Fundraising Skills a Blessing and a Burden

By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 1, 2006

This is the last in a series of articles profiling candidates for Montgomery county executive.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, a fast-talking, politically ambitious young lawyer named Steven A. Silverman got his entree into Montgomery politics by running the county executive campaign of his mentor, Luiz R.S. Simmons. Underfunded and opposed by the business community, Simmons lost in the primary.

"Steve saw you cannot be successful on behalf of progressive causes if you put yourself in a position where you are not trusted by one of the essential players," Simmons said in a recent interview.

In 1994, Silverman launched his own campaign, this one for the 20th District seat in Maryland's House of Delegates. He and his wife, Stefanie Weiss, invested nearly $60,000 of their money in the campaign. He lost.

"If I run again," his father, Howard Silverman, recalls his son saying after the defeat, "I'm going to be raising money -- not spending my own."

Steve Silverman has internalized the twin lessons of those defeats: Get the business community on your side, and raise plenty of money, preferably not your own. This year, as he campaigns to become the next county executive, Silverman has amassed a record $1.9 million, much of it from the development industry, and won endorsements from business groups as well as from two unions.

But Silverman's fundraising advantage has also become a liability. His critics have pointed to his campaign coffers as a sign that he is aligned with developers, a perception that haunts him in the Sept. 12 primary race against former County Council member Isiah Leggett and Robert Raymond Fustero.

Silverman, who has been on the council since 1998, has shown that he can raise money like a Republican and spend it like a liberal -- an effective combination in Montgomery, a heavily Democratic jurisdiction where many voters expect an array of services, including social programs that pick up where state and federal efforts leave off.

His campaign emphasizes the light-rail link known as the Purple Line, which he hopes will one day connect Bethesda and New Carrollton. Silverman wants voters to see his advocacy of the Purple Line and of using county money to build roads as evidence that he will deliver on a central promise of his campaign: "Sick of Traffic? Vote Silverman."

Short and stocky, a blazer-wearing, tousled-hair dynamo, Silverman, 52, is promoting himself as a decisive leader who can build roads and transit, create affordable housing and expand the job base. He works hard at his campaign, zooming around the county in his much-dinged Ford Taurus, sometimes getting through the intersection just as the light goes red or pulling an illegal U-turn to save time.

Early Political Inclinations

Silverman spent most of his childhood in Portsmouth, N.H. He is the only child of a Republican father and his late mother, Lolly, a Canadian who never voted in the United States. Silverman credits her with instilling in him the liberal values that have made him an advocate for affordable housing, smaller classes and other initiatives aimed at Montgomery's have-nots. "All that stuff comes from my mom," he said.

His father, a well-known figure in Portsmouth, worked mainly as a radio disc jockey and news director who occasionally interviewed presidential aspirants.

At school, Silverman debated, served on the student council and performed in plays. Directors usually cast him in funny roles, not lead parts. Best friend James Sears remembers him on stage, belting out "There Is Nothing Like a Dame" in "South Pacific."

"He was out there and in front," recalled Sears, an actor who lives in Portsmouth.

The family wasn't poor, but Silverman had to earn his own pocket money and began washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant at 14, he said. His parents relied on a scholarship to send him to a summer academy at a prestigious private school, where he heard a speech by then-Rep. Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey Jr. (Calif.), who was challenging President Richard M. Nixon, a fellow Republican, over his handling of the war in Vietnam.

During his senior year, Silverman joined other student volunteers on McCloskey's 1972 campaign, but the candidate dropped out after finishing second in the New Hampshire GOP primary. Silverman came to Washington to attend American University in 1973.

The nation was gripped by Vietnam and the implosion of the Nixon presidency, and Silverman moved in a circle of students who planned to enter politics. But only Silverman has made a career of it, said college buddy Arthur Lerner, a federal labor-relations manager.

After AU, Silverman worked for Democratic congressional candidates across the country and ended up helping Simmons, then a progressive Republican, win a seat in the Maryland House in 1978. In the years that followed, Silverman received his law degree from George Washington University, served as Simmons's aide in Annapolis and ran Simmons's campaign for the GOP nomination for Montgomery county executive in 1982.

After his defeat by a more conservative candidate, Simmons saw a dim future as a progressive Republican and switched parties. Silverman, who said he registered in 1972 as a Democrat in New Hampshire, re-registered in Maryland in 1989.

