Breakthrough In Virginia

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Not every dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun. In politics it can sometimes ripen and harden into a tough kernel of ambition, as the unimaginable slowly becomes transformed into the attainable. Such a gradual course requires patience, guile and discipline, rather than flamboyant words and heroic poses. But the subtlety of these stratagems should never mask the majesty of the dream or the boldness of the dreamer.

So it was with a Virginia political trailblazer named Douglas Wilder. Back in 1975, when Wilder was the only black in the state senate (and the first since 1890), he gave voice to his overarching aspirations, a notion of empowerment far beyond what seemed plausible amid the genteel conservatism of the Old Dominion. "If people will elect you Lieutenant Governor," Wilder predicted with startling prescience, "they'll elect you Governor. I would think it would be an interesting test somewhere along the line for a black to run for one of those positions so as to put prejudice right on the line."

Fourteen years later, election night 1989, Wilder himself provided Virginia voters -- and, by implication, the nation as a whole -- with the most ambitious referendum on black political progress since Jesse Jackson first dabbled in presidential primaries. With Wilder, the grandson of slaves, battling to become the nation's first elected black Governor, it seemed almost commonplace that black mayoral candidates from Seattle to New York City were winning their own landmark races.

Faithful to his prediction, Wilder had clambered onto the statewide leadership ladder with his election as Lieutenant Governor in 1985. In contrast to Jackson's often divisive politics of prophecy, Wilder was now the candidate of consensus progress and a united Democratic Party. If successful, he would become the model for future black crossover politicians who could triumph in places like Virginia, where the electorate was 80% white.

No longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop the historic implications of his campaign in a protective cloak of Bill Cosbyesque banalities.

Wilder's strategy appeared to be working so well that few expected election night to be a Maalox Moment. All the published pre-election surveys had shown Wilder leading his Republican rival J. Marshall Coleman by margins of 4% to 15%. Even an initial television exit poll had anointed Wilder with a 10 percentage-point triumph. But by the time Wilder felt comfortable enough to declare victory, his razor-thin lead had stabilized about where it would end up: just 6,582 votes out of a record 1.78 million ballots cast. That was enough, however, for Virginia's Governor-elect to declare proudly, "As a boy, when I would read about an Abe Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson . . . when I would read that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . I knew it meant me."

Wilder's wafer-thin win should have been all the more satisfying, for it underlines the extent of the racial barriers that he has surmounted. But in the topsy-turvy world of political analysis, this Virginia victory was measured against the unrealistically optimistic expectations raised by the pre-election surveys and as a result was somehow found wanting. According to the final CBS/New York Times exit polls, Wilder won an impressive 39% of the white vote. In 1988 Democratic primaries, Jackson never came close to this type of biracial mandate. Moreover, Wilder ran neck and neck with Coleman among all voters over 45, the group most likely to remember the era of "massive resistance" in the mid-1950s, when Prince Edward County shut down its public schools rather than integrate them.

Wilder, himself a product of segregated education and law school at Howard University, will be the embodiment of state government for the next four years. When he is inaugurated in January, he will command more day-to-day administrative power than any other elected black official in the nation's history. (P.B.S. Pinchback, hitherto the nation's only black Governor, served for just four weeks in Louisiana during Reconstruction.) But there is also an important symbolic dimension to Wilder's election. It is sobering to remember that just one other black has been elected to major statewide office since Reconstruction: former Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Only two black Congressmen and a handful of the nation's other 7,000 black elected officials serve constituencies in which blacks are not a majority. Even David Dinkins' triumph in New York City was a reminder of the constraints on black political power; most big-city mayors operate in a no-win environment, where their capacity to be blamed for insoluble urban problems far exceeds their powers and resources.

Wilder's ascension inevitably prompted journalists to dust off their favorite Virginia cliches ranging from "Capital of the Confederacy" to political scientist V.O. Key's 1949 description of the state's old-family oligarchy as a "political museum piece." But, in truth, Virginia has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 20 years. A booming urban corridor, which includes two-thirds of the state's voters, curves south from the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia, crosses Richmond and heads east to the bustling Tidewater area around Norfolk. Although no Democratic presidential contender has carried Virginia since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the party has controlled state government since the 1981 election of L.B.J.'s son- in-law, the popular Governor (and now Senator) Chuck Robb. The respected current Governor, Gerald Baliles, cannot succeed himself under state law. As political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia puts it, "I think of Virginia today more as a Middle Atlantic state than a Southern state."

