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By Howard Fineman
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As young men in law school in the 1970s, neither Mark Warner nor George Allen set the legal world on fire. At Harvard, Warner founded a group called the Somerville Bar Review--that's "bar" as in drinking studies, not professional ones. "I was the only guy I knew who didn't get law-firm offers after summer internships," he says. At the University of Virginia, Allen lived in a cabin on the mountaintop next to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. But the scenery did more to inspire a passion for deer hunting than textbook reading; his mud-spattered truck was a rare sight in the law-school parking lot. "I probably didn't fit in real well," he says.
But then, as immigrants to Virginia, both men spied their main chance in 1982--and took it. Searching for a big financial score, Warner heard through a friend that Atlanta TV mogul Ted Turner had become interested in an infant technology called "cellular" phones. "My law buddies asked, 'Who is going to want to talk on a phone in their car?' " Answer: everyone. He amassed a fortune, bought a mansion in the northern Virginia suburb of Washington and began plotting his entry into politics as a Democrat. Allen, the son and namesake of the Hall of Fame football coach, saw the opening he needed to launch his political career when the state redrew the lines and the rules for electing the House of Delegates. The new plan carved out a district consisting almost exclusively of rural countryside near Charlottesville--the very woods Allen had been tramping through, thinking conservative Republican thoughts. He ran, and won by 25 votes. "It's Mr. Jefferson's seat," Allen proudly notes.
As a new election cycle begins, Virginia--and the double-helix career of these two Virginians--is moving to center stage. Differing in background, tone and philosophy, they offer competing models of how to succeed in the South, where Democrats must be competitive if they hope to win the White House again. Warner, 51, is ending a much-praised term as a socially moderate, technocratic governor. Now he is launching a bid for the --Democratic presidential nomination on the theory that he knows the key to winning Red State votes. The 53-year-old Allen, a successful governor in his own right in the '90s, is running for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2006. A smiling but tough conservative--a hawk on war, a traditionalist on social issues--Allen is the distilled spirit of the Southern-based GOP of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. If Allen wins handily next year--and that is not necessarily certain--his next goal will be to head the GOP presidential ticket in 2008. "These guys are both the real deal," says Craig Shirley, a GOP consultant.
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Virginia itself is part of their story--and a test bed for political change in the country as a whole. As the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown approaches--soon to be a major motion picture--Virginia remains suffused with the Jeffersonian aura and the gentle green landscape of an agrarian democracy. But Virginia today is far less about cigarette tobacco than digital technology, and its devotion to segregation has long since been rendered moot by the election of the nation's first African-American governor (Doug Wilder, in 1989) and by a global influx of immigrants, drawn by the economic buzz of several of the nation's largest semiconductor "fabs" (short for fabricating plants) and the vast headquarter campuses of companies such as AOL and Nextel. President Lyndon B. Johnson won the state in 1964. No Democrat has since. But the changing economics and demographics could put it in play in 2008. "If Warner's on the ticket, it will be," says Shirley.
Tellingly, neither of these modern Virginia gentlemen is Virginia-bred. The son of an Aetna insurance man, Warner was born in Indianapolis, attended grade school in Peoria, Ill., and high school in the suburbs of Hartford, Conn. A yen for politics lured him to George Washington University in D.C., to Harvard Law and to communications ventures that drew on his political contacts (he had forged his own, from scratch, in Connecticut) and on a knowledge of federal bureaucracy. His net worth is estimated to be well north of $100 million. Allen's family, headed by a football-coaching father, was equally peripatetic. Born in Whittier, Calif., he followed the various whistle-stops of his father's career: Whittier College (Richard Nixon's alma mater), Chicago Bears, Los Angeles Rams. Allen was a freshman quarterback at UCLA when his dad was named head coach of the Washington Redskins in 1971. That landed the son at the University of Virginia, where, essentially, he has been ever since. "He's perfected a drawl, but he's really more West than South," says Larry Sabato, a UVA politics professor and Allen classmate.
