Posted on 10/10/2004 7:00:35 PM PDT by wagglebee
CHESAPEAKE — Early this year , Frank Driscoll , a longtime Republican launching a campaign for mayor, got a glimpse of the political clout that U.S. Rep. J. Randy Forbes wields in his hometown.
A few days after New Year’s , Driscoll showed up at the local GOP office, where he and other candidates had been invited for interviews with top city Republicans for the party’s endorsement in the upcoming spring elections. Among those talking with him would be Shirley Forbes , the congressman’s wife .
As Driscoll entered the building, he was surprised to see in plain view a box of bumper stickers touting Councilman Dalton Edge for mayor.
What startled Driscoll was this: The subject of the stickers had yet to announce formally that he was even a candidate.
The Republicans, it seemed, had already made plans, and they didn’t include Driscoll.
It turned out that Edge, who would kick off his campaign a few days later surrounded by top GOP officials , had been asked personally by Forbes to run for mayor.
“I had conversations with Dalton Edge for a long period of time,” Forbes acknowledged in a recent interview. “And I had always encouraged Dalton Edge and told him … I believe Dalton Edge is a man of his word. I think he’s a principled person. I think he should run.”
With the backing of Forbes and the local Republican Party, Edge raised more than $100,000 for the race, one of the largest campaign war chests in the history of Chesapeake mayoral elections. On May 4 , he was elected by a razor-thin margin, beating runner-up Rebecca C.W. Adams by a mere 145 votes, as well as Driscoll and six other candidates.
The election was just one striking example of how Forbes, who is running for re-election this fall in his 4th Congressional District , continues to shape the future of Chesapeake even as his national political stature grows.
Asked whether it would be possible for a Republican candidate to be elected in Chesapeake without Forbes’ backing, School Board Chairman Thomas Mercer was blunt : “As far as I know, it hasn’t been done .”
Why would Forbes, a U.S. congressman who says his concerns now revolve around national security and aircraft carriers, continue to be so intimately involved in hometown politics that his support – or lack of it – can make or break a candidacy?
In large part, by his own admission, he can’t and won’t let go of a place where his roots run so deep.
With the exception of college and law school, Forbes, who is 52 , has never left Great Bridge .
The piece of land where he spent a rural, “Mayberry RFD” childhood before the city’s incorporation in 1963 remains his home today, as well as the hub of his political influence and the prime source of his prosperity.
The relationships he developed as a high school student leader, Sunday school teacher, state delegate, state senator and partner in a blue-chip law firm wind through a career that has made him and his wife perhaps the most powerful couple in Chesapeake.
Center of the action
With the possible exception of City Hall, it’s hard to find another wedge of land in Chesapeake where political, legal and financial clout converge the way they do at 524 Johnstown Road .
There, in a neighborhood just west of Battlefield Boulevard , stands a white Colonial-style building that dwarfs everything else around it. The sign over the front door bears the name of the biggest law firm in southeastern Virginia , Kaufman & Canoles . But the building is owned by Randy and Shirley Forbes .
The complex – two former single-family houses that bookend an architecturally compatible midsection – provides office space for several tenants who figure prominently in Randy Forbes’ life.
The north wing, the house on the right as you face the complex, is the congressman’s boyhood home, built in 1951 by his late father, Malcolm. The second floor now houses the district office of Republican state Sen. Harry B. Blevins , who was principal of Great Bridge High School when Forbes was a student there in the late 1960s and who later entered politics at Forbes’ urging.
The midsection of the complex contains the Chesapeake offices of Norfolk-based Kaufman & Canoles, the firm where Forbes prospered briefly as a lawyer before giving up his partnership to serve in Congress.
Though he has dissociated himself from the firm, Forbes still keeps a private, separate office there for personal business. He pays the utilities for his office.
The south wing of 524 Johnstown has served as headquarters for a variety of Republican organizations, including Forbes’ own congressional campaign and the GOP’s local base of operations for President Bush’s re-election.
Another tenant has been the Chesapeake Republican Leadership Council Inc. , a political-action committee organized in October 2002 to groom and support local candidates for office. The PAC’s leaders have included members of Forbes’ campaign staff, and its financial contributors represent a who’s who of the city’s elected officials in the GOP, which began to dominate local politics during the past decade.
Two months before Edge formally announced his candidacy for mayor last January , the leadership council had endorsed him.