In Richmond the hurrahs over Wilder's election have been tempered by an almost equal amount of hand wringing over his meager margin. But no one should have expected Wilder's candidacy to usher in the millennium of a color-blind electorate. Coleman has contributed to this yes-but mood by threatening to call for a recount, though his chances of a resurrection appear scant.

Political pundits have vied to quantify what is virtually unknowable: the precise number of Democratic-leaning white Virginians who could not bring themselves to vote for a black candidate. Polls are unreliable on this point, since few voters are secure enough in their bigotry to confess such blatant bias. Wilder strategists, perhaps reflecting their candidate's de-emphasis of racial issues, argue that their putative lead was always exaggerated. "In none of our polling did we expect to have Doug much over 51%," says Wilder pollster Mike Donilon. In other words, if the election was always destined to be a cliffhanger, there was no dramatic last-minute drop-off of Wilder's white support.

But the prevalent interpretation is that Wilder was forced to eke out such a narrow victory only because he was a black candidate. The most common benchmark is to measure Wilder's vote against the come-from-behind 54% to 46% triumph of Democrat Donald Beyer over Edwina ("Eddy") Dalton in the battle for Lieutenant Governor. What gives piquancy to this comparison is that Beyer, a Volvo dealer and political neophyte, was running against the widow of a former Governor. "Wilder would have won a victory similar to Beyer's if he had been white," contends Sabato. But this is a bit facile. "You've got to look at the races separately," says Mandy Grunwald, Beyer's media consultant. "Coleman ran a better closing campaign than Dalton."

For his part, Wilder seems doggedly determined not to discover any larger morals in his victory. Having adroitly kept Jackson out of the state -- except to catch planes at Washington National Airport -- Wilder clearly does not want to risk being drawn into the morass of national black politics. At a Wednesday press conference, the victorious candidate went so far as to insist, "There isn't any lesson to learn from what we did in Virginia, as a prototype relative to being a black candidate." While there are few similarities other than race between him and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who is planning a 1990 race for Georgia Governor, Wilder's entire career can be viewed as a political primer for other crossover black candidates trying to win in a largely white world. Some of its lessons:

Remember, black politics is minority politics. Today Wilder can say, with almost perverse pride, "I've never been identified as an activist." Even during the turbulent 1960s, Wilder was far more concerned with amassing wealth (he is now a millionaire) as a trial lawyer than with civil rights protest. In his successful bid for state senate in 1969, he shrewdly outmaneuvered the would-be candidate of the Richmond black establishment, pointedly set up his headquarters in the downtown business district and won an estimated 18% of the white vote.

As the only black in the state senate, Wilder was destined to stand out, even if he had not in those days worn his hair in a bushy Afro and favored flashy suits. His initial speech was an eloquent, albeit quixotic, lament over the racist lyrics in the official state anthem, Carry Me Back to Old Virginia. Even his friends chastised Wilder for such an impolitic gesture, but he explained that the song "got under my skin so bad that I just couldn't resist it." (Now largely ignored, the song is unlikely to be featured at Wilder's inaugural.)

But Wilder soon began learning how to be a political insider, not a lonely crusader. He bridged centuries of Virginia history by forging personal alliances with rural conservatives and deflected racially insensitive comments with wit and humor. Even as he waged a long and ultimately successful fight to establish a state holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., Wilder's legislative priorities reflected the interests of trial lawyers and the Richmond business community. In back-room bargaining, Wilder was a tough, unyielding adversary. "A lot of people don't like him," says J.T. ("Jay") Shropshire, the clerk of the state senate who became a Wilder confidant. "But they respect him because he won't back down."

Take the slow train to the mountaintop. In 1982 Wilder convincingly demonstrated his power, not only as the state's pre-eminent black politician but also as a force to reckon with in the Virginia Democratic Party. Just months after Robb became the state's first Democratic Governor in over a decade, Wilder single-handedly blocked his choice for the U.S. Senate nomination. His pretext was that the would-be nominee had been too prolix in his praise of the Byrd dynasty that had dominated the state in the segregationist era. Wilder's gambit was to threaten to run for the Senate himself as an independent and split the party's vote. The result: Robb backed down, and the party, with Wilder's blessing, nominated a compromise candidate.

