Posted on 10/26/2005 6:00:55 AM PDT by Remember_Salamis
"As governor in 1994, he exhorted the Republican faithful to take the Democrats and metaphorically 'knock their soft teeth down their whining throats'."
Buckling His Chin Strap Sen. George Allen — likable, conservative, and tough — prepares to run for president
RICHARD LOWRY
Sen. George Allen is standing on the sideline of an empty Giants Stadium about an hour-and-a-half before the 1 p.m. start of a New York Jets vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers game. His brother Bruce is general manager of the Bucs, so Allen is here to root on the family team. He is idly handling a football, tossing it from one hand to the other, and, whenever he can find a willing target, throwing spiral passes — to a friend, to one of his brothers, to me.
A guy with a vest reading FIELD PHOTO comes up to him: “You’re going to be a tall president,” he says, smiling. Allen laughs and they banter about the senator’s height. He is commonly called 6’ 4”, but he is quick to note he is more like 6’ 3½” or 3¾”, explaining that you never want to be inaccurate or to be seen as exaggerating. It is an unremarkable interaction, but the photographer has hit on something important: Standing there, basically unnoticed, soaking in the pre-game vibe, is quite possibly the next president of the United States.
It is not hard to do a calculation that says at this early stage in the ’08 race George Allen has perhaps a better chance of winning the nomination than any other Republican. He combines the people skills of a Bill Clinton, with the convictions of a Ronald Reagan, with the non-threatening persona of a George W. Bush circa 2000, prior to his becoming a hate-figure for the Left. Profile writers often invoke Reagan and Bush in describing Allen, but the senator is emphatically his own man, with a personal history that has forged a rare and particular political talent, blending amiability with a streak of competitive ruthlessness in a way that makes him, at age 53, one of the nation’s top politicians.
He is about to embark on a challenging journey: running for reelection in Virginia next year, then — assuming he doesn’t founder on unseen shoals — for the Republican nomination in 2008. This will be the personal test Allen has always been, consciously or not, building toward. In Giants Stadium terms, now he’s in the pre-game, when the stadium speakers play upbeat rock music and the players chat and stretch; soon enough he will be in the real game, when the roar of the crowd is so intense that down on the field it almost feels like it could knock you over, and players either succeed — or fail.
That stark contrast of success or failure, win or lose, advance or go home, is what Allen grew up with as the oldest son of the Hall of Fame L.A. Rams and Washington Redskins coach George Allen. Senator Allen thrills to the fight, but it would be easy to miss it at first blush. He is one of the most infectiously likable politicians in America, a natural at putting people at ease and getting them to laugh. He makes whomever he’s talking to seem his only concern in the world, and is a master at finding common ground for small talk.
Football gives Allen a conversational entrée with nearly any American male. And it is one he never leaves unexploited. What Shakespeare is to the sonnet, Allen is to the football analogy. Over a period of a couple of months, I heard him compare every significant event in Washington to a football play or situation.
Here’s how he describes the decision of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to delay a vote on the John Bolton U.N. nomination after Sen. George Voinovich unexpectedly opposed the nominee, threatening a tie vote in committee: “A 9–9 vote would have killed the nomination. We needed to play for second down. If a receiver’s running a pattern and he falls down, instead of throwing an interception, you want to throw the ball away.”
He says his advice to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, prior to his hearings, was “to watch out for crack-back blocks.” Allen thought Roberts was terrific in the hearings, because he “had his head on a swivel” — a football phrase for being alert. To illustrate why he wants Bush’s next pick to be a conservative too, he takes a reporter’s notebook to outline a “play,” a little diagram displaying the Court’s current makeup with L’s for liberals, C’s for conservatives, and S’s for swing votes.
After Bush picks Miers, he says some deference has to be accorded Bush’s choice, because the president has the right to make “the draft choice.” And sometimes draft choices that seemed initially a mistake work out. “Eagles fans booed,” he recalls, “when they drafted Donovan McNabb,” now one of the NFL’s stars.