Once established in Virginia, Warner and Allen pursued markedly different theories of how to reach the governor's mansion in Richmond: Allen by accentuating ideological distinctions, Warner by muting them. Allen had been reared among prominent Republicans; his father hobnobbed on the sidelines with Reagan and Nixon. Allen became a serious fan of Jefferson's, especially his suspicion of concentrated federal power. As a candidate for governor in 1993, Allen ran as the Reagan of Monticello: a sunny-faced but staunch son of the Old South who favored the freedom to bear arms, new restrictions on abortion, an end to traditional welfare and a respect for the history of the Confederacy.
Warner, by contrast, is not by nature a fan of traditional political labels--a wise thing these days for a Democrat in the South. His parents were community-minded but apolitical, he says. As a scholarship student at GW, he worked for a series of Connecticut pols (Ella Grasso, Abe Ribicoff, Chris Dodd) known more for their savvy than their ideological fire. Asked to name his own role model, he cites a Roosevelt--not Franklin D., but Theodore, a Republican iconoclast known for his can-do spirit, environmental awareness and outside-the-box thinking. As a candidate in 2001, Warner stressed his successes as a high-tech entrepreneur (assembling the financing and the spectrum for Nextel was his major investment coup) and social-issue moderation: support for the death penalty, welfare reform and selected limits (such as parental notification) on abortion.
Allen and Warner share an aversion to the manners of the old-school Cavaliers, but their leadership styles otherwise are worlds apart. Allen's is about as subtle as a clothesline tackle--an attitude bred by a father who was famous for his inspirational (and sometimes violent) pep talks in the locker room and on the sidelines. The son spent summers in Nevada and Idaho learning to break horses the "Western way"--which, he explained, means "fast and hard, and you put 'em in sand and mud and you spur 'em and wear 'em out fast and quick." When he became governor, he said, he mistakenly tried to apply that theory to the then Democratic-controlled state legislature. "Virginians like the Eastern way," he found out, "which is, you curry 'em and you give 'em an apple and some sugar and carrots." He can still be blunt, however. At the GOP state convention in 1994, he urged the faithful to kick the Democrats' "soft teeth down their whiney throats."
Warner's roots are in another place entirely: the dealmaking '80s, which valued "win-win" alliances among technologists and investors not bound by old ways of thinking. The key to his first deal was realizing that regulators had hopelessly balkanized the licensing of regional cellular services--and that he could make a killing by brokering deals among them. To create the base for Nextel, he aggregated myriad old "push to talk" companies (think taxi dispatchers) into a new, nationwide use for their portion of the radio spectrum. He behaved the same way as governor, seeking the involvement--sometimes too much involvement, he now says--from other players in Richmond, including Republicans.
Hardly buddies, Allen and Warner nevertheless have worked together, or at least tolerated each other, on the issues that matter most: economic development and education. In 2002 Warner broke a campaign pledge and raised state taxes. "When we got in, we found the deficit was five times worse than what we had been told it was," he says. Allen, in the U.S. Senate but still the titular leader of the Virginia GOP, did not rush to the antitax barricades, and Warner wooed enough Republicans to pass his own budget plan. Warner, for his part, strongly supports Allen's leading achievement: the establishment of strict high-school testing standards. Rather than challenge the law, Warner created a crash program to meet its objectives--and won bipartisan praise for doing so.
But that may well be the last time they are on the same page. Warner leaves the governorship soon, and will head out on the campaign trail to test the waters currently patrolled, if not controlled, by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "He's very rich and very unemployed," notes Shirley. As for Allen, his first goal is to win an impressive re-election victory in '06, even as Warner, fresh from his success in helping to elect his protege Tim Kaine as governor, searches for a Democrat to derail him. Has the nation grown weary of the boot-wearing Bush style? Will voters embrace a Democrat without national-security credentials? And can the country handle the prospect of an intrastate smackdown for the White House? "This isn't New York," says Sabato of UVA. "It's not big enough to support two major presidential candidacies." Perhaps not. But Virginia used to be called the "Mother of Presidents," and now there are adopted sons eager to make their own history.
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