THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240008
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: COMMONWEALTH CONVERSATION
One of a series of interviews with Virginia's political leaders
conducted by Pilot editorial Margaret Edds. Warner is the former
chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party and a U.S. Senate candidate.
LENGTH: 106 lines
What have been the major trends in Virginia politics in the 1990s?
The Democratic Party of Virginia entered the 1990s with tremendous optimism. We had just set Virginia and national history with the election of Doug Wilder. Our margins in the General Assembly were still fairly strong. Wilder was the third link of the Robb-Baliles-Wilder chain. That almost immediately started to break down, and from a party standpoint, institutional inner tensions in the party papered over in 1987 and 1989 all sort of broke open.
What tensions?
The remnants of the ``Southern'' Democrats mixing with suburban Democrats mixing with the traditional base of minorities, labor and teachers. That coalition was easier to maintain during the 1980s as the economy continued to expand. As the economy started to contract, instead of dealing with ``Democrats'' you were dealing with factions of Democrats.
Was that inevitable after more than a decade in power?
Yes. There was some inevitability in that. And you had at the same time this upsurge in Republicanism across the South. The Republicanism in the South had swept through Virginia, at least at the federal level, in the 1970s, and yet in the 1980s there'd been a swing back toward the new, moderate Democrats.
Did the party not recognize the danger of factionalism?
I don't think it fully recognized the threat, particularly at the legislative level. Pre-1991 there was not enough recognition that we needed to go out and rethink how we recruit candidates and how we plan for some of our senior members when they retire.
And there was very little effort in terms of reforging the coalition of the ``Southern'' Virginia Democrats and the suburban/traditional base of the party. 1991 was a wake-up call at the legislative level and then 1993 was the real kind of knock-down.
Why did you decide to take on the party leadership in 1993?
I was chosen to do it because I was willing to do it. . . . I am very, very proud of what we did with the party from the day after the election in 1993 to June of 1995 when I left. Everyone was predicting the continued meltdown of the Democratic Party of Virginia, that we were going to have Armageddon. And it was actually the Republicans that had the battles. We maintained a tremendous level of coexistence inside the party.
How was that achieved?
We decided what we needed for this Democratic Party was a strategic plan. The task here was to focus the energy of the activists into rebuilding the party rather than letting the activists focus on the threatened intraparty strife.
What were the steps?
I really viewed the party in business terms. Here was a company or a product that was about to be driven out of its market. We had to go back and reclaim market share and have a plan to do it, and that plan was going to take more than a 3-month or 6-month time frame.
We went through a couple of sessions where we went away for a weekend with kind of Noah's Ark approach of one from Column A, one from Column B, everybody that makes up the Democratic Party from elected officials to activists to party officials.
That got the inner core of activists interested, and then we took our plan out on a road show and had 13 or 14 different meetings around the state. We invited activists to come in and talk about how we could rebuild the party.
And we were able to do a couple of things. You got the activists re-energized. Simultaneous with that, we were trying to dramatically upgrade the technology, one of my special projects.
And at the same time, we started a nationwide telemarketing campaign against the threat of Ollie North, which wound up raising a considerable amount of money which suddenly gave us a new source of income. It allowed us to take a party that was broke and it gave us staff and technology assets. We also initiated the first real outreach program for the party.
We'd already gotten our tails kicked in '93, so in '94 we were aware of the threat that was coming in the national elections. In the stories about the '94 election there was perhaps not enough focus on the congressional races. If you go back to early 1994 and you look at the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, they had targeted (Virginia congressmen) Owen Pickett, Norman Sisisky, L. F. Payne, Rick Boucher.
To the credit of all those individuals, they all ran super campaigns in 1994. But there were an awful lot of other Southern white Democrats that ran pretty good cmapaigns in 1994 that got swept out by the tide. I think the re-energized Virginia Democratic Party was a true asset in their re-election efforts.
What happened was, we'd gone past the bickering stage. We had a very united party. Everybody talked about Robb (winning), but nobody talked about the fact that six out of seven of our congressional candidates won in 1994, and no other Southern state got close to that.
How much did the Republicans help you in rebuilding the party?
Ollie North was a galvanizing force. . . . George Allen upped the stakes by his level of partisanship. With his outgoing personality, if he had come in and instead of trying to stomp Democrats had actually tried to co-opt them a little bit, he would have been more successful.
Can Democrats continue to hold on in Virginia? Trends would seem to be against it across the South.
If Virginia Democrats can continue to maintain their rightful position as fiscal conservatives, I think they can. Part of the key is not being swept away on the fiscal issues, and also if they can maintain a cultural conservatism. MEMO: These interviews by Margaret Edds were conducted for a book about
Southern politics in the 1990s. The Virginia chapter is being written by
Dr. Thomas Morris, president of Emory & Henry College, and Ms. Edds. ILLUSTRATION: Mark Warner
KEYWORDS: CANDIDATES INTERVIEW U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA
1996 by CNB