Word: spong
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...really impressed," a Law School politico said last week after talking with U.S. Senator William B. Spong Jr. (D-Va.). "I never realized a Southern politician could be articulate...
Despite his marked eastern Virginia drawl, Spong's knowledgeable discussions of the South's economic growth and Virginia's rapid urbanization show that he is quite different from the rural bosses who built their power in the South on segregation, economic stagnation, and a restricted electorate. The freshman Senator likes to emphasize his break with traditional Southern politics by exclaiming, with feigned astonishment and a trace of pride, "Why, did you know that I'm the first Virginia Senator ever elected from a city...
...Spong, who lives in Portsmouth, rose to prominence as the leader of the urban bloc in Virginia's General Assembly. For 30 years the late Sen. Harry F. Byrd's Organization dominated the state's politics, with the only opposition coming from the small Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But within the last 10 years a band of moderates, consisting of representatives from Richmond, the urban areas of Northern Virginia, and Tidewater cities like Norfolk and Portsmouth has sprung up between the two extremes in the party...
...about. Democrats Clark and Claiborne Pell (R.I.) knocked off Illinois' Charles Percy and South Carolina's Strom Thurmond with loveless abandon. Massachusetts' Edward Brooke and Baker bounced back for the G.O.P. against Walter Mondale (Minn.) and Joseph Tydings (Md.), but Democrats Ernest Hollings (S.C.) and William Spong (Va.) swept through top-seeded Jack Javits and Peter Dominick (Colo.) to take the title. Moaned Javits: "As a lawyer, I'm dismayed that Republicans couldn't win when we brought our case to court...
...Severn Kellam, a chief mechanic of the machine for 36 years, lost his political power base in the Norfolk area when five of the eight candidates supported by his organization for the state legislature and local offices were defeated by allies of Virginia's moderate U.S. Senator William Spong. With the power center of the Old Dominion's politics shifting inexorably from the county courthouses to the cities, Spong, whose political thinking is akin to that of progressive Republicans like Massachusetts' Senator Edward Brooke and Illinois' Percy, is emerging as a Democratic leader to reckon with...