The constant football patter is part of Allen’s down-home persona. He always wears cowboy boots (“not if I’m cutting the grass — yeah, well, then too”). He likes big belt buckles and he dips tobacco, consuming about a can every three or four days of Copenhagen, which is strong stuff (“dark-fired, probably from Tennessee or Kentucky”). A spit cup is always nearby, and he does an intricate little ritual without touching the tobacco when putting some in his mouth — opening the can, scooping the snuff onto the top of the lid, replacing the lid on top of the can, then swiping the can near his mouth to tuck the tobacco into his lower lip.
Allen is the Senate’s foremost expert in a certain kind of guyness. He will pour good-natured scorn on any softness. “With cream in it?” he asks incredulously in a CNN green room. “That’s not real coffee.” His brother Gregory is a psychologist, and recently made a reference to the TV show 24, which Allen says was lost on him. As is any other program “not on Fox, CNN, or ESPN.” “Bruce, I understand,” he says of his other, general-manager brother — “he’s in football.”
Allen has benchmarks for whether he will instantly find someone compatible or not. If he likes NASCAR is one, and “if his driver is Earnhardt Jr., that’s someone I agree with.” (He commemorates the elder Earnhardt with his old number on one of the family vehicles: “My daughter drives the red Durango. She says it’s so redneck with the 3 in the back, but I said that we’ll get another 3 when it wears off. Be proud of that hanging on there.”) If he is a rough-and-tumble Oakland Raiders fan, that’s another good indicator. If he is Harley-Davidson rider, that’s still another. These are all signs, as Allen puts it, of “good, individualistic, non-conformist minds.”
The whiff of anti-authority in these types that Allen finds so congenial relates to his limited-government political philosophy. “My two political heroes,” he says, “are Ronald Reagan and Thomas Jefferson. I look at Reagan as a modern-day Thomas Jefferson. The principles enunciated in his writings are the spirit of this country and its founding. Ronald Reagan then applied those principles to the challenges we face these days. Those two had, as I do, a trust of free people and free enterprise. They are the ones that don’t like a burdensome, costly, meddlesome government and they are the ones who were optimistic about the individual human spirit.”
It is a set of beliefs that travels with Allen’s populism: “Jefferson had an observation, and it’s true: You have the elites that try to garner all power to just a few people because they think they know more than everyone else, and then there are those that trust the people. I look at the owners of this government as not the Senate, not the president, not all these different departments, agencies, and bureaucracies — it’s the people.”
‘WE WERE THE REBELS’ Allen first got active in politics in 1976, when he was Virginia youth coordinator for Reagan while attending law school at the University of Virginia, where he had also been an undergrad. He knew Reagan from California in the 1960s, because the governor would visit Rams practices when George Allen was coach. In ’76, Reagan was challenging a sitting president, Gerald Ford. “We won Virginia,” Allen says, noting with satisfaction, “we were the rebels.”
Local party officials urged Allen, who had started his own law practice, to run for a seat in the House of Delegates in 1979. His handlers, Allen recalls, “told me you can’t wear shiny belt buckles and you can’t wear boots. You have to wear shoes and these tiny belts. I listened to them and lost.” His feet got blisters from the wingtips, which he put in a closet in his log-cabin home to turn gray with mold. He says that, shortly thereafter at the Green County Fair, delegate George Beard gave him the best advice he’s ever gotten: “He said, ‘This is hard enough as it is — be yourself.’”
He won the next time around, wearing his boots, by a slim margin. “That night, the margin was 18 votes,” he recalls, “and my father says, ‘Gosh, this is better than beating Dallas.’ To me that was the highest compliment.”
After serving nine years in the House of Delegates — in the old seat of Mr. Jefferson, as he is reverently known in those parts — he ran in a special election for an open congressional seat. He won handily, but Virginia Democrats redistricted him out of the seat. He vowed “to load up the truck and move, like the Beverly Hillbillies,” and run wherever he had to. Instead, he decided to run for governor.