After Simmons's primary defeat, Silverman developed a law practice representing homeowner associations, a specialty that put him in touch with community leaders and developers. At the end of the decade, he bought a split-level ranch house in White Oak with a small pool and a Jacuzzi. Friends brought Weiss to the engagement party of a mutual friend; she and Silverman married in 1990. Their son, Jordan, was born in 1992.

Weiss, a lifelong resident of Montgomery, is a communications executive for nonprofit groups and has written for The Washington Post's Health section.

Silverman's 1994 campaign for a seat in the Maryland legislature was a rough debut for a newcomer up against three incumbents. Silverman won fewer than 5,000 votes; the three incumbents each received more than 7,000.

Displaying His Feelings

After his defeat, Silverman put his political energies into efforts to build a new Montgomery Blair High School and revitalize Silver Spring. But in mid-1997, when scandal forced a prominent council candidate to leave the race, Silverman saw an opportunity. He won support from business people, worked hard to get endorsements and spent little of his own money.

In the September 1998 primary for the four at-large seats on the council, Silverman placed fourth, fewer than 700 votes ahead of the next contender. Winning elective office for the first time since student council, Silverman stepped back from his law practice, and what he says was an income of about $200,000 a year, to devote himself to his political career. By the end of 2001, according to Silverman and former partner Thomas Schild, the latter had purchased Silverman's share of the business.

During his first term, he faced a vote that forced him to choose between the business community and wage-earners. Despite a pledge he signed during the 1998 campaign to back a "living wage" law, he cast the deciding vote against such a measure in 1999.

Consideration of the bill followed the passage of a smoking ban, which had angered the business community. Silverman said that his opposition to the living wage was not connected to the smoking ban but that the living wage had created an overly divisive climate. "If I had voted for the bill, there would have been winners and losers," he said.

He supported a second living-wage initiative in 2001, and today his campaign literature cites the law as an example of his "bringing people together, getting results."

Silverman is considered a talented politician, a natural-born dealmaker and a leader who declares his goals early and fights for them.

A member of the 2002 "End Gridlock" slate backed by County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D), Silverman joined Duncan in promising to alleviate traffic by building roads, including the intercounty connector, which recently won federal approval. In the 2002 primary, Silverman was the leading vote-getter among at-large candidates, receiving more than twice as many votes as he had in the 1998 race.

Silverman's emphasis on the Purple Line echoes Duncan's focus on the connector, promoting solutions to assuage concerns about the pace of growth -- and the influence of developers' political money.

Leggett, too, has long received contributions from the building industry; but in this campaign, he has said he will take no more than 25 percent from such sources. Silverman says he refuses to demonize developers and wonders whether people will see any real difference between a candidate who takes a third of his funding from developers and one taking two thirds.

He makes no apologies for his embrace of the business community, developers included, and quotes the late Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, who warned fellow Democrats that it didn't make sense to "be pro-jobs . . . and hate employers."

Even so, Silverman's friends are worried that he could pay a price for pro-development decisions that predate Silverman's tenure on the council, not to mention his own growth-friendly record. "There's a certain element of the population that cannot wait to cast what is nothing more than an iconic vote against the past," Simmons said.

When events go against him, Silverman is not afraid to display his feelings. After Leggett published a list of 2,300 supporters on his Web site in August, Silverman was surprised by some of the names. One was Duchy Trachtenberg, an at-large council candidate who said Silverman called her and seemed "genuinely upset" that she'd allowed her name to be used.

She said she told him he shouldn't be spending time comparing his list with Leggett's. Silverman, asked about this exchange, said determining the loyalty of some political players was important. "It actually is something I need to find out about," he said firmly.

Silverman brims with so much natural energy he switches to decaf after the first cup of coffee of the day. He burns off some of his exuberance during regular bouts of racquetball against Simmons.

Silverman applies himself to the game in the same way he plays politics -- with power and feeling, lots and lots of both.

"Yes!" he exulted after scoring a point, unleashing a triumphant staccato: "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha." After losing a point, his zeal turned to anguish. "You're killing me," he moaned.

Simmons, 57, executing subtle shots that Silverman couldn't return, won two of three games during a recent Sunday match squeezed in between campaign events. "When you're older," Simmons explained with a wink, "you have to be a little foxier."