Arlington, Va.
When last we left Dick Wadhams, he was sowing confusion and dismay in the Democratic ranks of Congress.
It was Wadhams, the premier Colorado political strategist, who engineered the defeat of then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota in 2004.
Taking out an opposition leader is no small accomplishment. A safe seat, superb political skills and ready access to campaign cash are the usual perquisites of congressional leadership, making it tough to defeat such a leader in an election. But not impossible.
Wadhams was rightly hailed in victory, and some suggested that the Republican Party had found a successor to revered GOP strategists like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater.
Washington Monthly called the 50-year-old Wadhams “Rove 2.0 – the next Republican maestro of cutthroat campaigning.”
“Ridiculous,” says Wadhams. “There is only one Karl Rove. And there was only one Lee Atwater.”
But Sen. George Allen of Virginia, hoping to be elected president in 2008, hired Wadhams to make it happen.
Allen – a former congressman and governor – seemed to have as good a shot as any. He and Wadhams would get to know each other in a re-election lap this year, secure the party’s conservative wing, and win a one-on-one battle for the nomination with the aging maverick, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Until, in an emblematic instant that says everything about the way that the Internet is transforming politics, Allen took a stage in rural Virginia in August, singled out an Indian-American-Democrat who was videotaping the event, and called him “Macaca.”
As epithets go, “macaca” – a genus of monkey – is pretty tame stuff for Virginia, which venerates homegrown heroes like Stonewall Jackson and takes pride in its status as the capital of the Confederacy.
Racial tensions still tarnish the otherwise formidable reputation of the University of Virginia, where Allen played quarterback in the 1970s, and the student body waved rebel flags. His immediate predecessor was Harrison Davis, the first black athlete to play the position for the newly integrated UVA team, whose every incomplete pass elicited ugly racist chants from the liquored frat boys in their boat shoes and khakis.
But the growth of Washington’s prosperous suburbs, and an influx of high-tech professionals as well as Asian-American and Latin American voters, has tempered the Old Dominion’s politics. Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, running as centrists, have won the last two elections for governor by sweeping the capital’s suburbs and exurbs.
“There are a lot of similarities between Virginia and Colorado. You have this burgeoning northern Virginia area, much like the Denver metro area, with a lot of independent-minded voters. You have to work very hard to earn their votes,” says Wadhams. “And then you’ve got the rest of the state that is more conservative.”
Wadhams and Allen told reporters that “macaca” was a nonsense word, and that the senator didn’t mean to call the dark-skinned cameraman an ape. But the video of the moment showed up on YouTube and other websites, where it racked up thousands of hits. Liberal bloggers fueled the fray, depicting Allen as a racially insensitive bully.
The candidate apologized, repeatedly. But he and Wadhams were adrift in a cyclone. The “macaca” incident was representative, the bloggers contended, of a senator who once decorated his home with a Confederate flag, hung a noose in his law office and used racial slurs in his youth.
Wadhams is no Internet neophyte, having employed conservative bloggers with some effect against Daschle. The Internet “makes things move faster,” he says.
“I don’t think there was any blogger phenomenon at all in 2002, but they certainly had an impact in the 2004 race in South Dakota and now you have had kind of an explosion of blogging activity.”
Broadcasters and newspapers joined the swelling hunt. Wadhams has been around politics since former Colorado Sen. William Armstrong’s campaign in 1978, and has steered half a dozen candidates to victory in statewide races, including Gov. Bill Owens and Sen. Wayne Allard in Colorado.
But “this sustained and continued coverage was something I had never seen before,” he says. He speaks of “the intensity and the speed with which these things get magnified” because of the Internet.
Wadhams responded with a two-pronged strategy that finally seemed to stanch the bleeding. The campaign purchased a block of prime-time television for Allen to announce that it was time to return to the issues and put aside character attacks – while launching negative ads that savaged his Democratic opponent, James Webb, as a tax-loving liberal lackey and a sexist pig.
The race is now knotted. It took another ominous turn for Allen this month, when his Republican seatmate, Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, returned from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, voiced doubts about the prospects for victory and called for a reappraisal of U.S. policy.
Webb says much the same things, and Allen – one of the Senate’s most steadfast defenders of President Bush’s conduct of the war – has tried hard to paint his opponent as a coddler of terrorists.
It’s a tough sell. Webb is a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, a former conservative Republican (he once opposed admitting women to combat roles and the military academies) who served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, and an assistant secretary of defense.
Webb entered the race as a critic of White House blundering in Iraq, and campaigns in a pair of desert combat boots given to him by his son, who is currently serving in the Marines there.
In a state rich with veterans and military families, Webb wastes few opportunities to contrast his family’s service with that of Allen and other Republicans, who lead from the Beltway, not the battlefield.
The “macaca” clip will survive, in one or another quadrant of cyberspace. So might Allen’s presidential hopes if he hangs on to win in November.
“In the final analysis,” says Wadhams, “I know we are going to win this election and I think that will be a huge vindication of Sen. Allen after everything we’ve gone through.”
If so, perhaps the Rove 2.0 talk will be revived. Political reporters will make the pilgrimage to Virginia, to ask Wadhams to instruct them in his own mystical unified theory of politics.
The Coloradan rolls his eyes at the notion.
“The only Wadham’s theory right now,” he says, “is to get Sen. Allen re-elected.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
