New Dominion

Staking Out Positions

Both the front-runners are seen among political observers as promising and photogenic. Both are lawyers. Both cast themselves as loving husbands and fathers. Kaine -- 5-foot-11, 195 pounds, 47 years old -- is the state's lieutenant governor. Before that he was a Richmond city councilman and mayor. Kilgore -- 6-foot-2, 180 pounds, 43 years old -- has been, until he resigned to run in this campaign, Virginia's attorney general. Before that he was the state's secretary of public safety under Gov. George Allen. Kaine and Kilgore had side-by-side parking spaces in the garage near the state capitol in Richmond.

There is no love lost between them. Kilgore paints Kaine as a left-leaning liberal who favors gun control and higher taxes. Kaine portrays Kilgore as a fiscally irresponsible conservative who is against education funding and diversity. The truth, of course, is more complicated, but that doesn't keep the candidates from taking potshots.

"My opponent has more flip-flops than a Virginia Beach souvenir shop," Kilgore said to a crowd of about 80 activists and supporters outside a Dulles International Airport hangar in June.

"I'm sure Jerry will say a lot of things without me in the room, but will he say those things when I have an opportunity to challenge him?" Kaine responded in an interview with the Virginian-Pilot.

Kaine and Kilgore attack each other "because they genuinely view the other candidate as destructive to public purposes," says Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who moderated the candidates' first debate last December.

The presence of malice in the campaign is a microcosmic reflection of a national schism, a fiercely superpartisan war that is sucking the centrism out of American politics. Political analyst William Schneider, a Virginian, told the Virginian-Pilot in the mid-1990s that "Virginia has a very powerful sense of political decorousness. . . . It's almost gentlemanly." Historically, public mudslinging in the land of Thomas Jefferson has been frowned upon.

In the past decade, or so, things have begun to change. The intense national interest in the 1994 senate race between Democrat Chuck Robb and Republican Oliver North and the 1997 gubernatorial race between Republican Jim Gilmore and Democrat Don Beyer increased the flow of bad blood.

Virginia, says Ferrel Guillory, a political guru at the University of North Carolina, "is increasingly typical of mass society. . . . Television is white-hot. Sound bites are shorter. All of these forces have forced candidates to draw bright lines and narrow their messages to certain hot cues."

"It is a nasty race," says Nelson Wikstrom, who teaches political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. "The two men come from different backgrounds. Kilgore is from southwest Virginia with that twangy accent that Kaine supporters have mocked. Kaine is not even a Virginia native. He is from Missouri and is a Harvard Law School graduate."

"Jerry Kilgore is not being straight," says a slick radio voice in a Kaine spot titled "Weak." Oddly enough, the ad also lambastes Kilgore for using a slick radio voice. "What is Jerry Kilgore afraid of, and why won't he speak for himself?"

Kilgore's camp takes umbrage at this ad that seems to mock Kilgore's voice, which is a high-pitched drawl.

"Jerry Kilgore," the ad concludes. "The wrong values. Too weak to lead Virginia."