Race sent George Allen into the pits

By Bob Gibson

Published: November 12, 2006

U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Fairfax County, first won in a nail-biter and finally lost 24 years later in a nail-biter.

He beat Del. James B. Murray Sr., D-Albemarle County, by 25 votes in 1982 and lost to Democrat Jim Webb last week by 8,935 votes out of more than 2.3 million cast.

In between, Allen built a reputation as a solid conservative party-builder with a knack for rallying the Republican base and bad-mouthing Democrats, bureaucrats and the elites - sort of a cowboy populist in boots.

Nine years in the House of Delegates, four in the governor’s mansion and seven in Congress, including the past six as a senator, changed Allen a bit from man of the country people to a cowboy in suits.

Something didn’t quite fit as his image aged and he moved to Washington.

The man from Earlysville took along an accentuated country twang, a famous inherited name and the political skills to apply smash-mouth football to partisanship, always the party man and sometimes the bipartisan public servant.

Allen’s political skills included the ability to unite a state Republican Party sometimes prone to hunkering down into different philosophical and regional factions.

If he was a uniting figure, however, it was among Republicans. He never appealed much to Democrats. Anyone who intentionally mispronounces the name of the Democratic Party by calling it the Democrat Party isn’t even trying.

Longing to win the White House in 2008, Allen started taking his ambition on the road from Washington, at first raising money for other Republicans and then seeking GOP support in early contest states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

He rotated an ever-changing variety of young aides to do office work, nearly setting records for Senate staff turnover, and became a chicken-and-pea-circuit regular in places like Des Moines, Manchester and Charleston. Allen is as guilty as any presidential aspirant in the Senate of shortchanging Senate work, according to GOP insiders.

Allen’s campaign mistakes reflected the Karl Rovian tone of a re-election bid set when he hired Colorado Republican Dick Wadhams, a protégé of Rove, the political strategist closest to President Bush.

Everyone, including presumably Allen and Wadhams, saw the 2006 Senate race as a test drive around the track to warm up for the 2008 Republican presidential derby. No one expected Allen to wreck the car on the warm-up lap.

By looking ahead to 2008 and by not knowing Virginia, Wadhams and his pit crew of hired outside guns squandered a huge lead when Allen hit the wall in mid-August, looked wounded and unresponsive and limped in for emergency repairs.

Allen had arrived in Washington at the same time as George W. Bush. In what might have seemed smart politics over most of his term, Allen gave Bush and his questionable Iraq war policies unquestioned 96 percent embraces that helped smother his re-election bid this year.

As Allen changed, especially during his six years in the Senate, Virginia changed even more.

Once a reliably red Republican state, the Old Dominion moderated into a brilliant purple state. Democratic blue Northern Virginia made the commonwealth ever more competitive in statewide elections, a fact ignored by Allen and many downstate Republicans to their peril.

Allen’s mistakes, which earned him the prize awarded by Washington insiders for worst-run campaign of the year, included the infamous Aug. 11 “macaca meltdown” in which he called Webb volunteer tracker Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth “macaca” and welcomed the dark-skinned Indian-American to “America and the real world of Virginia.”

Insisting he had made up the word, a racial slur in French-speaking portions of Europe and Africa, or that his campaign workers had coined it after nicknaming Sidarth for his supposed Mohawk haircut, Allen opened the door wide to character questions about himself.

The senator denied, and then suddenly warmly embraced, his Jewish heritage in a series of gaffes that caused many voters to question his credibility, including outright denial that he had ever used the n-word despite reports from many individuals he’d often uttered the racial slur while attending the University of Virginia and its law school.

Promising to talk about “real issues” after Allen dinged himself up for weeks on character questions, his campaign instead spent weeks producing a series of attacks on Webb’s writings that smelled more of desperation than policy debate.

The campaign never got off the character questions, causing an uncomfortable public debate as to whether Webb was more a sexist from his writings than Allen was a bully or racially insensitive from his utterances.

The people Allen employed who couldn’t handle his campaign gaffes were quietly replaced in the fall by a team of Allen campaign veterans who knew Virginia and the candidate better than the pit crew that doubled as a hit crew.

Christopher J. LaCivita, a veteran also of the 2004 swift-boat political attacks that helped sink presidential nominee John Kerry, supplanted Wadhams as the campaign aide with the most clout and took over the Allen damage repair efforts.

By that time, it may have been too late for even a swift-boat veteran to successfully apply more tar to Webb than the stuff stuck to Allen.

Contact Bob Gibson at (434) 978-7243 or .