GEORGE ALLEN'S RACE PROBLEM.
Pin Prick
by Ryan Lizza 1 | 2 | 3
Post date 04.27.06 | Issue date 05.08.06
[Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in April. Since then, George
Allen has called an Indian-American campaign volunteer for his opponent a
"macaca"--a derogatory term meaning "monkey." We've reported on the current
controversy in The Plank. This profile of Allen by Ryan Lizza puts the story
in context, chronicling his longtime love affair with Dixie and with the
Confederate flag in particular.]
enator George Allen is the only person in Virginia who wears cowboy boots.
It's a warm and bright spring day in the swampy southeastern Virginia town
of Wakefield, site of the annual Virginia political fest known as Shad
Planking. Once a whites-only event where state Democrats picked their
nominees, Shad Planking is now a multiracial affair where candidates from
both parties come to show off their regular-guy bona fides and trade
lighthearted barbs. Beer flows freely. Knots of tailgaters gossip about
state politics. In a clearing amid tall pines, shad is cooked on long wooden
boards. Though the two Democrats fighting for a shot to challenge Allen this
year in his Senate reelection campaign both show up for the event, Allen
clearly owns the crowd, as the sea of royal blue allen t-shirts and baseball
caps makes clear. The senator has emerged as the principal conservative
alternative to John McCain in the early jockeying among 2008 Republican
presidential candidates, and today's event is a reminder of what
conservatives love about him.
But nobody else wears cowboy boots. The guy passing out the stickers that
say i support confederate history month is in sneakers. The libertarian who
asks me to ask Allen about industrial hemp and abolition of the IRS is in
very sensible shoes. The pink and pudgy sports-radio host drawling friendly
questions at Allen is in loafers. A guy walks up to Allen and sticks a piece
of paper in his hand. "Some people are handing out these, saying you aren't
pro-gun enough," he tells the senator, a little menacingly. I look down at
his feet. High-tops.
There is a guy in a bolo tie. This excites Allen, who is quoted in the
newspaper the next day approvingly advising bolo guy, "If you're going to
wear a tie, that's the one to wear." Allen has lots of finely honed opinions
about red-state cultural aesthetics, and he is always eager to share them.
He talks with the radio host about the merits of Virginia's different
country music stations. Allen is dismayed about the modern country played on
one AM station. "I like the real country music," he says.
It's credible enthusiasm given that, this afternoon, Allen resembles a
froufrou version of Toby Keith. He is wearing a blue button-down shirt and
brown pants accented with a fat brass belt buckle that says virginia in
stylized, countrified letters. And, of course, he's wearing the cowboy
boots. They are black, broken in, and vaguely reptilian. From his back
pocket, he removes a tin of Copenhagen--"the brand of choice for adult
consumers who identify with its rugged, individual and uncompromising
image," according to the company--and taps a fat wad of the tobacco between
his lip and gum using an impressive one-handed maneuver. As the scrum breaks
up, Allen turns away and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt,
just missing one of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde,
ponytailed woman approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her
tracks and stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost
landed on her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen's communications director,
John Reid, reassures her: "That's just authenticity!"
It's a word they use a lot it the Allen world--"authenticity." His aides and
the growing ranks of conservative backers hungry for someone to take out
McCain emphasize Allen's down-home credentials and cowboy-boot charisma far
more than his voting record. A glowing National Review cover story, to take
one recent example, trumpeted Allen's preternatural fluency in the sports
metaphor-laden language of American masculinity. This gift for communicating
in the vernacular of John Madden doesn't just distinguish him; it makes him
the ideal vehicle for a particular brand of Republican campaign strategy. As
the GOP has grown increasingly adept at turning elections into contests
about style and character rather than issues and ideas, some Republicans
have become obsessed with finding candidates who can project the cultural
identity of a red-state everyman. It sometimes seems that pro-nascar has
replaced pro-life as the party's litmus test.
While Allen's shit-kickin' image may be the subject of certain Republican
consultant fantasies, it may not be ideal in the current political climate.
A certain someone has, after all, used that shtick before, effectively
bludgeoning his Democratic opponents with his Texas brand of cultural
populism. But, by now, that folksy act looks a little spent. And, although
Allen is undoubtedly the hot new thing within the Beltway's conservative
establishment, some denizens of K Street and right-wing newsrooms have begun
doubting whether he represents their best hope to snuff out the burgeoning
campaign of their enemy, McCain. "If my choice is, 'Who do I want to go out
with to a fun dinner to drink our brains out,'" says one of the party's top
fund-raisers who has met with Allen many times, "there's no question, it'd
be Allen. He's a guy's guy, but he didn't blow me away in terms of
substance."
Fortunately for Allen, he has a protean ability to shift political personas
to adapt to the prevailing political fashions. In the 1980s, he was a Reagan
revolutionary. As governor of Virginia at the height of the Gingrich
insurgency, he promoted his own version of the Contract with America
throughout his state. As Virginia modernized, with high-tech eclipsing the
tobacco economy, he remade himself as a traveling-salesman governor, luring
new companies to the state.
Even in these early days of his budding presidential campaign, he has
slipped out of the self-styled image of Bush's most loyal foot soldier. He
now says the president is welcome to campaign for him but expresses no
enthusiasm for the idea. He tells reporters he is more like Ronald Reagan
than George W. Bush. But it's not Bush from whom Allen ultimately needs to
distance himself. There is a graveyard of old Allen personas--unpresidential
personas, downright ugly ones--that could threaten his political ascendance.