It was a three-man primary for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. Allen had no money, so he had to travel the state in his RV inspiring a grass-roots army. Allen bulldozed to victory, winning 64 percent of the vote at a nominating convention with 13,000 delegates, supposedly the largest such assemblage ever in the Free World.
Allen was broke, relatively unknown, and trailing the well-financed two-term Democratic attorney general Mary Sue Terry by 27 points. Little did she know it, but Terry was about to be hit by that truck out of The Beverly Hillbillies. She declined to run negative ads immediately, ads that might have linked Allen to the “radical Right” (the Republican lieutenant-governor nominee was controversial home-school leader Michael Farris). When she finally did run such ads, it was too late, because voters had gotten to know Allen, and to know Allen is to like him, or at least not be scared of him. He called for “honest change” after twelve years of Democratic rule and found a powerful theme in proposing the abolition of parole. He won with 58 percent of the vote, the biggest margin for any gubernatorial candidate since 1961.
The 42-year-old Allen relished his “insurgency,” telling the assembled political establishment of Virginia at his inauguration in January 1994 that “Virginia’s government [is] for Virginians — not for stolid, status quo, monarchical elitists. It was a victory for the people who own Virginia’s government.” His four-year term as governor — Virginia bars consecutive terms — would be a textbook example of how to build a mandate for change and deliver on it, ranking Allen among those other great conservative state-level reformers, John Engler, Bill Owens, and Jeb Bush.
He kept a “Promise Book” to track the progress of his campaign pledges. He knew he could stampede the Democratic legislature on abolishing parole and did. Virginia’s crime rate dropped faster than the national rate. He lost a fight over a $2.1 billion tax cut, something he hadn’t campaigned on, but pushed through his welfare-reform plan. Allen vetoed a weakened Democratic version — one of 99 vetoes. “The legislature gave me a baseball bat,” he says proudly (and he has kept that bat to this day). Democrats capitulated and accepted all of Allen’s key requirements, giving Virginia reform prior to the federal version. The state’s welfare rolls declined by half.
At the midpoint in his term, Allen ran at the Democrats hard in the legislative elections, attempting a historic GOP takeover. He fell short, but the legislature would go Republican in a few years. Allen got his education plan for testing and standards through the legislature, working the complex issue in a bipartisan way. Student achievement improved. He also used a more consensus-based approach to reform the juvenile-justice system. He continued to score successes in economic development, an area in which he had pushed changes. After vetoing a watered-down version of a parental-notification bill on abortion (it allowed notification of relatives other than parents), he eventually got the stricter version he preferred.
Leaving office, he could boast of the “Virginia Renaissance.” He had reformed the justice system, welfare, education, and economic development. “In the context of Virginia governors and maybe governors around the country, any one of his four agenda items would have been a major accomplishment,” says Frank Atkinson, Allen’s former policy director. He had shown flexibility in pursuing his goals — or, in Allen’s own terms, shown that he knew there were two ways to break horses, the tough Western way, or the gentler Eastern way, but what ultimately mattered was that the horse got broken. He left office with a 69 percent approval rating.
TO WASHINGTON After a couple of years at a law firm, he ran against incumbent senator Chuck Robb, partly on the strength of his gubernatorial record. He beat him with 52 percent of the vote. An executive by temperament, Allen seems a caged tiger in the Senate. He says as governor he told people not to focus on personalities or process, but in the Senate, “they worship process.” “As governor,” he says, “I made more decisions in the morning than I make in the Senate in a week.” He continues: “Decisions are action and I like action. I hate just treading water and standing still. Someone asked me what I considered to be the most overrated virtue, and I realized later this is not a true virtue, but patience. That’s the most overrated.”
