George Allen's Race Problem - Pin Prick

The New Republic ^ | 4/28/06

[areafiftyone]

Senator George Allen is the only person in Virginia who wears cowboy boots. It's a warm and bright spring day in the swampy southeastern Virginia town of Wakefield, site of the annual Virginia political fest known as Shad Planking. Once a whites-only event where state Democrats picked their nominees, Shad Planking is now a multiracial affair where candidates from both parties come to show off their regular-guy bona fides and trade lighthearted barbs. Beer flows freely. Knots of tailgaters gossip about state politics. In a clearing amid tall pines, shad is cooked on long wooden boards. Though the two Democrats fighting for a shot to challenge Allen this year in his Senate reelection campaign both show up for the event, Allen clearly owns the crowd, as the sea of royal blue allen t-shirts and baseball caps makes clear. The senator has emerged as the principal conservative alternative to John McCain in the early jockeying among 2008 Republican presidential candidates, and today's event is a reminder of what conservatives love about him. p>But nobody else wears cowboy boots. The guy passing out the stickers that say i support confederate history month is in sneakers. The libertarian who asks me to ask Allen about industrial hemp and abolition of the IRS is in very sensible shoes. The pink and pudgy sports-radio host drawling friendly questions at Allen is in loafers. A guy walks up to Allen and sticks a piece of paper in his hand. "Some people are handing out these, saying you aren't pro-gun enough," he tells the senator, a little menacingly. I look down at his feet. High-tops. 

There is a guy in a bolo tie. This excites Allen, who is quoted in the newspaper the next day approvingly advising bolo guy, "If you're going to wear a tie, that's the one to wear." Allen has lots of finely honed opinions about red-state cultural aesthetics, and he is always eager to share them. He talks with the radio host about the merits of Virginia's different country music stations. Allen is dismayed about the modern country played on one AM station. "I like the real country music," he says. 

It's credible enthusiasm given that, this afternoon, Allen resembles a froufrou version of Toby Keith. He is wearing a blue button-down shirt and brown pants accented with a fat brass belt buckle that says virginia in stylized, countrified letters. And, of course, he's wearing the cowboy boots. They are black, broken in, and vaguely reptilian. From his back pocket, he removes a tin of Copenhagen--"the brand of choice for adult consumers who identify with its rugged, individual and uncompromising image," according to the company--and taps a fat wad of the tobacco between his lip and gum using an impressive one-handed maneuver. As the scrum breaks up, Allen turns away and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt, just missing one of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde, ponytailed woman approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her tracks and stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost landed on her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen's communications director, John Reid, reassures her: "That's just authenticity!" 

It's a word they use a lot it the Allen world--"authenticity." His aides and the growing ranks of conservative backers hungry for someone to take out McCain emphasize Allen's down-home credentials and cowboy-boot charisma far more than his voting record. A glowing National Review cover story, to take one recent example, trumpeted Allen's preternatural fluency in the sports metaphor-laden language of American masculinity. This gift for communicating in the vernacular of John Madden doesn't just distinguish him; it makes him the ideal vehicle for a particular brand of Republican campaign strategy. As the GOP has grown increasingly adept at turning elections into contests about style and character rather than issues and ideas, some Republicans have become obsessed with finding candidates who can project the cultural identity of a red-state everyman. It sometimes seems that pro-nascar has replaced pro-life as the party's litmus test. 

While Allen's shit-kickin' image may be the subject of certain Republican consultant fantasies, it may not be ideal in the current political climate. A certain someone has, after all, used that shtick before, effectively bludgeoning his Democratic opponents with his Texas brand of cultural populism. But, by now, that folksy act looks a little spent. And, although Allen is undoubtedly the hot new thing within the Beltway's conservative establishment, some denizens of K Street and right-wing newsrooms have begun doubting whether he represents their best hope to snuff out the burgeoning campaign of their enemy, McCain. "If my choice is, 'Who do I want to go out with to a fun dinner to drink our brains out,'" says one of the party's top fund-raisers who has met with Allen many times, "there's no question, it'd be Allen. He's a guy's guy, but he didn't blow me away in terms of substance." 

Fortunately for Allen, he has a protean ability to shift political personas to adapt to the prevailing political fashions. In the 1980s, he was a Reagan revolutionary. As governor of Virginia at the height of the Gingrich insurgency, he promoted his own version of the Contract with America throughout his state. As Virginia modernized, with high-tech eclipsing the tobacco economy, he remade himself as a traveling-salesman governor, luring new companies to the state. 

