Word: wilders
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Find a silver-bullet issue even more powerful than race. The Wilder camp braced for a close contest, even after Coleman, perhaps their weakest Republican challenger, won a bruising three-way G.O.P. primary. Coleman immediately launched a fusillade of negative spots, dredging up the personal charges against Wilder from the 1985 campaign. Without a cutting issue to transform the debate, the internal calculus in the Wilder campaign was that its candidate was mired at around 45% support, partly because of Democratic defections stemming from a rancorous coal miners' strike in southwestern Virginia and a Labor Day riot among black college...
Enter Doug Wilder, divorced, father of three and abortion-rights crusader. Coleman was a tempting target, since he had placated the Republican right by opposing all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. Wilder media consultant Frank Greer prepared an abortion ad, almost certain to be emulated by other pro-choice Democrats in 1990. Framing the issue in age-old conservative rhetoric, the spot featured images of Thomas Jefferson as an announcer intoned, "Doug Wilder believes the government shouldn't interfere in your right to choose. He wants to keep politicians out of your personal life...
...implication was that not only abortion and race were at stake but even the state's economic prosperity. It is oversimplistic to attribute too much influence to a single TV ad in a media-glutted statewide campaign. But the abortion issue was framed in a way that allowed Wilder to make inroads among racially tolerant, upscale voters who might be tempted to vote Republican on economic grounds. In affluent northern Virginia, Wilder ran a crucial two percentage points ahead of his 1985 showing. "Abortion is the symbolic issue for a tremendous life-style change," says Goldman. "And so is voting...
...surrendered. It was in Virginia in the 1950s that men who fancied themselves learned penned some of the last erudite-sounding but morally bankrupt justifications for segregation. And it will be in Richmond on Jan. 13 that there will be a black hand on the Bible when Lawrence Douglas Wilder is sworn in as Virginia's 73rd Governor. It is not only in Berlin that ugly walls and once impassable barriers are tumbling down in a world bright with change...
Tuesday's elections gave us America's first elected black Governor, Doug Wilder of Virginia. That event, along with an analysis of the progress blacks have made in other contests, and Lance Morrow's account of his return to the grass roots of Prince Edward County, was our cover story until Thursday afternoon. But then came the stunning announcement that East Germans be allowed to travel through the Berlin Wall and would be granted freer elections as well. Bonn bureau chief Jim Jackson called me to urge that we change the cover, but my fellow editors and I hardly needed...