His Senate career hasn’t been bereft of action. His signature issue has been opposing taxes on the Internet. He opposed them as governor, making him a lonely man among his fellow governors, who were hungry for the revenue. He has been stalwart in keeping the Internet tax-free. It fits what have been his themes as senator, technology and competitiveness. It’s an interest he acquired as governor, as Northern Virginia became a high-tech haven, and aides say he likes to have off-beat tech stories included in his daily political clips.
His biggest success was his work building the Republican majority as chairman of the Senate campaign committee for the 2004 cycle. He did an excellent job recruiting candidates, and proved a good fundraiser. Republicans picked up four seats, and Allen raised his national profile.
It’s hard to see Allen mellowing in the Senate into an elder statesman. “I would not be surprised if he left the Senate,” says one former Senate staffer, “because I don’t think he likes it very much.”
Becoming president would obviously be one way to leave. He has to win reelection next year, and it doesn’t seem he will face a stiff challenge now that the popular Virginia governor Mark Warner has decided not to run against him. His team is conscious of not looking too far ahead, even as he accepts invitations to speak in Iowa and New Hampshire. No one I talked to for this story had any doubt that he will run. His family seems ideally suited for it. His beautiful wife Susan is a proven political asset and his three children are old enough for it not to be an intolerable strain. And when is a race going to be so wide open again?
If Giuliani and McCain are in a competition for the moderate slot in the race, Allen and Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney seem the top contenders for the conservative spot. Allen, a former conservative governor from a conservative state, probably has the early advantage. “He is right now best positioned in the sweet spot of Republican politics,” is how Grover Norquist puts it. “He is on good terms with every piece of the coalition.”
A presidential run will put unprecedented stress on Allen, as it does on any candidate. The charge will surely surface that he’s a phony. How did he become such a cowboy growing up outside of Chicago, then in Palos Verdes, Calif.? Allen brushes the question off: “I don’t know. I’m just the way I am. I don’t worry about it.”
COUNTRY BOY It seems he was always drawn to that particular slice of American life. He acquired his love of auto racing when his dad was a coach with the Chicago Bears and their training camp “was in Rensselaer, Indiana, and there was nothing to do there. They had a dirt track and we’d go and just have great fun.” He picked up chewing tobacco from players and got boots from the companies that would send them for free to the teams. His younger sister Jennifer, who wrote a wickedly funny memoir about growing up called Fifth Quarter, reports that by high school Johnny Cash, Live from Folsom Prison was his favorite album. Allen worked summers at a Nevada ranch. By the time he was in law school and had fallen in love with Virginia, he was lost to urban life forever.
Allen’s persona has always helped him politically, as he has seemed more down-to-earth, more real, more vivid than his opponents, but in an ’08 race he might seem too similar to Bush at a time when even Republicans might be suffering, after eight years, from Bush fatigue. There is the same sports background, good-ol’-boy persona, seeming lack of reflectiveness. His posture vis-à-vis Bush will, in general, be a puzzle for Allen.
After the Bush years, GOP Washington — fat, happy, unprincipled — could use a good populist scouring. Allen would ordinarily be just the man to deliver it. But he’s part of Washington, making his favored role of a reformist outsider more difficult to play. “He hates being the incumbent,” says an Allen observer. “And he hasn’t done anything in the Senate that is anti-establishment.”
An Allen candidacy might also test whether an old-fashioned limited-government conservatism is still saleable. In an age of “compassionate conservatism,” he bristles with a not very touchy-feely hostility to the nanny state. He opposes mandatory seatbelt laws: “Law enforcement has better things to worry about than somebody’s lap while they’re driving down the road.” He raised the speed limit in Virginia, and would have repealed the motorcycle-helmet law if he could have. He battled with the legislature when it wanted to mandate that people riding in the back of pickup trucks wear seatbelts. He vetoed it, but the law eventually passed under his Republican successor. “It’s absurd to have seatbelts in the back of a pickup truck,” he says. “I can’t even imagine what it would look like.”