As landlords of Kaufman & Canoles and other tenants, Forbes and his wife took in between $100,000 and $1 million in rent in 2003 , according to Forbes’ 2004 disclosure statement .
Shirley Forbes also makes about $30,000 a year working part time as a member of the law firm’s support staff.
When it’s time to leave the office, the Forbeses don’t have far to go. Their stately four-bedroom Colonial home, with an outdoor pool, occupies 3 acres just behind the office complex, separated from it by a white fence.
Lucrative partnership
Randy Forbes is one of three Virginia congressmen worth at least a million dollars , according to U.S. House financial disclosure forms released in June . His House papers put his assets at between $1.5 million and $6 million , most of it in real estate – his Chesapeake office and a cottage in Duck, N.C.
House disclosure statements exclude reporting on one’s personal residence; the Forbeses’ Parker Road home is assessed at about $317,000 .
Forbes didn’t achieve his affluence overnight; it grew in step with his rise to professional prominence.
After finishing first in his class at Randolph-Macon College and graduating in 1977 from the University of Virginia law school , where his classmates included U.S. Sen. George Allen and former Gov. Jim Gilmore , Forbes could have worked for any number of law firms around the country. But he decided to return to Chesapeake.
“I knew I wanted to come back to this area because I love this area,” he said.
In addition to his hometown, the congressional district he represents includes Suffolk, Franklin and Emporia, extending north to Petersburg and counties west of Richmond.
A few years out of school, Forbes started his own firm in 1983 , persuading the Chesapeake City Council to rezone his small boyhood home at 524 Johnstown Road to permit a law office in what was, and still is, primarily a residential neighborhood.
About six years later , Forbes made his first bid for the legislature, winning a seat in the state House of Delegates in 1989 . Less than a decade later, his law practice had grown successful enough to begin attracting the interest of several major firms.
In 1998 , Kaufman & Canoles was looking to set up an office in fast-growing Chesapeake, much as it had done in other Hampton Roads cities. By this time, Forbes’ political influence had become stronger. Two years earlier , he had been elected chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia , and a year after that he waged a successful campaign for the state Senate .
At first, Forbes resisted offers from Kaufman & Canoles and a couple of other big firms. He harbored three main concerns: As a committed Christian , would he continue to be able to help clients with personal issues as well as legal ones if he joined a big firm? Would the integrity of his votes as a state senator remain protected from the interests of the firm and its clients?
And would he be able to stay in Chesapeake?
Kaufman & Canoles eventually managed to assure him on all three counts, and in the summer of 1998 , Forbes became a partner. By the time he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives three years later , his salary was more than $200,000 a year , according to his 2001 disclosure statement .
As part of the merger deal, Forbes made plans to expand his small Johnstown Road practice to provide rental office space for his new firm.
Because of his deep attachment to his boyhood home and to a house next door that he also owned, Forbes couldn’t conceive of demolishing them.
Instead, he decided to connect them with a new central addition.
In the winter of 2000 , he and his wife asked the City Council for a rezoning that would allow for the larger office building.
Sharon Daniels , a neighbor, was among several residents who objected, arguing that the use wouldn’t be compatible with a residential neighborhood and could lead to more development along Johnstown Road. She reminded the council that a little more than four years earlier it had denied another rezoning for a law office at a residential property just down the street.
Among those who appeared before the council on the Forbeses’ behalf was Robert D. Jones , a Chesapeake real estate attorney who had practiced law with Forbes early in his career. “You have to look at the lifetime of devotion to this community,” Jones told the council.
The council voted 7-2 to approve the rezoning. A year later, Jones joined Kaufman & Canoles .
Today he is the firm’s managing partner in Chesapeake.
For Kaufman & Canoles, the merger with Forbes’ firm very quickly led to more business in and with the city.
In 1998, the firm received checks from City Hall , the Chesapeake School Board and the Chesapeake Hospital Authority – the council-appointed board that oversees Chesapeake General Hospital – totaling about $8,800 , according to check records obtained under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act . The records for the city were from July 1, 1998 , forward.
By the end of 1999 , the year after the merger, the firm had been cut checks for more than $456,000 by the city, School Board and hospital authority.
Between 1998 and the middle of this year, Kaufman & Canoles collected nearly $2 million from government-related accounts in Chesapeake. The law firm won competitive bids for the School Board and hospital authority business.
Dee D. Gilmore , Forbes’ chief of staff , said Forbes has had nothing to do with Kaufman & Canoles since joining Congress in June 2001 .