Even in these early days of his budding presidential campaign, he has slipped out of the self-styled image of Bush's most loyal foot soldier. He now says the president is welcome to campaign for him but expresses no enthusiasm for the idea. He tells reporters he is more like Ronald Reagan than George W. Bush. But it's not Bush from whom Allen ultimately needs to distance himself. There is a graveyard of old Allen personas--unpresidential personas, downright ugly ones--that could threaten his political ascendance. Even his authentic self--or, rather, the man described by his own family--might prove just as great a liability. His identity crisis has created the most intriguing duel of 2008: Before he runs for president, George Allen has to run against himself. 

t's mid-April, and the private plane carrying Allen and his entourage has just landed at the Stafford Regional Airport. After months of out-of-state fundraising and sojourns into Iowa and New Hampshire, the senator is suddenly taking care of business back home with a three-day, eleven-city reelection announcement tour. Jim Webb, Reagan's Navy secretary, is running in the Democratic primary, Bush's job approval rating in the state is in the 30s, and there is some cautious talk about Virginia, once a presumed gimme for Allen, becoming a competitive race. 

After all the heady presidential planning--the hiring of big-name consultants like Mary Matalin, Ed Gillespie, and Dick Wadhams and the first-place finish in fund-raising last quarter--nothing could bring Allen down to earth faster than the Stafford event. There are less than three dozen people here, including numerous Allen aides. The wind knocks over the American and Virginia flags that form Allen's backdrop. And then there is Craig Ennis, who says he's an independent candidate here to debate Allen. His t-shirt says u.s. special forces: motivated, dedicated, lethal. He positions himself in front of the platform on which Allen and his wife, Susan, stand and holds a homemade sign: why do you hide from me? 

Allen delivers a stump speech that rests heavily on his record as governor from 1994 to 1998 and skips rapidly over the details of his five years in the Senate. The soft-peddling of his legislative record may have struck the audience as a strange tack for an incumbent. But it has its own compelling political logic. Allen knows that senators have a dismal record as presidential candidates. There is, however, an equally compelling reason why Allen might not want to revisit his years in Richmond. 

In the early '90s, Allen exuded the revolutionary spirit of the Republican insurgency. His 1994 inaugural address as governor promised to "fight the beast of tyranny and oppression that our federal government has become." That year, he also endorsed Oliver North for the Senate even as Virginia Senator John Warner and others in the party establishment shunned the convicted felon. At North's nominating convention, Allen proposed a somewhat overwrought approach for beating Democrats: "My friends--and I say this figuratively--let's enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats." 

But, while Allen may have genuflected in the direction of Gingrich, he also showed a touch of Strom Thurmond. Campaigning for governor in 1993, he admitted to prominently displaying a Confederate flag in his living room. He said it was part of a flag collection--and had been removed at the start of his gubernatorial bid. When it was learned that he kept a noose hanging on a ficus tree in his law office, he said it was part of a Western memorabilia collection. These explanations may be sincere. But, as a chief executive, he also compiled a controversial record on race. In 1994, he said he would accept an honorary membership at a Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination--an invitation that the three previous governors had refused. After an outcry, Allen rejected the offer. He replaced the only black member of the University of Virginia (UVA) Board of Visitors with a white one. He issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans declaring April Confederate History and Heritage Month. The text celebrated Dixie's "four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights." There was no mention of slavery. After some of the early flaps, a headline in The Washington Post read, "governor seen leading va. back in time." 

Allen has described those early years as a learning experience. Indeed, he sanded off the rough edges and began molding himself to the Bush era, when conservatives began abandoning the crudeness of their old Southern strategy. During the second half of his gubernatorial term, Allen began positioning himself as the next cool thing in Republican politics, a governor more interested in results than partisanship. Indeed, at the Stafford Airport stump speech, there are no confederate flags or coded racial appeals. Instead, Allen talks about energy independence and the competitive challenge from rising economies like China's and India's. If it weren't for some of the rhetoric about "tax commissars," one might mistake Allen's stump speech for a Tom Friedman column. 

Even if the moderate turn leads voters to remember the governor of fiscal responsibility rather than the Confederate history booster, there's still a problem. Before there was a Governor Allen, there was a state legislator Allen. Allen became active in Virginia politics in the mid-'70s, when state Republicans were first learning how to assemble a new political coalition by wooing white Democrats with appeals to states' rights and respect for Dixie heritage. 

Allen was a quick study. In his first race in 1979--according to Larry Sabato, a UVA professor and college classmate of Allen's--he ran a radio ad decrying a congressional redistricting plan whose main purpose was to elect Virginia's first post-Reconstruction black congressman. Allen lost that race but was back in 1982 and won the seat by 25 votes. He spent the next nine years in Richmond, where his pet issues, judging by the bills he personally sponsored, were crime and welfare. But he also found himself repeatedly voting in the minority on a series of racial issues that he seems embarrassed by today. In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, "Allen said the state shouldn't honor a non-Virginian with his own holiday." He was also bothered by the fact that the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That same year, he did feel the urge to honor one of Virginia's own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing "regret and sorrow upon the loss" of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision banning segregation. 

None of this means Allen is a racist, of course. He is certainly not the same guy today that he was in the '80s. But his interest in Southern heritage and his fetish for country culture goes back even further. And what's truly improbable is how someone with his upbringing ever acquired such backwoods tastes. 

eorge Allen is the oldest child of legendary football coach George Herbert Allen, and, when his father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew, George dragged her upstairs by her hair. 

George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. "George hoped someday to become a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession--getting paid to make people suffer." 

Whuppin' his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen's interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn't grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father's coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French chacirc;teau," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate. 

Even the elder George Allen wasn't Southern--he grew up in the Midwest--but the oddest part of the myth of George Allen's Dixie rusticity is his mother. Rather than a Southern belle, Etty was, in fact, French, and, as such, she was a deliciously indiscreet cultural libertine. She would do housework in her bra and panties. She wore muumuus and wraparound sunglasses and once won a belly button contest. According to Jennifer, "Mom prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile." When her husband later moved the family to Virginia, Etty despised living in the state. She was also anti-Washington before her son ever was, albeit in a slightly more continental fashion. "Washingtonians think their town resembles Paris," she once scoffed. "If Paris passed gas, you'd have Washington." 

Allen is now so associated with football--he played at Palos Verdes High School and at UVA, speaks in famously complicated football metaphors, and frequently tosses around the pigskin at campaign events--that he is most often described in relation to his father. But his siblings have said he actually takes after mom. Like Etty, George saw himself as disconnected from the culture in which he lived. He hated California and, while there, became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life--or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of "Hee Haw," his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South's deeply rooted culture attracted him. Or perhaps it was a romance with the masculinity and violence of that culture; his father, who was not one to spare the rod, once broke his son Gregory's nose in a fight. Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father's players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad's players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. Writing of her brother's love for the "big, slow-witted Junior" on "Hee Haw," Jennifer reports, "[t]here was also something mildly country-thuggish about Junior that I think George felt akin to." 

In high school, Allen's "Hee Haw" persona made him a polarizing figure. "He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front," says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works Department in Manhattan Beach, California. "I mean, it was absurd-looking in our neighborhood." Hurt Germany, who now lives in Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen's name. "The guy is horrible," she complains. "He drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can't believe he's going to run for president." Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also remembers Allen's obsession with Dixie: "My impression is that he was a rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags." 

Politically, Allen's years in Palos Verdes were dominated by the lingering racial tensions from the riots in nearby Watts in 1965--when that neighborhood was practically burned to the ground--and the nationwide riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which left other parts of Southern California in flames. It is with that context in mind that four former classmates and one former administrator at Allen's high school described to me an event for which Allen is most remembered--and the first glimpse that the château-raised Californian might grow up to become a defender of the South's heritage. 

It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. "It was something like die whitey," says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican and would "seriously consider" voting for Allen for president, says the graffiti said, "burn, baby, burn," a reference to the race riots. 

Soon after, Allen finally got the chance to become a Southerner. In 1971, his dad was hired to coach the Redskins, and the Allens relocated to Virginia. Allen transferred from ucla, where he spent his first year of college, to UVA. The old "Hee Haw" fan was like a pig in slop. Even at Virginia's own state school, Allen stood out for his showy brand of good ol' boyness. Under the headline "allen and country living," a 1973 profile in the school paper noted his penchant for country music had earned him the campus nickname of "Neck." He drove a pickup truck (paid for by the Redskins). He wore cowboy boots. He supported Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam. He once shot a squirrel on campus, skinned it, ate it, and hung its pelt on his wall. "He was trying to be more Virginian than the average Virginian," says Sabato. 