There is a Goldwater, live-and-let-live streak to his Republicanism. “It’s their life,” he says of people, “and so long as they’re not harming someone else, let them make those decisions. I probably shouldn’t get into it, but the lottery: Let the people of Virginia decide if they want a lottery or not, or horse racing. Would I waste money on a lottery ticket? Never. In fact, I try to teach my kids, ‘All right, pick some numbers here, kids,’ as a ping-pong ball comes out, and then of course it’s not the numbers they pick: ‘There you are — you’re winners, kids. You just saved a dollar.’ But it’s voluntary, and I don’t think it harms people.”
This libertarian sensibility leads some to believe that he doesn’t have a passion for social issues. In the 1993 gubernatorial race he refused “to be labeled pro-life or pro-choice,” and said he would, as a theoretical matter, support his daughter’s decision to get an abortion. But he has never voted the wrong way on abortion or other social hot buttons, except for opposing the so-called gag rule when he was in Congress during the first Bush administration. Allen is a Presbyterian, but private about his faith, which will be an obstacle to bonding with the Christian Right the way Bush did. In one interview he makes a brief reference to praying for help in making the right decisions, but quickly adds, “I really don’t want to get into this issue.”
If the past is any guide, Allen will be underestimated. People miss how sharp he is — a former aide says he has a near-photographic memory, recalling things like “a note he wrote on a copy of the bill he got when he was in the House of Delegates in 1986” — and how tough. He doesn’t scare easy, or at all. “I’ve never seen anything shake him,” says former aide Chris LaCivita. “I’m not blowing smoke at you — I mean nothing.”
“If you get in his way, watch out,” says one Allen observer. Of his potential presidential competitors, he says, “They don’t know what’s coming.” “He’s actually very tough and some would say mean,” he continues. “He’ll use anything. At the end of the day, you either win or you lose. He wants to be in the winner’s circle, period. He realizes in the end all the whining about how you ran a race goes away.”
FEELING ALIVE Allen grew up in one of the most hyper-masculine, competitive households in America. Coach Allen wanted to win every day — “The future is now,” he famously said — and loved players who performed above their ability, in a victory of sheer will above the physical. Coach Allen’s creed was win at all costs, and suffer and inflict pain to do it: “Every time I lose, I die a little”; “Hit hard and good things happen”; “Show me a person without goals and I’ll show you someone who’s dead”; “Only by bleeding can a man ever feel alive.”
His son’s childhood proving ground was the front yard and its roiling, bone-crushing games of rule-less football, with the players suffering bloody noses and vomiting with pain. Jennifer Allen writes that her brother George once declared that “he saw dentistry as a perfect profession — getting paid to make people suffer.” As governor in 1994, he exhorted the Republican faithful to take the Democrats and metaphorically “knock their soft teeth down their whining throats” — a statement he now says he regrets, but captures the make-them-bleed side of Allen.
In a way it was an exciting childhood, going to training camp, as Jennifer Allen describes it, and making runs to the liquor stores for players bound by Coach Allen’s strict curfew. But it was also difficult, with an often-absent, intensely competitive father. She describes a scene after one devastating playoff loss, when Coach Allen is in a black mood at the dinner table. He has a dispute with his son Gregory: “Dad picked up a dinner plate and George stood up. It was the first time I had seen anyone take a stand against Dad. George said, ‘If you’re going to hit him, you’ll have to hit me first.’”
For all his bonhomie, there is something remote about Allen, just as there was with Reagan. Some who know him feel he can have more of a personal connection with a stranger than with them. Supporters are prone to say about Allen, “What you see is what you get.” True, in a way. But with any serious politician who is driven enough to run for president you usually also get what you don’t see. Their drive is the product of a deep-down hunger inaccessible to anyone but themselves and one or two of their closest confidants. Allen has this hunger, or he might still be living in a cabin, working as a lawyer in Charlottesville.
