Operation: Take Back Virginia
News: Can an aloof military man like Jim Webb connect with the coal miners of the Mountain Empire, or will ersatz Southern charm win the day for George Allen?
November 6, 2006
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BRISTOL, VA — The Democrats have to win Virginia if they have any hope of capturing the Senate, and they have to win southwest Virginia to win the state. It's a long way between Richmond, the state capital, and here, and a longer way to the tony suburbs of Washington. It's a long enough way even from the town of Roanoke, which people here say for years defined the outer limits of Virginia for politicians in statewide races. Knoxville, Tennessee, 113 miles away, is closer, which is why it's almost as common for local television to carry commercials for either side in the Ford-Corker Senate race as for Jim Webb or George Allen, the Democratic challenger and Republican incumbent who are vying for the Senate seat here.
It's not just the mileage. The Mountain Empire as it is sometimes called, Coal Country as the six coal counties that anchor the southwest are known, Appalachia or near-Appalachia, or the lower I-81 corridor, or whatever term one might apply—the region is a long ways away culturally as well. At a dinner for Republican Party faithful here on Saturday night, a woman named Jean McReynolds was earnest almost to tears as she told me, "Southwest Virginia, now we are considered to be a distressed area, but George Allen has never treated us that way—like we're different. He's always treated us just like we're part of America."
Allen, a native of Orange County, California, who was Virginia's governor in the late 1990s and has been its junior senator since 2000, has never won an election without winning the southwest. He began his political career here. McReynolds met him when he was fresh out of law school clerking for a local judge in the town of Abingdon just up the road. She calls herself "his No.1 fan" and dreams of him being president one day, "because of his heart for the people, his understanding of the needs of the people." But at the Eliza Sprinkle Dinner at John Battle High School in Bristol the other night, her nicely manicured hands were tense and fiddling, her voice a low quiver as she confided, "I am just so nervous he's not going to win."
The dinner cost $10, for ham and corn, macaroni and cheese and fresh-baked rolls, and the people gathered awaiting Allen's arrival were well dressed but not chic. Republicans of the "good cloth coat" variety, middle class with memories of worse, people near the top of the social ladder in a place where that doesn't reach too high. They've never felt important, McReynolds said, until Allen came to ask for their vote. On Saturday night 150 to 200 of them didn't quite fill the long tables under the cafeteria's bright lights, and if the atmosphere wasn't exactly gloomy neither was it buoyant. Nobody was tasting victory. Before the proceedings began, McReynolds, her husband, and her sister were talking about their man's prospects. Allen leads in Richmond, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Southside. He's behind by 8 percent in the militarized Norfolk/Hampton Roads area, and has a bare advantage in the southwest. "Webb's got the north," Joe McReynolds said flatly, reflecting polls showing the Democrat up by 20 percent in the populous "suburban crescent" which has driven politics in the state for decades. The sister was incredulous: "Why?! He must favor the corporations."
In fact, Webb's strongest suit on the campaign trail is to talk frankly about corporate wealth, loopholes in corporate tax rules, inflated CEO pay. He has not learned the politician's lesson to avoid the subject of 46 of the top 500 corporations that paid no taxes last year. He makes sure to say, "I'm not talking about class war" when pointing out that the disparity in wealth is greater than at any time since the late 19th century. But fair is fair, he says; the country needs revenue from somewhere, and it can't come from people, it has to come from corporations. He talks of all this with the intensity of someone who feels it deep in some part of himself, but he has no store of knowledge about the places he visits to connect this with felt reality. His audiences respond, on the hope there might be more than statistics driving him.
Allen's trick has always been to play the regular guy next door, borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan, who could act the rube while stealing the futures of the plain people who put their faith in him and adding to the fortunes of the corporate class he always served. Allen, who had been making airport stops through the state all day, wooshed into John Battle High, "Home of the Trojans," about an hour late. A local party operative pulled him close saying quickly, nervously, "We're going to pull it out for you." Allen, who has cultivated an air of untroubled bonhomie despite the "macaca" incident, despite charges of his historic ease with the word "nigger" and various other controversies, said, "I know you will," with as much implied condescension as confidence. He tossed a football back and forth with one supporter and gave thanks all around to his warm-up speakers, state officials whom he affectionately called "Fireball" and "45 Magnum," before launching into his stump speech on "the three T's" of his campaign: terror, taxes, and traditional values.
He scoffed at Webb's opposition to the war in Iraq: "I don't know how naïve you have to be to think you can negotiate with people who fly planes into buildings." Earlier a woman named Theresa, who was stabbed eight times by her husband and has loved George Allen ever since he eliminated parole in Virginia, ensuring that the ex would spend 36 years in prison, told me that she supports the war in Iraq because, working in sales for a company that supplies the New York Fire Department, she has come to know a number of firefighters, and after 9/11, "with what happened to them, I think anything we do is justified."