After graduating, Allen stuck around UVA for three years of law school. Professors remember him as the guy in the back row of class spitting tobacco into a cup. "He was Mr. Cool," says a UVA law professor who taught him. "But, if you would have said he would go on to be governor, senator, and then run for president, people would have said that was the least probable thing that would ever happen."  span class="articlecontent">

am standing in front of George Allen, but he doesn't seem to notice me. He's seated behind a tank-sized wooden desk in his Senate office, buried in paperwork. In front of him is a white spit cup, the outside of it stained a little brown by some errant saliva. Though I've been announced and walked the length of his football field of an office to greet him, he is distracted. I stand for an awkward moment before he finally bounds out of his chair, opening up his six-foot-four frame--perhaps five with cowboy-boot heels--and welcomes me with a hearty shake and a tobacco-specked smile. 

His office might be called classically senatorial. In the reception area, there are three walls of power photos, political cartoons, and action shots of Allen. There's Allen driving a race car. Allen on a horse. Allen throwing a football. A cover story from Richmond magazine features his wife: "what vips drive--first lady susan allen ♥ her 4wd."  

Allen and I talk a little about being a senator versus a governor. He seems determined to keep his outsider cred in hopes of surviving the anti-incumbent wave building in Virginia. He casts his lot in with the angry voters. "I'm aggravated," he says. "I get frustrated by the slow pace of the Senate, as are most Virginians and most Americans. I like action. I like to see things get done." 

But, mostly, Allen and I talk about race. It's a subject that's much on his mind these days, as he tries to make amends for his old pro-Dixie stances. He's trying to get more money for historically black colleges. And he has spent the last few years in what might be called civil rights boot camp. In 2003, he traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, on a "civil rights pilgrimage." "I wish I had [gone] sooner," he says. "I was listening to the old civil rights movement, the strategies, the foundations, the tactics, and--in watching all of it, and in my point of view--I don't see how you can stand being knocked off a stool at a lunch counter and just take it. My reaction is, 'I don't see how you can take it.' And they say, 'You understand, it's all peaceful and nonviolent.' And I say, 'I just don't understand this.'" Allen bonded at the event with a former Black Panther who agreed with his take on nonviolence. "Of course, he played linebacker, I find out, and we became wonderful friends for the rest of the pilgrimage." Allen says that, in a few days, he will travel to Farmville, Virginia, for another reconciliation pilgrimage--this one with Representative John Lewis, the heroic civil rights activist. 

Allen also tells me about the anti-lynching resolution he sponsored and helped pass in 2005, launching into a soliloquy about what he's learned in recent years about genocide. Back when he was governor, a series of black churches in Virginia were burned down, and Allen attended a meeting with President Clinton and Vice President Gore on the matter. "I went to the Holocaust Museum, which is the best museum in this country," he says. "And you recognize that people knew what was going on." He thought about that experience when he decided to champion the anti-lynching apology. 

Allen knows the trouble spots in his record and has ready answers. We talk about his sister's book ("It's the perspective of the youngest child, who is a girl"), about the noose ("It had nothing to do with anything other than the Western motif in my office"), and about the Confederate flag once hanging in his living room ("I have a flag collection"). As for his mischievous attempt to scare his classmates into believing that his school was going to be burned to the ground, Allen, who, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, co-sponsored a resolution calling for a crackdown on school vandalism, denies the incident had anything to do with race. "It was something like eat crap or something like that," says Allen, who was suspended for the incident. "Your school sucks, and so forth. It wasn't racial. Bad enough what I did--didn't have that to it. The purpose was to get your team riled up against a rival." 

We move away from race and onto energy independence. But there was one nagging question that, even as I sat there listening to Allen go on about soy diesel fuel and lithium ion batteries, I still wasn't sure I would ask. Two days earlier, while preparing for this interview, I had Allen's high school yearbook open in front of me. I kept thinking about the creepy game day prank and the classmates who described the rebel flag on the car and the e-mail from Patrick Campbell: "Some of my classmates and I became rather disturbed a few years ago when we learned that George was rising in the political scene," he had written me. "Mr. Allen is known as a racist in our Southern California society which is why we feel he relocated to an environment which was more supportive of his view points." Maybe I had just stepped into the middle of a revenge-of-the-nerds type spat; Allen was, after all, the quarterback of the football team, and Campbell was a biology lab assistant. And did anything that happened in high school really matter today? 

