set up a staff and keep it going despite all the distractions of senior year.
``He has confidence in his ability to design a system and keep it running well,'' said Amy Moritz, a conservative think-tank director who hired Timmons when he came to Washington in the early 1980s.
Some critics say Timmons takes the notion of control too far.
In fact, Timmons may go down in history as the only person to preside at a Virginia political convention that ended in a near riot.
Timmons was president of the Young Republican Federation of Virginia in 1988, a time when the group was locked in an internal power struggle. Timmons and his executive board sought the upper hand by proposing a bylaw change that effectively would have disenfranchised their rivals.
A special convention at a Newport News hotel ballroom quickly boiled out of control. Angry young Republicans began shouting and shoving one another. The police arrived and kicked the group out of the hotel.
Some Republicans say Timmons and his heavy-handed tactics splintered the Young Republicans into two factions, a division that still dogs the group's effectiveness.
Timmons has no patience for those still fighting old battles.
``Grow up, guys - get a life,'' he said. ``Let's focus on the here and now."
Timmons' desire for control became clear this year when he devised an extraordinarily complex system to allow his office to oversee virtually every contact between state agencies and the General Assembly.
Democratic lawmakers griped that Timmons made it almost impossible for the legislature to operate if state officials, even agency heads, could not talk about even the most innocuous bill without first checking with the governor's office.
Like many top Allen aides, Timmons came of age worshiping President Reagan.
Timmons enrolled at Ohio State University a few months before Reagan was elected president in November 1980. Timmons was so enthused by what was happening in Washington that he dropped out of college after his sophomore year to run for the state House.
His platform for Ohio - lower taxes, welfare reform, parole abolition and streamlining colleges - was remarkable in its similarity to Allen's blueprint for Virginia.
Timmons, then 20, wore suits and ties to give himself a more mature image. His efforts were undercut, however, when his mother directed the Chillicothe Gazette to endorse her son. A columnist for the Columbus newspaper, noting Mickie Timmons' claim that her Jay's priorities were in order, mocked, ``Can we presume his room is, too?''
Timmons' subsequent defeat only whetted his enthusiasm for politics. He quit school without a degree and moved to Washington, Ground Zero of the Reagan revolution. He worked for a variety of federal agencies, Republican candidates and a North Carolina congressman before he signed on with Allen in 1991.
Timmons said he finds some key similarities between Allen and Reagan: an unwavering conservative philosophy and a knack for presenting issues in a way that ordinary people can grasp.
Timmons said the Reagan revolution was incomplete because the president's aides lost their momentum and zeal for change.
Timmons is intent on keeping the revolutionary fires stoked for the two years remaining in Allen's term.
His clunky Ford - with ``A Team93'' plates - is parked a few paces from a Capitol entrance that is open 24 hours a day, so Timmons can come and go at all hours.
``He just does it from dusk until dawn - and then some,'' Allen said.
Timmons finds it difficult to relax even when he is away from the Capitol. He turned a minor paint job in his Henrico County condominium into a full-blown home improvement project.
His closest friends - all of them from politics - say Timmons is far from a humorless grind. During the gubernatorial race, if a newspaper would publish an unflattering photograph of an Allen staffer, Timmons would run off 100 photocopies and plaster them around the office.
Timmons and Moritz, the think-tank director, have kept up a running feud over Monopoly rules dating from a game played during a ski trip nearly a decade ago. Neither will concede defeat. In fact, Moritz said she has forgotten the rule in question.
``That goes to show you that winning was more important than the rule,'' she said.
Twice, when Allen and his family went on vacation, Timmons managed to disconnect himself from his beeper, pocket telephone and laptop computer for a week at a time. In April, he toured Florida for seven days.
``I was really proud of myself,'' he said. ``I talked to the office only eight times.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by MOTOYA NAKAMURA, Staff
For Gov. George Allen, right, Jay Timmons, 33, left, is the ultimate
gatekeeper who stays in the shadows, keeps the administration
focused and remains vigilant for any hint of disloyalty.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB