Of course he did, and he told her so. And then she asked whether her friends would still like her if they found out.
“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Of course they love you. Why wouldn’t they?”
A look at the Virginia Senate candidates’ records as governor
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Allen’s record seen as mixed bag
The Va. candidate’s previous term in the Senate offers clues to how he would do if he wins a comeback bid.
Kaine makes ‘closing argument’ as campaigns debate momentum
The Democrat is up with two more ads in Virginia Senate race.
Warner makes radio ads for Tim Kaine
Virginia’s most popular politician narrates a pair of new radio ads for Democrat Timothy M. Kaine.
Kaine keeps outraising Allen as outside spending tops $40 million
For the entire election cycle, Timothy Kaine has collected a total of $16.2 million while George Allen has raised $11.9 million.
George Allen makes direct appeal on defense cuts
Republican delivers message himself in latest ad.
“No,” said his mother, “they tell Jewish jokes.” She shook with fear.
“So I felt I had to keep it secret,” Allen says. He acknowledged publicly what she’d told him only after a cascade of news reports made it clear that the truth would come out.
Now, Allen says, he regrets some things he said in that losing campaign. He says he has embraced his newfound heritage. He’s proud of the shofar, a gift from a Hasidic Jewish group he addressed last year.
At that meeting, he tried to blow the horn, a difficult task even for some rabbis. “I couldn’t get much of a sound out of it,” Allen says, but that night, “I had the best dreams.”
A more humble demeanor
The past six years have not exactly been a nightmare for George Allen, but for a man not given to introspection, this has been a tough time. It’s in his voice, more subdued now, even at campaign rallies. It’s in his demeanor, which friends and foes alike say has grown cautious, steering away from the backslapping and kidding of the happy warrior, the candidate Democrats as well as Republicans called one of the best retail politicians they’d ever seen.
“His energy would fill up a room,” says Virginia Tech communications professor Robert Denton, a close observer of Allen’s style for more than three decades. “This year, you don’t see the old George Allen — wearing funny hats, throwing the football, telling jokes. He’s self-editing now. You can see kind of a transformation, a genuine regret after a humbling experience.”
Flashes of the old Allen emerge as he seeks to recapture the seat he lost to Webb, the novelist and former Navy secretary who is not seeking reelection. But such moments occur almost exclusively off-camera. For example, at the Loudoun County Fair, where a farmer pumps Allen’s hand and asks him to “see if you can get our government straightened out.” The candidate, in Wranglers and a tennis shirt with the Redskins logo, draws himself up and exclaims, “That’s what I aim to do — get ’em off your back.”
Facing an opponent who had to be persuaded to run by some of the nation’s most prominent Democrats, Allen has had a relatively light campaign schedule this fall — in a 16-day stretch in late September, the candidate made 18 public appearances, well short of the 32 made by his peripatetic wife, Susan.
He still wears his trademark black cowboy boots — a signature accessory since his childhood fascination with the TV Western “Gunsmoke” — but his wad of tobacco is no longer omnipresent in his mouth, bellicose rhetoric has vanished from his repertoire, and his TV ads, accompanied by sweetly rippling piano riffs and images of Allen reading storybooks to children, are dominated by pleasant suburban women talking about his talent as a father and his passion for reaching across party lines.
The impulsive George Allen — the guy so excited the day his first child was born that he ran smack into the delivery room door, nearly knocking himself unconscious — has yielded to a combination of age, contemplation and harsh experience.
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