Gus James, Kaufman & Canoles’ managing partner , said the firm wasn’t drawn to Chesapeake primarily to get City Hall business. “We moved there for business opportunities in general,” he said. “It wasn’t city business alone.”
Forbes, when asked whether he played a role in the growth of the firm’s business with Chesapeake’s city government, said: “It would be foolish to say that Kaufman & Canoles went out and hired lawyers that were going to hurt their business. That just wouldn’t make sense. If you look, Kaufman & Canoles is the largest law firm in southeast Virginia. They have specialties that few other law firms can do and have.”
Douglas V. Carson , who has been a friend of Forbes’ since the late 1980s and was once his campaign treasurer , was appointed to the Chesapeake Hospital Authority in January 1999 .
That year, the authority began to shift the bulk of its local legal work to Kaufman & Canoles .
Carson said the timing was purely coincidental, adding that the authority had solicited bids in late 1998 after Bruce Kushner , an attorney who had previously handled such business, became a Chesapeake judge .
“When I came on the board, they were at the end of that process,” Carson said.
As one of 11 members of the authority and a newcomer, Carson said he was in no position to influence anyone.
Since March 1999 , the authority has written more than $700,000 in checks to the law firm, according to the board’s records.
In addition to being an old friend of Forbes and a former political aide, Carson oversees three local title-insurance firms in which Shirley Forbes has a stake. State Corporation Commission records show Carson is the registered agent for all three firms, which are based in his Great Bridge home.
Stock earnings from the firms provided Shirley Forbes and at least one of her children with thousands of dollars in income last year, according to Randy Forbes’ 2004 U.S. House disclosure form.
In recent years, Kaufman & Canoles has been a player in some of the biggest commercial and residential development projects in the city.
Among its most recent clients is the developer of the proposed Hanbury shopping center in southern Chesapeake .
In 2000 , one of its attorneys , E. Andrew Keeney , shepherded a rezoning through City Hall for a Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club on Taylor Road in Western Branch. It was approved by an 8-1 vote. Some of the land on which the project was built belonged to C. Edward Russell Jr., another lawyer at Kaufman & Canoles .
Forbes, a Virginia senator at the time, apparently played a role, too. Kaufman & Canoles received two payments in excess of $5,000 from Wal-Mart – one in 2000 and another in 2001 – for Forbes’ legal work, according to his congressional candidate disclosure form.
Wal-Mart’s political-action committee also has been supportive of Forbes’ political efforts, giving $15,000 to his congressional campaign since 2001 , according to Federal Election Commission records.
Meanwhile, individuals affiliated with Kaufman & Canoles, including Russell , and Jones, collectively have contributed about $6,500 to Forbes’ campaign coffers, records show.
When Forbes is in your corner
Although the merger with his firm helped Kaufman & Canoles become a player in the continued growth and development of Chesapeake, Forbes remains first and foremost a politician.
He helped shape the local Republican Party that today dominates city government.
In 1997 , when Forbes ran for the state Senate, he turned to Blevins, his now-retired high school principal, and asked him to run for his delegate seat.
Blevins, who worked closely with Forbes after he became president of the student government, said the future congressman stood out immediately as an “All-American boy” who seemed to have everything going for him – an excellent student with exceptional people skills.
“There was never any doubt in my mind that Randy was going to amount to something,” he said. “I admired him tremendously, and he did me,” Forbes said.
In 2001 , when Forbes, opted to run for Congress, he again invited Blevins to fill his shoes, this time in the state Senate.
“I kind of laughed,” Blevins said. “I was his mentor; now I’m his mentee.”
Another beneficiary of Forbes’ support is City Councilman Cliff Hayes , an information systems manager with the Chesapeake Sheriff’s Office , who was one of four council members elected in the spring. Forbes enthusiastically backed Hayes , apparently bumping another candidate, John Henry Martin , from an early GOP endorsement.
“I thought it was important for Cliff Hayes because, one, Cliff Hayes has got a technology background that I think is going to be hugely important,” Forbes said. “… And Cliff was an African-American candidate, which I think was very important to have in this city.”
Forbes takes pride in his ability to promote the candidates he thinks will be best for his city.
He said polling has shown that about 65 percent of the electorate is likely to vote for any candidate he endorses. The reason, he figures, is that voters know he’s his own man, someone who will back only candidates he believes will best serve the city – not necessarily those supported by everybody else.
