Posted on 09/27/2006 7:42:34 AM PDT by truthandlife
One of Virginia's best-known political analysts said he had never personally heard Sen. George Allen use racial epithets, despite saying on television a day earlier that the senator "did use the n-word."
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said Tuesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press, "I didn't personally hear GFA (Allen's initials) say the n-word.
"My conclusion is based on the very credible testimony I have heard for weeks, mainly from people I personally know and knew in the '70s," Sabato wrote.
Sabato, a classmate of Allen's at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, said Monday on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" that he knew Allen had used racial slurs, but declined to say whether he had witnessed them.
Allen, a Republican who had been mentioned as a presidential contender and is now fighting an unexpectedly difficult race for a second U.S. Senate term, had said through a campaign aide that Sabato's claim was inaccurate.
"We're obviously glad that Mr. Sabato clarified his comments," said Dick Wadhams, Allen's campaign manager. "We remain committed to trying to dispel these erroneous stories that have been out there."
Also Tuesday, Allen's Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, declined to say definitively whether he had ever used a racial slur to describe blacks.
"I don't think that there's anyone who grew up around the South that hasn't had the word pass through their lips at one time or another in their life," Webb told reporters.
Webb referred to his novel, "Fields of Fire," which aides said includes passages using the n-word as part of character dialogue. But he added: "I have never issued a racial or ethnic slur."
Asked for clarification of his original answer, spokeswoman Jessica Smith quoted Webb as saying, "I have never used that word in my general vocabulary or in any derogatory way."
She declined to say whether he had ever used the word apart from when he wrote his book.
Allegations of racial insensitivity by Allen dating to his high school days in California have become a major distraction for the senator since August, when he called a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent "macaca." The word is considered a racial slur in some cultures.
On Monday, a former football teammate of Allen's, Dr. Ken Shelton, said he heard Allen frequently use a common slur applied to blacks among white friends while in college. Allen called the claim "ludicrously false" and released statements from four other ex-teammates defending the senator and rejecting Shelton's claims.
Also in interviews with the AP and Salon.com late Sunday, Shelton claimed that on a hunting trip to Louisa County in 1973 or 1974, Allen stuffed the severed head of a female deer into the oversized mailbox of a black household near Bumpass, Va., 40 miles east of the university.
But in interviews Tuesday, two Louisa County sheriff's deputies who were on the force in the early '70s said that they recall no complaints about severed animal heads.
Retired Lt. Robert Rigsby said he was in charge of investigations in the early '70s, and any such report would have gone through him.
"I think that's a myth," Rigsby said.
Never right and frequently left.
All I have to say .. they are showing their sides .. loud and clear
I listened to him on KABC in Los Angeles last night. I think they replay the 1st hour at around 9pm PDT. He took Sabato and the other two guys apart.
OMG! Not one question?
I'm really beginning to wonder if we aren't seeing some early-70s UVa grudges getting played out on a grand scale here. As in, Sabato and Shelton are jealous of Allen getting all the chicks or something. There's something nasty lurking under the surface here, and all of the trails seem to lead back to Charlottesville during the early 1970s.
}:-)4
Maybe they are in the wrong business. Instead of politics, perhaps they should write scripts for Hollywood.
And I'm supposed to worry for Allen's re-election chances beased on this?
Wasn't a Los Angeles detective involved in the OJSimpson case smeared because he used the N word in a novel he was writing?
Wow. You really can feel some hatred coming through that piece...so much for "impartiality" (not that Sabato's ever had any).
Eventually it's going to come out that in 1971, Allen and a couple of the other UVa football jocks gave Sabato a swirly in one of the dorms. And Larry's been waiting 35 years to get revenge. Or maybe Larry got jealous that Allen ended up in one of those cramped ancient rooms on The Lawn that all the UVa students lust after, and Larry was living in some cockroach-infested craphole off Rugby Road.
}:-)4
Doesn't mean a thing.
For all anybody knows Larry stops and has sex with men at the I66 rest-stop near Manassas on his trips to and from Washington DC, and I bet I can find more than one UVA staffer who'd swear to that.
Larry is not as popular with his fellows as he imagines.
I hope he knows about the "maa\caca" guy being Larry's STUDENY.
He didn't mention that part.
That took guts.
For his sake, Sabato better have gotten a huge payoff over this because his "unbiased" credibility is forever ruined.
We can at least put Sabato in the same category as Zogby.
Has Larry adopted a strange haircut lately?
Sabato appears to have had an axe to grind for some time ...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10509653/site/newsweek/
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.
//
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/programs/debates/00_transcript.htm
2000 U.S. Senatorial Debate - Transcript
October 22, 2000, NBC 12 Richmond, Va.
Moderator: Larry J. Sabato
Candidates: Chuck Robb (D), George Allen (R)
Sabato>>> Mr. Allen, your own wife, your own chief of staff asked you not to say those words about the Democrats since you were governor of all the people in Virginia. But you did it anyway, just as you have uttered other inflammatory statements during your political career. Can you see why Virginians by an overwhelming margin in a recent Time Dispatch - Channel 12 poll judged Mr. Robb and not you as someone who looks and acts like a senator?
//
http://loper.org/~george/archives/2004/Apr/957.html
Sabato introduced Allen as a classmate in the UVa class of 1974, noting that Allen was president of the fourth-year class while he was the Student Council president.
I haven't seen him in a while. Did he change it or purchase a new wig?
I want to see if he's got a modified Mohawk under the rug.
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