Dec 18, 2001
Former Marine: A Minority of One Boosts the GOP's Majority
When the General Assembly convenes next month, it will be missing a family name that has been present for nearly a third of a century. William Robinson, Jr., who fol- lowed his father to the House of Delegates, will not return - a victim by his own hand and by the hand of a political neophyte and novelty, Winsome Sears. If her conduct as a legislator is anywhere near as interesting as her background, or the Davida-and-Goliath con- test she and Robinson fought for the 90th District seat, the Capitol press corps will not want for copy.
Ms. Sears will be not only the first black Republican woman lawmaker in the Assembly's history - a minority of one - she also will be the first foreign-born woman, and the only challenger to unseat a South Hampton Roads incumbent despite the 2000 redistricting, and the first black Republican to win in a black-majority district.
Born in Jamaica, Ms. Sears came with her parents to the U.S. at age 6. When she was 18 her grandmother, an instrumental part of her life, died. Recognizing then "that I needed discipline" - not an opinion one would expect from someone who had graduated early and with honors from Adlai Stevenson High School - she joined the Marines. ("You don't get respect there unless you dig your own ditch," she has said.) She became an electrician and a diesel mechanic. "You could smell me before you saw me," she said last month. "I'd be covered with diesel, but I always had my lipstick on."
After a three-year stint, she married a first lieutenant and they moved back to his hometown, Norfolk. In 1992 she earned an English degree from Old Dominion. She spent time in banking and as the director of a homeless shelter before moving on to Regent University for a graduate degree in organizational management. Somewhere in between she found time to raise three girls.
EXPERIENCE as a Leatherneck probably served her well in the contest against Robinson, which was not fought according to Marquess of Queensbury rules. She filed stalking charges against an outspoken Robinson supporter, Michael Muhammad, leader of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. A trial is pending. Muhammed thinks (a) that whites are devils (and has compared them to, um, excrement, which makes a heck of a combination) who are carrying out a genocidal conspiracy against blacks, and (b) that Jews are to blame for the state of affairs in government, the economy, and medical care, and the "jewspapers." (Pressed, Robinson disavowed Muhammad's views.)
Not that Ms. Sears played the shrinking violet. She hammered Robinson's record as a defense attorney in a leaflet calling attention to three cases in which he was accused of unethical or improper conduct. But she did not raise Robinson's other court problem, his chronic inability to manage his case schedule. In the words of a Times-Dispatch story:
Just weeks before the election a judge in Suffolk sentenced Robinson to five days in jail for contempt of court for failing to show up for a case because he had scheduled another case in another court. Robinson has appealed the sentence but spent one night in jail and still faces other contempt allegations in other courts.
The episode had to have hurt the Delegate, who ended up losing by 679 votes. And Ms. Sears surely benefitted from the $35,000 the Republican Party pumped into her campaign. But her own tenacity was a big factor. As John Cosgrove - GOP Party Chairman for the Fourth District and a fellow Delegate-elect - told another newspaper, "She was everywhere. I saw how hard she worked. She went house-to-house, talking to people and holding babies. She was out there in the housing projects campaigning. The Marine came out in Winsome Sears in this race."
THOUGH HER victory helps put the GOP within walking distance of a veto-proof majority, the leadership should not assume she is a partisan hack. Devoutly religious, she says she is a Christian first, a Republican second. She is open to exploring whether treatment serves drug addicts better than incarceration, and thinks school vouchers for poor children should pay the entire cost of tuition.
And she has not been a Republican forever. Conservatives might venerate Reagan; Ms. Sears found him disagreeable. It was Michael Dukakis' leviathan vision for government that caused the scales to fall from her eyes: "As I was listening to what he was saying, all the government programs he was proposing - I was thinking, 'I don't believe that.' And then it hit me: Oh my God, I'm a Republican. How am I going to tell my family?" She had been a "lazy Democrat," so she switched. "Black people always get the shaft when they back only one party."
Ms. Sears opposes abortion ("life comes from God"), believes "the first type of government is self-government," holds that public officials are servants first, thinks "money doesn't always solve the problem," and supports the right to bear arms. "There are over 2,000 gun laws on the books that need enforcing . . . .So if we enforce those laws, we [should] be ahead of the game." In answer to a candidate questionnaire about state spending she said schools, public safety, transportation, and health care should get more money because "everybody needs these." She would like to see agencies cooperate and pool their resources. And she would advise "giving tax incentives to businesses that engage in public-private partnerships."
With the state facing a revenue shortfall, spending more money in all those areas will prove a challenge even greater than the fight over the budget last session. Of that eyeball-to-eyeball battle, Delegate Robinson said the problem was "there is just too much testosterone."
Winsome Sears has done her part to fix that.