There is no mistaking, at least, his fondness for victory on Sunday afternoons. At the Jets–Bucs game, Allen is all manic intensity. He is happy to talk to people during UVa football games. But a Bucs game, with Allen family skin in the game, is different — it’s real life. I can accompany him to the game, basically on the condition that I not talk to him, at least not about anything distracting.
At the start of the game we’re on the sideline, and he paces and cranes his neck, angling to get the best view. “We’ll stay here if the start of the game goes well — not that I’m superstitious,” he says with a smile. The Bucs go three-and-out on their first possession. We start to walk toward the tunnel to leave the field. The Jets fumble the punt, and the Bucs recover. We stop practically mid-stride at the back of the Jets end zone right in front of the tunnel. “We’ll stay right here for a while,” he says — “not that I’m superstitious.”
Eventually, we make it to a luxury box. He stands, throwing his hands in the air or stomping when the Bucs falter. He has plenty of pungent comments and critiques of players, always followed by “please don’t repeat that.” He eventually secures what seems a lucky seat, but the Bucs still fall 14–12. He stands up, looking stricken.
Everyone leaves the suite with its multiple TVs that can tune in any game in the country, but Allen stays. He is free until he has to leave at 6 p.m. for a fundraiser in Manhattan. “We can watch the games here,” he says eagerly, ready to settle down for the round of 4 p.m. games. But stadium staff kicks him out. Nearly out of the stadium, he walks into a lobby area with a TV. “Oh, we can watch the games here,” he says eagerly. He stands to watch some of the Cowboys–Eagles game.
He answers my questions about his favorite games as he watches. The L.A. Rams beating the Packers in 1967 with a dramatic, last-minute blocked punt. The Redskins beating the Cowboys on New Year’s Eve to make the Super Bowl in 1972. He talks about how his dad, a major public figure, was almost a kind of politician himself. “My father liked politics,” he recalls. “He loved the competition of it.” So does his son. Rivals had best have their heads on a swivel.
Allen '08 bump
That strategy works for me. We see where we've gotten by President Bush being so kind to former President Clinton.
He's got my vote in '08.
If Allen runs for President (which I hope he does), he'll most likely face Mark Warner in that battle. Allen needs to solidify the gun owners vote now by becoming very aggressive and pro-active on getting legislation passed to get rid of some of the gun control laws. If he waits, he'll have to face an opponent who has a better and more recent record of pro-gun activity.
Warner has distinguished himself as being the most pro-gun Governor in Virginia history. The only reason he's done this is to further his political career on the federal level. Allen has not been a leader in this area but has voted the right way on almost everything since his eyes were opened before the senate race.
If Allen stays with the status quo on the gun issue, he'll lose against Warner.
Mike
Sean Hannity is predicting an Allen/Guiliani ticket. That would work for me (although I wish Guiliani wasn't such a lib on social issues). Seals up the South and should put some of the NE in play. Bench doesn't seem that empty for us in 2008, with Allen, Romney, and even Guiliani as options at the moment.
George who? He'd better get some name recognition going. I've never heard of him and I'm more informed than 80-90 percent of the American public.
Allen's got my vote too (barring the unexpected), but based on the swooning tone of this article, I think Rich Lowry might have a crush on him.
This is an interesting article about George Allen. I didn't know that much about him.
The more I read about this guy the more I like.
I agree. "Fawning" has negative/cynical connotations, and detracts from the article. I'd remove that commentary from the title.
I'd vote for that ticket - especially if Giuliani doubles as Homeland Security Secretary. But they need to be charismatic enough to detract from the Hildebeast's message of "free government money for all".
Allen, and either Giuliani or Romney would drive the dems to Lemminglike suicide.
ping for later read........
What makes you think that Warner will knock-off
Hillary?
great read
I couldn't find anything regarding his position on illegal immigration. Do you know anything?
Okay...I'm in.
