THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 2, 1994 TAG: 9412020529
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
Citing family duties, Michael Farris withdrew as a contender for the GOP nomination to the U.S. Senate in 1996.
U.S. Sen. John Warner, running for re-election, said he respected Farris' reason - as would anybody, upon learning there are nine offspring in the Farris household.
Farris has an unshakable grip on his followers, and he may run again for lieutenant governor, which is far less demanding than being senator.
Actually, the work in the U.S. Senate need not loom as foreboding, unless one happens to be on the order of a workaholic, as is Warner.
What is horrific about the job is getting elected. After raising 10 tons of money, a candidate has to sign off as a member of the human race while campaigning at least a year and running himself or herself into a rut of debt rivaling the Atlantic's Norfolk Canyon.
The task of senator, when you examine it, is pretty much what you choose to make it.
It is not as trying as being a conscientious member of a city council or a county board of supervisors.
Problems of a national nature can be ducked, now and then; but local issues, such as where to place a garbage dump, tend to be pressing and intractable
And the day after voting, the odds are you will meet on the street the very fellow against whose back yard you voted to put the dump.
The voters can get at you, and do so, night and day. It is a wonder anybody runs for city council.
Congress is something else. First off, each congressman has a staff amounting to the hordes that followed Genghis Khan.
(In mid-1940s, the likes of Portsmouth's Rep. Porter Hardy had a three-member staff - two in the office and one in the headquarters back home. Now a congressman would be hard put to count, much less name, his or her aides.)
Staffers try to solve problems of the folks back home and brief the senators on the issues and which button to push, yes or no.
Or the senator can relax in a swivel chair, feet on the desk, and read the hometown papers; watch TV panel shows; or, to get a cross section of the feelings of the nation's uninformed segment, listen to the yammering on network talk shows, as predictable as whippoorwills at dusk.
Then the Congress member can play it safe and pile up a pension by voting with the turgid flow or follow his or her own conscience, to be able to look a grandchild in the eye.
Farris is not the first to choose to stay with his family. Norfolk's much-admired Colgate W. Darden Jr., after being a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, a congressman and governor, turned down a certain seat in the U.S. Senate to serve 12 years as president of the University of Virginia.
U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd, the Democratic boss who offered Darden the Senate seat, marveled ever after that he had rejected it. by CNB