Virginia has been on my mind lately. Let's begin with the conclusion: Virginians are a politically ornery group of people likely to do an occasionally amazing thing politically, and we are about to find out how pissed off they are at George W. Bush.
But before we get to that, though, the ugly events in Toledo last weekend reminded me that once upon a time, in another life, I covered a Ku Klux Klan rally in a little town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in southwest Virginia. For the purposes of this story, it is important to know that I am black, Catholic, and was born in another country. These count as three definite strikes as far as the Klan is concerned. But on that day in the summer of 1987, they were going to have to deal with me, because they were coming to my town. I had moved from New York City just three years earlier to take a job covering Bedford County for The Roanoke Times.
“Have you had to deal with much racism in your life,” was one of my job interview questions, and in the first six months there I thought I would die.
But three years on, I knew that county in and out and thought of it in a very proprietary way. I laughed when the one good ol' boy judge referred to northern Virginia as “Occupied Virginia” because of all the northerners who were moving in. I learned to drink bourbon with branch water in a courthouse that had two men's rooms and two women's rooms. If you stopped long enough on your way in, it was possible to see where the doors once read, “Colored” and “White.” I even, once, put salted peanuts in a Coke before I drank it.
I called up the grand wizard the day before the march and did the basic interview. “Why the march; why Bedford; how may people attending; what do you hope to accomplish, etc.?”
Before I hung up I told him I'd see him the next day.
The next morning came, and I drove into town and saw that there was going to be no rioting that day. Every state trooper within a hundred miles was on Main Street in Bedford. It was a weekend day, and I was dressed liked it: shorts, T-shirt. Young black male.
I parked and started toward the guy with the biggest headpiece. The troopers begin to move as one, as if I had roused some restless beast. Remember, though: my town. I heard a voice booming: “Leave 'im alone! He ah-right.”
The sheriff, my sheriff -- so southern, so redneck that cliché does not even begin to cover it. Still, he was the best source I had, and I am willing to bet that he would tell you that that our relationship was evidence that race is not as big a deal as people make it out to be. The next year the whole state got on that bandwagon and elected Doug Wilder the first, and still the only, black governor since the Reconstruction.
I walked up to the Klansman and introduced myself, instinctively offering a handshake. I could hear the television cameras clicking on. There weren't even a dozen robes there that day, less than half what he had predicted.
I left thinking that the Klan was more pathetic than dangerous, and that most people -- black and, especially, white -- thought that things were different now, that they had changed for the better. Add to that that in Virginia there is a sense, Massive Resistance aside, that they were never really all that bad, and occasionally they want to prove it. That's why Wilder could be governor, and that's why Democrats still win the governor's mansion from time to time.
Which bring us to the current, frenzied, nasty race, pitting Republican former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore against Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine. Kaine is not black, but he is a Democrat, the former mayor of Richmond, and a onetime death-row defense attorney. In the usual calculus, a Democrat from Richmond who opposes, or once opposed, the death penalty is looking at three strikes with a lot of Virginia voters. The race, however, is tied, and Kilgore has released, or unleashed, a series of death-penalty ads about specific killings that fall just short of putting the gun in Kaine's hands.
“Tim Kaine voluntarily represented the person who murdered my son," says one grieving father in one particularly odious ad. Imagine that: a lawyer representing a man accused of murder. If he stole a sweater, yes, maybe. But murder? Unconscionable. Kaine should not be in this race. Still, in Virginia, which has executed more people than any other state except Texas, the contest is tied.
And that, it seems, has everything to do with the president's popularity, or lack thereof. Kilgore is running away from the president, and hard, almost never mentioning him. It'll be interesting to see if the commander in chief, below 40 percent in the opinion polls, gets an invite to campaign for Kilgore in the next three weeks. Kaine, on the other hand, can't embrace popular Democratic Governor Mark Warner hard enough.
There is also a governor's race being run in New Jersey, and sometimes these two state contests can be a preview of what's to come in the big congressional midterms next year. In 1993, Republicans won New Jersey (Christie Todd Whitman) and Virginia (Jim Gilmore), and the next year Democrats in Congress got wiped out.
It just might be that George W. Bush is making it OK to be a Democrat again. And Virginia, where Bush-Cheney won by a solid 8 points, could be where the bells begin to toll for the GOP in 2006.
Terence Samuel is the former chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