There’s another side to the story, of course.
Local GOP members from whom Forbes withholds his blessing – and who lose – can wind up feeling bitter.
Jim Dunlo , a former Sheriff’s Office major , was not merely endorsed by the Republican Party but was its nominee to run against Democrat Faye Mitchell in the November 2003 race for clerk of the circuit court . Dunlo said he lost the election not only because Forbes and his wife, Shirley, withheld their support, but because they actively worked to undermine his campaign.
Dunlo points to Mitchell’s appearance at a Forbes gala fund-raiser the month before the election.
Forbes, however, said that Mitchell was a guest of others attending the event and that he did nothing to promote her candidacy. After she won, Forbes spoke at her swearing-in.
Dunlo said his crime was bucking the system and running for an office the Forbeses had not authorized him to seek.
“In Chesapeake, he does what he wants, when he wants,” Dunlo said of Forbes earlier this year. “It’s about control and power.”
Forbes dismisses such complaints as whining. And he emphatically rejects the idea that he and his wife somehow manipulate the political process by such tactics as ordering people not to vote. “Do we send out a computer thing that told them on the Internet?” he asked. “Did we send out a mailer? Did I go around on a whisper campaign and whisper to 5,000 people and tell them not come out and vote?”
The problem, he said, lies with those who make ludicrous charges about his so-called control.
“They’re always the losers – always the losers,” he said. “They look in there, and they, they can’t look in the mirror and just say, 'I just lost.’ You know, they have to say, 'He caused me to lose.’ ”
Yet one local Republican who has challenged the Chesapeake GOP hierarchy has never lost an election: School Board Chairman Thomas Mercer .
Mercer lent his support to Dunlo, Martin and others in the party who, seeking greater transparency and fairness, were preparing to stage a challenge to local GOP Chairman Stephen Rodriguez , a Forbes supporter, at a party meeting in April .
Later, Mercer learned that a copy of a letter titled “Stand Up for America” had been distributed at several Baptist churches on Easter Sunday . The letter, authorized and paid for by Rodriguez , noted Forbes’ involvement in the nation’s “culture wars” and his opposition to pornography on the Internet, obscenity on TV, same-sex marriage and secularizing the Pledge of Allegiance. Then it said:
“But such stands never come without a price. Many who oppose these stands are now trying to attack these men because they hate the values for which they stand. ... They have vowed to remove Steve Rodriguez and in their words, 'take over’ the party to promote their own agendas.”
Mercer, a Methodist minister and strong conservative , was dumbfounded . Anyone who knows him knows he opposes same-sex marriage, Internet pornography and every other culture-war issue cited in the letter, he said.
“I still don’t think it’s right for a Republican candidate not to endorse fellow Republicans – and I stand by that,” Mercer said recently. “That was my problem then, and it’s my problem now. I think that as Randy Forbes represents the Republican Party, that he holds a great deal of power in who gets elected.”
Forbes’ Web site includes a section highlighting a “Push Back for America” program, a call to reclaim moral ground lost to growing permissiveness. A link to a letter signed by Forbes identifies some of the same issues in the “Stand Up for America” letter.
Forbes declined to discuss whether the letter distributed on Easter Sunday was appropriate.
“I’m not going to really comment on somebody else’s campaign. I’ll comment on what our campaign does,” he said.
Days after the letter was distributed, Forbes intervened to bring squabbling factions in the party together, averting a showdown over Rodriguez’s continued leadership of the local GOP.
Blevins said Forbes demonstrated one of his great political gifts last spring: the ability to resolve conflicts by bringing people to the table.
“He mediated and worked things out and tried to put the pieces back together,” Blevins said.
At meetings that included Martin , Mercer , Rodriguez and several others, Forbes brokered a 17-point resolution, signed by him and a long list of prominent GOP leaders in the city. At the end of the day, there was something for almost everyone. Martin got a GOP endorsement for his City Council run. Mercer got Forbes’ backing and went on to be the top vote-getter in the spring election. And Rodriguez was assured another term as local party chairman.
Asked recently why a U.S. congressman, with everything else happening in the world and the nation, would take the time to address hometown politics in such a way, Forbes said his four children were educated in the Chesapeake public schools and he still cares “a great deal” about the city.
For every “losing person” who accuses him of interfering in local politics, he said, someone else will ask him to intervene.