I stared closely at Allen's smirk in his photo, weighing whether his old classmates were just out to destroy him. And then I noticed something on his collar. It's hard to make out, but then it becomes obvious. Seventeen-year-old George Allen is wearing a Confederate flag pin. 

Still, I wasn't sure I'd ask him about it. And then he says something that changes my mind. As a child, Allen tells me, before he even moved to California, he learned about the painful history of the South when his dad would take the kids on long drives from Chicago to New Orleans and other Southern cities for football bowl games. There was one searing memory from those trips he shares with me. "I remember," Allen says, "driving through--somehow, my father was on some back road in Mississippi one time--and we had Illinois license plates. And it was a time when some of the freedom riders had been killed, and somehow we're on this road. And you see a cross burning way off in the fields. I was young at the time. I just remember the sense of urgency as we were driving through the night, a carload of people with Illinois license plates--that this is not necessarily a safe place to be." 

Now the pin seemed even worse. Why would a young man with such a sensitive understanding of Southern racial conflict and no Southern heritage wear a Confederate flag in his formal yearbook photo? 

I finally ask him if he remembers the pin, explaining that another of his classmates had the same one in his photo, a guy named Deke. "No," Allen says with a laugh. "Where is this picture?" He leans forward over his desk and tightens his lip around the plug of Copenhagen in his mouth. "Hmmm." He pauses. He speaks slowly, apparently searching his memory. "Well, it's no doubt I was rebellious," he says, "a rebellious kid. I don't know. Unless we were doing something for the fun of it. Deke was from Texas. He was a good friend. Let me think." He stretches back in the chair, his boots sticking out from underneath his desk. "Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I'll have to find it myself." Another pause. "I don't know. We would probably do things to upset people from time to time." 

He stammers some more, says he saw Deke in an airport recently. "I don't know, I don't know," he continues. "It could be some sort of prank, or one of our rebellious--we would do different things. But I remember we liked Texas." 

The next day, at Allen's request, I send him a copy of the yearbook photo. A few hours later, his office confirms that the pin was indeed a Confederate flag. In an e-mail sent through an aide, Allen says, "When I was in high school in California, I generally bucked authority and the rebel flag was just a way to express that attitude." And then he's off. He explains that he "grew up in a football family where life was integrated sooner than most of the rest of the country." He reminds me of his parole, education, and economic achievements as governor. He also tells me about the money he's trying to secure for minority institutions and an upcoming speaking gig at St. Paul's College, a historically black school in Virginia. "Life is a learning experience," he muses. In fact, he says, he's continuing his education this very weekend at the civil rights pilgrimage. But, in the Allen versus Allen primary, every time the new Allen has the upper hand, the old Allen comes punching back. After Allen's stirring statement, an aide adds a coda to the e-mail: The senator doesn't remember the Confederate flag on his Mustang, "but it is possible."

[EternalVigilance]

Get back to me when you want me to consider some actual person.

Will do. There are a number of good prospects.

[sitetest]

Dear EternalVigilance,

Let me know. Thanks.

Be forewarned, though, I'm a pragmatist. I look at one thing: will this candidate actually further the cause of life to the next step? Someone who is actually electable, and will likely appoint anti-Roe justices is to be preferred to someone who, if he had the power, would ban every abortion, himself, but is only a little more likely to get elected than, say, me.

If the Republicans refuse to nominate someone who will at least minimally advance the cause of life, or if the Republicans actually nominate someone who will set us back, then I won't vote Republican. But I will at least strongly consider any Republican nominee who will say the magic words about appointing anti-Roe justices.


sitetest

[kabar]

On immigration, Mr. Allen, whose mother emigrated from France, is clear. His take is more like that of a House Republican than a senator. "I don't want to argue anybody's particular bill," he says. "First thing we need to do, and should have done, is [secure] our borders. We needed fences, whether virtual or physical, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground sensors, detention centers. . . . If that's all that can be done, do that now. Don't allow a lack of a consensus [on guest workers or other immigration issues] to prevent what needs to be done."