Even his authentic self--or, rather, the man described by his own
family--might prove just as great a liability. His identity crisis has
created the most intriguing duel of 2008: Before he runs for president,
George Allen has to run against himself.
t's mid-April, and the private plane carrying Allen and his entourage has
just landed at the Stafford Regional Airport. After months of out-of-state
fundraising and sojourns into Iowa and New Hampshire, the senator is
suddenly taking care of business back home with a three-day, eleven-city
reelection announcement tour. Jim Webb, Reagan's Navy secretary, is running
in the Democratic primary, Bush's job approval rating in the state is in the
30s, and there is some cautious talk about Virginia, once a presumed gimme
for Allen, becoming a competitive race.
After all the heady presidential planning--the hiring of big-name
consultants like Mary Matalin, Ed Gillespie, and Dick Wadhams and the
first-place finish in fund-raising last quarter--nothing could bring Allen
down to earth faster than the Stafford event. There are less than three
dozen people here, including numerous Allen aides. The wind knocks over the
American and Virginia flags that form Allen's backdrop. And then there is
Craig Ennis, who says he's an independent candidate here to debate Allen.
His t-shirt says u.s. special forces: motivated, dedicated, lethal. He
positions himself in front of the platform on which Allen and his wife,
Susan, stand and holds a homemade sign: why do you hide from me?
Allen delivers a stump speech that rests heavily on his record as governor
from 1994 to 1998 and skips rapidly over the details of his five years in
the Senate. The soft-peddling of his legislative record may have struck the
audience as a strange tack for an incumbent. But it has its own compelling
political logic. Allen knows that senators have a dismal record as
presidential candidates. There is, however, an equally compelling reason why
Allen might not want to revisit his years in Richmond.
In the early '90s, Allen exuded the revolutionary spirit of the Republican
insurgency. His 1994 inaugural address as governor promised to "fight the
beast of tyranny and oppression that our federal government has become."
That year, he also endorsed Oliver North for the Senate even as Virginia
Senator John Warner and others in the party establishment shunned the
convicted felon. At North's nominating convention, Allen proposed a somewhat
overwrought approach for beating Democrats: "My friends--and I say this
figuratively--let's enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining
throats."
But, while Allen may have genuflected in the direction of Gingrich, he also
showed a touch of Strom Thurmond. Campaigning for governor in 1993, he
admitted to prominently displaying a Confederate flag in his living room. He
said it was part of a flag collection--and had been removed at the start of
his gubernatorial bid. When it was learned that he kept a noose hanging on a
ficus tree in his law office, he said it was part of a Western memorabilia
collection. These explanations may be sincere. But, as a chief executive, he
also compiled a controversial record on race. In 1994, he said he would
accept an honorary membership at a Richmond social club with a well-known
history of discrimination--an invitation that the three previous governors
had refused. After an outcry, Allen rejected the offer. He replaced the only
black member of the University of Virginia (UVA) Board of Visitors with a
white one. He issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate
Veterans declaring April Confederate History and Heritage Month. The text
celebrated Dixie's "four-year struggle for independence and sovereign
rights." There was no mention of slavery. After some of the early flaps, a
headline in The Washington Post read, "governor seen leading va. back in
time."
Allen has described those early years as a learning experience. Indeed, he
sanded off the rough edges and began molding himself to the Bush era, when
conservatives began abandoning the crudeness of their old Southern strategy.
During the second half of his gubernatorial term, Allen began positioning
himself as the next cool thing in Republican politics, a governor more
interested in results than partisanship. Indeed, at the Stafford Airport
stump speech, there are no confederate flags or coded racial appeals.
Instead, Allen talks about energy independence and the competitive challenge
from rising economies like China's and India's. If it weren't for some of
the rhetoric about "tax commissars," one might mistake Allen's stump speech
for a Tom Friedman column.
Even if the moderate turn leads voters to remember the governor of fiscal
responsibility rather than the Confederate history booster, there's still a
problem. Before there was a Governor Allen, there was a state legislator
Allen. Allen became active in Virginia politics in the mid-'70s, when state
Republicans were first learning how to assemble a new political coalition by
wooing white Democrats with appeals to states' rights and respect for Dixie
heritage.
Allen was a quick study. In his first race in 1979--according to Larry
Sabato, a UVA professor and college classmate of Allen's--he ran a radio ad
decrying a congressional redistricting plan whose main purpose was to elect
Virginia's first post-Reconstruction black congressman. Allen lost that race
but was back in 1982 and won the seat by 25 votes. He spent the next nine
years in Richmond, where his pet issues, judging by the bills he personally
sponsored, were crime and welfare. But he also found himself repeatedly
voting in the minority on a series of racial issues that he seems
embarrassed by today. In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote
against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond
Times-Dispatch reported, "Allen said the state shouldn't honor a
non-Virginian with his own holiday." He was also bothered by the fact that
the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That same year, he did feel the urge to
honor one of Virginia's own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing "regret
and sorrow upon the loss" of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed
every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s
and 1960s and promised "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's 1954
decision banning segregation.
None of this means Allen is a racist, of course. He is certainly not the
same guy today that he was in the '80s. But his interest in Southern
heritage and his fetish for country culture goes back even further. And
what's truly improbable is how someone with his upbringing ever acquired
such backwoods tastes.
