Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 21, 1994 TAG: 9401250277
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The occasion lacked little but Roy Clark and banjo music to make the illusion complete. There was Democratic Speaker of the House of Delegates Tom Moss as Grandpa Jones, emerging from time to time to announce the menu. There was right-wing evangelist Pat Robertson, the Machiavelli of Virginia Beach, as Junior Samples. There, finally, was aspiring candidate and one-time convicted felon Oliver North, grinning inanely around the gap in his teeth, as the Cornfield Jackass.
The cold weather made it impossible to know whether any of the various Republican ladies present could compare with the toothsome wenches, with their bold ways and inviting cleavage, who make ``Hee Haw'' fetching to the eye, but even Republicans are allowed a good time now and then; and clearly Republicans were having a good time Saturday.
They - and above all Allen - had earned it squarely, if not quite fairly, and after 12 years in the political wilderness they had a right to howl. Allen had waged a canny, if mendacious, campaign that surmounted all predictions, all odds and all Democrats to get to the governor's office; in the process his coattails had swept into office the largest representation of Republicans in both the House and Senate those bodies have witnessed in modern times.
The hapless Democrats whom they defeated, starting with Mary Sue Terry, deserved to lose, too. Since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, Virginia Democrats have represented little more than a tedious worship of the status quo in all things. Change, they believed and argued, is dangerous. Taxing voters to spend money on needed state improvements is wicked. Budgets are meant to be modest, and tax receipts that exceed them are invariably described as ``surprising.'' Thus ran the wisdom of the late ``senior'' Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., whose iron fist ran Virginia for nearly 30 years and continues to send night-sweats through the shivering frames of Democrats in the General Assembly.
Republicans and others who voted for Allen probably did not fully grasp that their man's stated political intentions are the incarnation of Byrd's Little Red Book; but they certainly smelled the stink the General Assembly - and especially freshly ex-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder - have left in Richmond.
State education at all levels is critically underfinanced. Highways, bridges and back roads are falling apart from want of care. ``Abolishing parole'' may not be the answer to Virginia's shocking rise in violent crime, but the crime is rising, it is violent and most Virginians are shocked at how little their elected officials seem to care.
Allen either sensed or was told all these things and exploited them skillfully in the campaign that brought him, last Saturday, to Richmond. Manfully trying to shift his tobacco chaw as he read his inaugural speech, however, he repeatedly stumbled over his own lines - which he was said to have written himself - and giggled, inopportunely, at lines that were nastier than they were funny. He promised more than Bill Clinton, and cannot deliver a tenth of it.
None of this encourages Virginians to confidence that they have put a rocket scientist in the Capitol, and in fact it deepens the fear, as did Allen's State of the Commonwealth address to the General Assembly a few days later, that he is a man of extremely limited intellect.
He seems to believe, for example, that buzzwords like ``creative'' and ``conservative'' and ``empower'' have meaning, when any intelligent person could tell him that their true meaning lies in how they are used.
Still, neither the lack of intellect nor intelligence has been much of a bar to the governorship of Virginia, at least since Reconstruction, and it may be that a ``Hee Haw'' governor with a party of wild Republican minions, greedy and self-seeking as Republicans generally are, will be no worse, in the end, than the Democrats who have plundered Virginia for so long.
As usual, of course, only John Q. Public will suffer. But then John Q. Public put both there.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB