Word: wilder
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Faithful to his prediction, Wilder had clambered onto the statewide leadership ladder with his election as Lieutenant Governor in 1985. In contrast to Jackson's often divisive politics of prophecy, Wilder was now the candidate of consensus progress and a united Democratic Party. If successful, he would become the model for future black crossover politicians who could triumph in places like Virginia, where the electorate was 80% white...
...longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop...
...Wilder's strategy appeared to be working so well that few expected election night to be a Maalox Moment. All the published pre-election surveys had shown Wilder leading his Republican rival J. Marshall Coleman by margins of 4% to 15%. Even an initial television exit poll had anointed Wilder with a 10 percentage-point triumph. But by the time Wilder felt comfortable enough to declare victory, his razor-thin lead had stabilized about where it would end up: just 6,582 votes out of a record 1.78 million ballots cast. That was enough, however, for Virginia's Governor-elect...
...Wilder's wafer-thin win should have been all the more satisfying, for it underlines the extent of the racial barriers that he has surmounted. But in the topsy-turvy world of political analysis, this Virginia victory was measured against the unrealistically optimistic expectations raised by the pre-election surveys and as a result was somehow found wanting. According to the final CBS/New York Times exit polls, Wilder won an impressive 39% of the white vote. In 1988 Democratic primaries, Jackson never came close to this type of biracial mandate. Moreover, Wilder ran neck and neck with Coleman among...
...Wilder, himself a product of segregated education and law school at Howard University, will be the embodiment of state government for the next four years. When he is inaugurated in January, he will command more day-to-day administrative power than any other elected black official in the nation's history. (P.B.S. Pinchback, hitherto the nation's only black Governor, served for just four weeks in Louisiana during Reconstruction.) But there is also an important symbolic dimension to Wilder's election. It is sobering to remember that just one other black has been elected to major statewide office since Reconstruction...