Kilgore Parlays Tenacity, Luck

Allen credits Kilgore with leading the push to abolish parole in Virginia, fulfilling a campaign promise Allen had made.

Kilgore insists that he was not planning to seek elective office until a candidate he was supporting for attorney general dropped out. Friends advised him that the race was wide open and urged him to run.

Even his wife was surprised when he resigned in late 1996 and took to the campaign trail. But Mark L. Earley won, and Kilgore joined Anderson Marks & Miller, a mid-size law firm in Richmond.

He mostly represented local governments, said C. Thomas Ebel, president of the firm. He became a partner in 2000, but the next year he cashed out his share and waged a successful campaign for attorney general. Among his accomplishments, he lists programs to combat domestic abuse, identity theft and spam. He resigned in February to run for governor.

His campaign presents a firmly anti-tax, law-and-order platform.

He wants to limit real estate tax increases to 5 percent. He proposes curbing domestic abuse by making jail mandatory for violators of protective orders. He says he would expand the use of the death penalty to fight gangs and allow civil suits against gang members. And he supports barring illegal immigrants from state services and giving police broader powers to detain them on immigration violations.

His opponent, Timothy M. Kaine, has accused Kilgore of running a campaign based on negative ads that distort his record. The most controversial are two emotional ads, which a Washington Post poll conducted last week indicated that most Virginians have seen.

They feature relatives of murder victims speaking of their anguish and challenging Kaine's personal opposition to capital punishment. At the end of each, Kilgore's face appears, half in shadow. His voice is heard saying his campaign sponsored the ad. Kaine responded with an ad in which the candidate looks straight into the camera and says, "I'll enforce the death penalty."

Kilgore has a gentle, mellifluous voice. During his 11 years in Richmond, his mountain twang has softened, though it takes a southwestern Virginia native to notice. People who grew up with him say they now detect a marked difference between his accent and his brother's. That has led to speculation that he hired a speech coach. But Kilgore denies it, saying it is the result of having two suburban children and hours of practice before he delivers a speech.

"I am who I am," he said. "I'm not going to change."

He still runs three or four miles a day on the treadmill and is on such a strict diet that for the first time in his adult life he has passed by Dairy Queens without stopping.

Kilgore would be the first governor from southwestern Virginia since A. Linwood Holton, who took office in 1970. Holton is a native of Big Stone Gap and Kaine's father-in-law. But Kilgore says that because Holton moved away to practice law in Roanoke, a better comparison is George C. Peery, a Tazewell County Democrat who took office in 1934.

Some people in Kilgore's home town say they can't quite grasp that someone from southwestern Virginia might become governor. Kilgore -- whose favorite book, "The Great Gatsby," is a paean to optimism -- wants to combat that attitude. Too often, he said, young people from his region are convinced that they have to "settle" for a station in life.

That is why he cared, he added, about a dispute over a large sign at the entrance to town proclaiming Gate City to be the home of Virginia's attorney general, Jerry W. Kilgore. Gate City's Republican mayor ordered it taken down in September, saying that because Kilgore stepped down in February it is no longer accurate. It took two days for anyone to notice and two more days for the sign to go back up after many residents and local council members complained.

"It's not about me," Kilgore said. "Gate City's always going to be home, whether I have a sign or not in that town. But I think the sign was a statement to all the kids at Gate City High School that you can make it. Whatever dream you have, you can dream it. That's important for kids in my part of the state."

Profiles of Democrat Timothy M. Kaine and independent H. Russell Potts Jr. will also appear in The Post.