Mr. Allen is not sympathetic to allowing illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to "earn" citizenship without returning to their home country. If they want to work legally, "I think they have to go back . . . and apply to come in here as a temporary worker. If they want to become a citizen, go through the process of becoming a citizen." Anything short of that, he says, "rewards illegal behavior."

His immigration position puts Mr. Allen athwart President Bush, a fact he doesn't mention. But then he also disagrees with Mr. Bush on the scope of the federal government. The president accepts its size as a given and advocates using it for conservative ends. Mr. Allen says he has "a libertarian sense." He describes himself as more in sync with Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan than with George Bush. "I'm one who dislikes limits. I don't like restrictions. I like freedom. I like liberty. Unless you're harming someone else, you leave people free."

Fred Barnes interview: The Virginian on April 22, 2006.

[Josh Painter]

"But I will not go further. And Allen is ALOT further."

Wrong.


George Allen on Abortion

Strongly opposes "Abortion is a woman's right". (Sep 2000)

Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives. (Mar 2005)

Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)

Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life. (Mar 2003)

http://ontheissues.org/Senate/George_Allen.htm

-----

From the Save the GOP blog:

"Now, going way back to 1996, Allen defended the pro-life plank in the GOP platform..."

"As best I can tell, Allen has not cast a single pro-choice vote in the four years he’s been a member of the Senate."

http://www.savethegop.com/archives/2005/05/04/details-on-george-allen-the-2008-presidency-and-abortion/

-----

And how does the opposition view Allen? This is from Daily Kos:

"George Allen is mighty popular both within the GOP establishment and the grassroots. He is pro-life, close to Bush and Rove, pro-big business, very media savvy, he has the sort of swaggering macho style that appeals to GOP voters (= a clear alpha male persona), he has no former scandals that we know of, lots of experience, he has gone completely under the radar since he came to Washington, he has a very nice looking family, he's from the South etc etc."

"I'm writing this diary because I see George Allen as the only threat among those potential GOP candidates we know of today. This is the guy who will be able to ensure a further slide towards fascism, theocracy and corporate welfare - and selling it to the American people with a big teeth smile."

"So my pledge is: start fighting George Allen already today. Do not underestimate the strongest potential candidate in the Republican party, and don't let Bush hatred give this guy further comfort under the radar of Democratic investigation and attack. Start campaigning already today and we will be well prepared in 2008, when George Allen takes on Hillary or some other Dem in a national campaign."

Looks like you're doing just what The Kossack asked his readers to do, EV...

[EternalVigilance]

Allen is using almost the exact rhetoric as the President, and is hiring the same open borders lobbyist/consultants the President has relied upon.

Does the name Ed Gillespie ring a bell?

If you want to fall for the deception, go for it.

I ain't.

George Allen is George Bush Lite.

And that ain't what America needs.

[EternalVigilance]

Looks like you're doing just what The Kossack asked his readers to do, EV...

Your attempt to garner support for Allen based on the lying rantings of some leftwing lunatic is lame. And your insinuation that I'm somehow following his marching orders by pointing out how phony Allen actually is in terms of conservatism is even lamer.

[kabar]

But I will not go further. And Allen is ALOT further. I will not vote for him, if he is the nominee.

You are a one issue voter. I don't think you will be voting for Gore, Clinton, Kerry, Biden, et al. so sit this election out as well as many more to come.

FYI: The President is very limited in what he/she can do to overturn Roe vs Wade, which doesn't outlaw abortion but just returns the decision to the states. What would your idealized candidate do about abortion if elected to the WH? What previous President represented your views on abortion?

[EternalVigilance]

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=10880

Human Events Online

Sen. Allen Squishy on Immigration Reform

Q: Does American have the engineering capability to build a fence along the border that would keep people out?

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN: Do we have the engineering capability?

Mmmhmm.

ALLEN: I suspect so.

Q: So, this is the follow up, why don’t we?

ALLEN: Because it would be -- I don’t [think] it’s worthy of consideration. The reason is, while something might be able to be done at an enormous cost to the taxpayers if there are more effective ways of doing it other than a fence, whether it’s with surveillance and more personnel, and surveillance--

Q: Are you in the camp of those supporting the “virtual fence” idea?

ALLEN: I think a virtual fence would be much less costly to the taxpayers. I think the key thing, regardless of virtual or actual fence, which would take a long time. Let’s assume we wanted to build the Great Wall of America, which can be done, it would take years and years. I’m watching the Woodrow Wilson Bridge being built here, which is a much more difficult task than building a wall. It’s not over a river. The key point is to make sure we have a workable, legal, guest-worker system in this country not rewarding illegal behavior. Not this don’t ask, don’t tell--

Q: Do you support closing the border first before we do guest worker or do you think they go hand-in-hand?