“I will have other people, that if something is going awry, cry out and say, 'Don’t you care about us anymore? Don’t you care about the city anymore? Why don’t you come in and help correct that problem?’ ” he said. “Now, you’re right, it’s easier for me just to say, 'The heck with you all, you know, you go your way.’ But I don’t do that.”
Ambitions beyond Chesapeake
On the morning of Sept. 11, under a TV tuned to Fox News coverage of the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks, J. Randy Forbes helped kick off the Republican Party of Virginia’s fall campaign with about 20 volunteers gathered around coffee and doughnuts in the political wing of his 524 Johnstown building.
“This is probably one of the most important elections we’ll have in our lifetime,” Forbes said of the presidential race. “... I think it’s vitally important that we win this election and get our voters to the polls. Things look very good now.”
Among those who showed up that day were Mayor Edge and City Councilman Hayes .
“We’re all in support of you,” Edge told Forbes. “It’s absolutely essential that we get you and George Bush elected this time. You know very well how fondly, how much I think of you. … We can’t take anything for granted. I think we realize that Randy is an incredible talent and an incredible congressman.”
Forbes’ Democratic opponent in the 4th District race is 25-year-old Jonathan Menefee , who as of June had $2,905 in cash on hand compared with the incumbent’s more than $415,000 , according to June 30 campaign finance reports. Menefee’s only political experience has been in the student government at Catawba College in North Carolina .
Later on Sept. 11, after Forbes’ gathering was over, the Chesapeake GOP Women’s BBQ was held on the other side of the white fence that separates Forbes’ office building from his home.
“It’s not my event,” Forbes told his volunteers that morning. “The only thing that we do is we get to cut the grass.”
That down-home manner contributes much to the congressman’s political success, frustrating his opponents and engendering a fierce loyalty among his followers.
“For every one of those people that you can bring who lose elections,” he said, “I can bring you 50 that will say, 'The reason we love him, the reason we stand with him, is because he doesn’t think he’s too good for us, and he’ll come back down here and he’ll stand with us and he’ll work with us.’
“And I’m not going to change that.”
While Forbes is expected to win another two-year term in the House – and says he’s very happy with that job – he may move on to bigger things. Asked to comment on reports he could someday run for U.S. Sen. John Warner’s seat, he shared an anecdote.
At a dinner not long ago, Forbes recalled, Warner , who is up for re-election in 2008 , spoke of the congressman’s political prospects.
“ 'I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around here,’ ” Forbes said the senator told his audience. “But he said, 'If I retire … there’s nobody I know of that would be a better-suited replacement for me in the Senate than Randy Forbes.’ ”
Ping
Don't tell that to Tom Davis...
1. Forbes gets the nod because he wields enormous power within the state GOP and there are a lot of party members in southeastern Virginia who owe him "favors."
2. If the Democratic nominee is Mark Warner, Davis would possibly be the stronger candidate. He is better known in NoVA than Forbes. Chesapeake, VB, etc. will be viewed as safe for the GOP no matter what and the real contest would center on NoVA.
I think Tom Davis' political views have a lot to do with his northern Virginia constituency. I've heard things he said at functions other places and he sound's different. I don't think someone like Forbes could get more than 40% of the vote in the Fairfax county area. Virginia gets dramatically more conservative by the mile as you get outside the beltway.
I think in hindsight, Jim Gilmore really put himself out on a limb when he took the RNC post. Losing the VA and NJ governorships in 2001 finished Gilmore for good. When John Warner retires, whoever runs against Mark Warner either needs to make a very strong showing in NoVA, or carry everywhere else in the state by a huge margin. So in that respect, Davis could be the best choice.
Gilmore's big downfall was the car tax issue. He was going to win the election anyway, and he made too big an issue out of car taxes. The most conservative people out there realize that there needs to be some taxes and actually car taxes are very fair (nobody is forced to own expensive automobiles). His committment to this caused other budget problems that we didn't need.
The car tax reduction was always more "symbolic" than "drastic." It was never that big a tax, I think for the average person driving a $25-35K car it was a couple of hundred dollars twice a year. But you're right, people actually had to write the check. However, I remember a few times during the Klintoon years having to write 5 figure checks to the IRS and NOTHING ever hurt like that!
It's not that I'm "for" taxes. I just realize that the government needs an income to function. What the government needs to do is get rid of all of the unnecessary programs. I don't mind paying for my share of defense and things like that, but it pisses me off to pay to research how fruitfly mating habits are affected by tidal changes or similar crap.
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