HellOOOOOOOOOOOOO, nobody knew who the F Kerry or Clinton was when they ran, but by election time any prez candidate will have 99 or 100 name rec. It's a non-issue.
I do agree that an Allen-Hillary matchup would have the biggest gender gap in history.
Hillary versus any man would cause a huge gender gap, on both sides.
I find it interesting that Allen has defeated a woman for election before. I'm not sure many of the other potential candidates, other than Romney, have.
Name id is not a big deal,but I agree with you on the rest.Conservatives can win moderates... but it has to be the right conservative.Most of us know why Goldwater lost in a landslide and Reagan won two landslides.It is all about the package we present and how we communicate it.
Careful, Rembrandt_fan, you may drifting back left again......At this stage Allen appears to meet both reqirements....ideological satisfaction and a history of winning. Just visualizing him at a smiling 6'4" standing next to the mean and shrill little frump in the black pantsuit prior to their debates is a very positive and enjoyable image.
Sam Brownback beat Senator Sheila Frahm(?) in the primary to win his seat. McCain hasn't had a real senate election for decades. Pawlenty may have faced women for his state senate seat. Barbour's only had one election. Huckabee defeated Jimmie Lou Fisher (female) in his reelection campaign.
Allen would be beaten like a child by Hillary in a head-to-head matchup
Really? Can you tell me some of the states that Gore and Kerry lost that Hillary is going to run away with?
Winning states is all that matters. Which ones will she pick up?
Pong
Potential candidate Mike Pence has defeated a woman,Melinda Fox twice.Winning the the gender gap both times.Pence also does very well with Democrats and minorities.His district is historically Democrat.
maybe Iowa,New Mexico,and Ohio.
Bump! I take it he won't be asking Giddy for advice then...
You all are better than a search engine. Thanks for all the info on past match ups.
Allen/Blackwell = victory in '08.
I like this guy. This statement should also apply to any and all "he can't win because he's too conservative" pubbies.
The "Go North" VP Strategy for the GOP in '08 is better. That would be picking a Northern Republican, such as MN Gov. Pawlenty. The GOP lost Wisconsin and Minnesota by a few points. Historically, a VP candidate only adds that much. If we lock up the Great Leakes States, we can't lose!
Virginia Sen. George Allen said, "Legal immigration has been and is the lifeblood of our nation. My own mother followed the process and emigrated to the U.S. from Tunisia after World War II. I have the greatest respect for the ingenuity, discipline and determination that so many of our newest citizens show in their work and lives." "But illegal immigration is not only unfair to the thousands of men and women who waited their turn and worked hard to come to America, but is also a threat to our nation and state socially and economically," Allen said. "I support the strict enforcement of our immigration laws and hope that legislators in Virginia and my colleagues in Congress will join me in supporting laws to make illegal immigration more difficult and unappealing."
You got to be kidding me. His father was the famous football coach for the Washington Redskin. He's got a heck of a bigger start on name recognition than that Frenchie Kerry had.
Big maybe there. I doubt those States would lean Hillary because of Hillary. She has great appeal in New England and California; the rest shed have to work for, hard.
Shes weaker than Kerry in those 3 states. In fact, I bet Kerry is a better bet for nominee than she is.
I am SICK of candidates who "espouse conservative ideas" and then vote and govern to the left. I am DONE with RINOs.
I have been for Allen for a while.
Allan is PRO HOMOSEXUAL and has quote "The gayest staff on the hill" according to homosexual activist groups.
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/5883/CFI/family/
Simple... Hillary is a woman and liberal. The men of the Democratic party won't go for her... At least not the Dems outside of NY.
Warner appeals to far more to mainstream Dems than Hillary does and he doesn't have the political baggage that she does from the Bill Clinton presidency.
Mike
I'm mixed on Allen, but he sure as heck looks better than what we've got in there now.
I'm mixed on Allen, but he sure as heck looks better than what we've got in there now.
Whoo-hooo!
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