ALLEN: I think you need to do all of them. You need to do all of them.

Q: Are you going to put a priority on one?

ALLEN: If you get, well, first you have to secure your borders. That’s No. 1. But securing the borders in itself is not going to solve the whole problem. What we need to do is devise a good guest-worker program. And we should not reward illegal behavior because if you reward illegal behavior somebody will find a way to get in here and they will think, “Oh, gosh I can get amnesty,” and so forth. So, I think all of them go together. It’s a comprehensive approach. We should have been securing the borders much better, years ago. The fact that there’s not even sufficient detention facilities where they catch people and--

Q: But you don’t think building a fence, so to say, or some kind of secure physical barrier is necessary?

ALLEN: I think you need to strengthen, you’re asking about the specific on how you do it.

Q: Well, sure, this is policy, right?

ALLEN: The best way to do it, to securing the border then, what you can actually get done now is with more personnel, is with better use of technologies. You can call it a virtual fence, but using unmanned aerial vehicles that also have sensors that at night you can sense the heat from human beings and the detention centers. Because once you catch those [people] coming in here illegally it does no good just to make it a catch-and-release system. Of course they don’t show up. That is clearly not the one. But doing that alone is not going to solve the problem.

Q: So, you would want all these three things together before you’d do one or another?

ALLEN: As a process, I think, to have an effective, for the safety of this country, for adequate workforce capabilities of many companies and for protecting the rule of law, all three of these matters or principles need to be there.

Q: So, guest amnesty, virtual fence and--

ALLEN: I am not for amnesty. Not for amnesty.

Q: Guest worker? Excuse me.

ALLEN: A legal guest-worker program. And they way I look at it, take the H2B, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, but it’s a seasonal worker approach. Mostly small businesses, they certify, they prove they can’t find Americans to do work. They show the ads they ran in the newspapers and then they are matched up with someone who is checked out, I mean scrutinized, from another country that they’re not a terrorist or criminal and that person comes and they are a guest worker. The whole family doesn’t come, that person comes.

Q: What states use that now?

ALLEN: All states in the United States. The problem is that there are only 66,000 for these seasonal workers for the whole country and that’s got to be much higher. But that is an example of a legal guest worker program. Same as the H1B for the technology workers or some of the agriculture migrant workers that follow the crops as they need to be harvested. You have these legal approaches.

Q: And you think that is effective and safe?

ALLEN: Yes, I do. The problem is the numbers, particular in the H2B, these are the seasonal workers for the seafood industry, for the hospitality industry, some of the more seasonal work, and 66,000 are just not enough.

Q: So, we just need more of those?

ALLEN: Yeah. But it’s a legal guest worker system. It’s not just don’t ask, don’t tell.

[EternalVigilance]

You are a one issue voter.

Funny, since I've been arguing against Allen right here on this thread on the basis of his squishiness on two major issues.

Are you always given to such untruths?

[kabar]

Allen is using almost the exact rhetoric as the President, and is hiring the same open borders lobbyist/consultants the President has relied upon.

You are wrong. We will see how Allen votes on the Senate bill.

Does the name Ed Gillespie ring a bell? If you want to fall for the deception, go for it. I ain't.

I gather that to be the case. Do what you want, you should sit this election out.

Gillespie has been a successful political consultant and head of the GOP. I'd hire him too if I had presidential ambitions.

And that ain't what America needs.

You are entitled to your opinion as one of 290 million American citizens and 20 million illegals. Maybe you should run for office and see how many people agree with you.

[Gelato]

There is no reason to believe Allen would appoint justices who are better than himself. It is wishful thinking to assume his choice for the bench would be pro-life, since he is not.

But the goal isn't to overturn Roe v. Wade anyway. The goal of the pro-life movement is to outlaw abortion. Once Roe is overturned, it is at that point when we will need a pro-life president more than ever before, to lead at the bully pulpit toward protecting life.

George Allen apparently believes that whatever a state decides on abortion is fine with him. That is the same position as Mitt Romney and others who can only be described, metaphorically, as on the Confederate side of the slavery issue.