All this Byzantine maneuvering was but a prelude to Wilder's breakthrough: his nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 1985. Virtually no leading white politicians wanted Wilder on the ticket; the issue was whether they would risk his wrath to keep him off. Wilder cemented a successful alliance with Baliles, the underdog for the gubernatorial nomination, because he was in the weakest position to resist a black running mate. "There were people in the Baliles campaign," Wilder recalled afterward, "who didn't want me on the ticket either."

Wilder's statewide campaign in 1985 can best be understood as the test marketing of the candidate for the 1989 gubernatorial race. Strapped for campaign cash, Wilder made news by touring each of the state's 95 counties. He neutralized stereotypes by filming a TV ad trumpeting his endorsement by a prototypical rural policeman, who looked like an extra from Smokey and the Bandit. Even when his G.O.P. opponent attacked him for owning slum property and being reprimanded by the state supreme court for unduly delaying a client's case, the normally combative Wilder turned the other cheek. As Paul Goldman, Wilder's longtime backstage strategist, explains, "One of the things we learned in 1985 is that if you don't think about race, it doesn't matter." Wilder won with what, compared with last week's results, seems almost a landslide margin: nearly 52% of the vote.

Wilder never faced a serious challenge for the gubernatorial nomination once he pressured State Attorney General Mary Sue Terry to defer her own ambitions until 1993. There was grumbling in the Robb faction of the state party, but once again, no one wanted to risk an open schism by trying to deprive Wilder of his moment on the mountaintop. There was no chance of a racially divisive primary, since Virginia Democrats, unlike those in other Southern states, nominate by convention. In a sense, Wilder was the beneficiary of old- fashioned back-room politics, just as Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates were in the urban North decades ago. With the aid of the Robb and Baliles organization, plus his own ties to Richmond business interests, Wilder was able to raise $7.2 million, avoiding the traditional fate of ill-funded black candidates.

Find a silver-bullet issue even more powerful than race. The Wilder camp braced for a close contest, even after Coleman, perhaps their weakest Republican challenger, won a bruising three-way G.O.P. primary. Coleman immediately launched a fusillade of negative spots, dredging up the personal charges against Wilder from the 1985 campaign. Without a cutting issue to transform the debate, the internal calculus in the Wilder campaign was that its candidate was mired at around 45% support, partly because of Democratic defections stemming from a rancorous coal miners' strike in southwestern Virginia and a Labor Day riot among black college students in Virginia Beach.

Enter Doug Wilder, divorced, father of three and abortion-rights crusader. Coleman was a tempting target, since he had placated the Republican right by opposing all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. Wilder media consultant Frank Greer prepared an abortion ad, almost certain to be emulated by other pro-choice Democrats in 1990. Framing the issue in age-old conservative rhetoric, the spot featured images of Thomas Jefferson as an announcer intoned, "Doug Wilder believes the government shouldn't interfere in your right to choose. He wants to keep politicians out of your personal life." It was the next sentence, perhaps the most important in the campaign, that provided the thematic subtext: "Don't let Marshall Coleman take us back."

That line was much more than just a reminder of the era before Roe v. Wade. It also consciously harked back to segregationist, backwater Virginia, a sleepy Southern state dominated by the oligarchic Byrd machine. The implication was that not only abortion and race were at stake but even the state's economic prosperity. It is oversimplistic to attribute too much influence to a single TV ad in a media-glutted statewide campaign. But the abortion issue was framed in a way that allowed Wilder to make inroads among racially tolerant, upscale voters who might be tempted to vote Republican on economic grounds. In affluent northern Virginia, Wilder ran a crucial two percentage points ahead of his 1985 showing. "Abortion is the symbolic issue for a tremendous life-style change," says Goldman. "And so is voting for Doug Wilder."

Virginia has always been in the forefront of racial change. It was at Jamestown in 1619 that the first shipload of captive Africans later destined for slavery disembarked. It was at Appomattox in 1865 that the Confederacy surrendered. It was in Virginia in the 1950s that men who fancied themselves learned penned some of the last erudite-sounding but morally bankrupt justifications for segregation. And it will be in Richmond on Jan. 13 that there will be a black hand on the Bible when Lawrence Douglas Wilder is sworn in as Virginia's 73rd Governor. It is not only in Berlin that ugly walls and once impassable barriers are tumbling down in a world bright with change.

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: CBS News/New York Times exit poll}]CAPTION: Winning by a whisker

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: CBS News/New York Times exit poll}]CAPTION: The vote by race... and sex

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CAPTION: What mattered in Virginia

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Don Winbush/Richmond