There are some things the national government must prevent states from doing. Taking innocent life is one of them.

[EternalVigilance]

Gillespie has been a successful political consultant and head of the GOP. I'd hire him too if I had presidential ambitions.

He's also the leader of the Open Border's Lobby...he and his partner in Quinn/Gillespie, Jack Quinn, former top lawyer to Bill Clinton, have made tens of millions of dollars during this administration shuttling back and forth between the RNC, the White House and their offices on K Street.

Have you seen how much the Chamber of Commerce paid them to promote open borders?

[EternalVigilance]

You are entitled to your opinion as one of 290 million American citizens and 20 million illegals.

Sorry bub.

20 million illegal aliens aren't 'entitled' to ANY opinion in America.

You working for the Senator?

[Josh Painter]

"George Allen is George Bush Lite."

Wrong again. Allen is a true conservative, and his voting record has a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union to back that up. President George Bush is a moderate who leans ever so slightly to the right. Allen has a lot more of Ronald Reagan in him than President Bush could even dream of.

Ed Gillespie, former RNC chair, joined Allen's PAC solely on the strength of his fund-raising abilities. So he's a big tent Republican. So what? Gillespie is the PAC's money guy (Treasurer), not a consultant on life issues.

"I don't like Republicans," says Laura Nichols, Dick Gephardt's former communications director, "but I love him. Great man. Evil chairman. As a Democrat, he's everything in a chairman you don't want: Wicked smart, fierce competitor, well-spoken, great on TV, your basic nightmare."

Gillespie and Dick Armey, together with Newt Gingrich, drafted the Contract With America -- Gillespie labeled each of the 10 articles -- and the ensuing election installed Armey as House majority leader.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50602-2004Apr4?language=printer

You offer innuendo and smear tactics, I offer facts, logic and common sense. You lose.

[EternalVigilance]

Do what you want, you should sit this election out.

Is this the new RNC plan for 'winning elections'? Asking base voters to 'sit it out'?

[EternalVigilance]

"I don't like Republicans," says Laura Nichols, Dick Gephardt's former communications director, "but I love him. Great man. Evil chairman. As a Democrat, he's everything in a chairman you don't want: Wicked smart, fierce competitor, well-spoken, great on TV, your basic nightmare."

Gosh. Is that the best you can do? Trotting out endorsements for Ed Gillespie by Democrats?

Jack Quinn kinda likes him too, it would seem.

[EternalVigilance]

Wrong again. Allen is a true conservative, and his voting record has a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union to back that up.

Two bucks and and ACU rating will buy you a cup of coffee from Starbucks...but it doesn't prove a thing about a man's credentials to lead the conservative movement and the Republican coalition.

President George Bush is a moderate who leans ever so slightly to the right.

Accurate.

Allen has a lot more of Ronald Reagan in him than President Bush could even dream of.

Bah.

[EternalVigilance]

You offer innuendo and smear tactics, I offer facts, logic and common sense. You lose.

Do you think George Allen's 'virtual' (imaginary) fence is 'logical'?

[Josh Painter]

"Your attempt to garner support for Allen based on the lying rantings of some leftwing lunatic is lame. And your insinuation that I'm somehow following his marching orders by pointing out how phony Allen actually is in terms of conservatism is even lamer."

Wrong again. LOL! The quote from Kos was just one of several arguments I've made, including Allen's voting record, his 100 conservative rating by the ACU, his 100% ratings by pro-life groups and his 0% ratings by pro-abortion groups.

All you've addressed from my arguments is the Kos quote. You've totally ignored the interest group ratings. Facts are such inconvenient things, aren't they, E.V.?

And you are doing exactly what Kos exorted his moonbat Kossacks to do- to work against Sen. Allen.

Interesting that you won't name a candidate you're for. You only try to smear Sen. Allen. And you're doing a pretty lame-o job of it, too.

I smell a rat.

[Gelato]

On abortion, George Allen can only be described as "pro-choice, with exceptions."

He supports abortion up until viability or brainwaves--or some other arbitrary, man-made standard. Rape and incest babies have no right to life, and neither do babies with fetal abnormalities, according to Allen.

In the Senate, his votes have been carefully catered to the pro-life crowd. But as a House member, Allen felt free to vote pro-choice at least once, in 1992. Back then, it was more "acceptable" to be pro-choice and a Republican.

Since that time, Allen's votes reflect political ambitions, not principled beliefs.