10/21/2006

By BOB LEWIS  / Associated Press

Rub George Allen the wrong way and it's there, between the cowboy hat and the bolo string tie, just beneath the trademark sunny demeanor: the look.

No yelling. Never anything more profane than "gosh." But it's there, if only for a heartbeat — a steely and wordless locking of eyes that imparts the chilling certainty that you've crossed Virginia's ambitious Republican junior senator.

It's unmistakable because it's so at odds with the genial persona that has enchanted Virginia voters for 25 years and has invited comparisons with the archetypal Republican, Ronald Reagan.

The look has chastened errant aides and sent them scurrying. It has unsettled and even intimidated people whose questions or contentions Allen dislikes, and this has been a political season full of uncomfortable questions about race, character and ethics for him.

Allen's game face sometimes comes with the smash-mouth oratory that evokes his formative years as a college football player and growing up the namesake son of a Hall of Fame coach amid the hot rhetoric and bone-breaking brutality of the National Football League.

It's all about teams and winning: his team, always "the A-Team," vs. the bad guys. It's all about finding an advantage — psychological, strategic, monetary or otherwise — and using it without mercy or remorse.

To understand Allen is to fathom the aggressively competitive mindset big-time football requires and the relentless will to win imparted to him by the late father he always sought to please and still reveres. It drives Allen today, for good and for ill.

This year's re-election race was to have been little more than a qualifying heat for a 2008 presidential run for the former governor whose parole abolition, welfare reform and mandatory standardized tests for Virginia students made him widely popular in a Republican state.

Then came the events of Aug. 11 and the subsequent troubles that turned Allen's runaway lead in the polls over neophyte candidate Jim Webb, a Republican-turned-Democrat, into a struggle to rescue not just Allen's political career but perhaps Republican control of the Senate.

At a rally near the Kentucky border, Allen spotted a 20-year-old man of Indian descent videotaping him from the perifery of a nearly all-white crowd. S.R. Sidarth was a volunteer for Webb's campaign tasked to track Allen across the state and record his public events.

With a fulsome grin, Allen pointed Sidarth out and, in 43 seconds, twice called the Virginia-born honor student "macaca," a racial disparagement in some cultures. "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," Allen told Sidarth to the hoots and cheers of his audience.

Allen eventually called Sidarth and apologized, but by then the video had been posted on the Internet, become a global news story and made him grist for television comedians. Allen spent weeks trying to quell the crisis he admits he brought upon himself.

As that died down, there came a surprise question at a debate about whether his grandparents were Jewish and his indignant response, accusing the questioner of "making aspersions" about his religion. A day later, he acknowledged his Jewish ancestry, but joked to a reporter that it had not deterred him from savoring a ham sandwich.

A week after that, former University of Virginia football teammates alleged he had freely used a notorious six-letter epithet for black people in the early 1970s. Allen denied and decried the claims from long ago, but critics said his remarks to Sidarth made them relevant.

In October, The Associated Press reported that Allen, in apparent violation of Senate ethics rules, failed to disclose stock options he received from his service as a director of corporations he benefited as governor.

For nearly two months, the harshest scrutiny of Allen's career put him and a campaign built to play offense on the defensive. It raised questions, particularly among the estimated 500,000 people who moved to Virginia since Allen was last on the ballot, about Allen's temperament, his attitudes and his character. He's still answering them.

Is he a racist? He rejects the suggestion, as do many people who know him best. He particularly denounces claims that he casually used the N-word.

"I don't ever remember using that word," he said in an Associated Press interview in September. "To say that it was part of my vocabulary is just so patently wrong and false, it's just absolutely contrary to everything I was and aspire to be."

"I grew up in a football family and we had players on my father's teams that were like cousins or uncles to us," he said. "You don't care about someone's race or ethnicity or their religion. You care about, gosh, can they block well or can they run well or can they pass or can they help the team win."

What about his past? Allen admits he was slow to grasp how deeply the Old South and its icons offend black people.

As a House of Delegates member, Allen opposed making a state holiday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. He kept a Confederate battle flag in his Albemarle County home as late as 1993 — part of a collection of flags, he says. A noose hung from a ficus tree in his Charlottesville law office. As governor, from the same building where the Confederate Congress once sat, he issued a proclamation honoring the history and heritage of the Confederacy.

His predecessor as governor, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, finds it baffling how someone could function so long at the highest levels of government and not comprehend the Confederacy's contemporary symbolism.

"That's an unfortunate thing at this late stage in anyone's development," Wilder said. A grandson of slaves, Wilder in 1989 became the nation's first elected black governor and is now Richmond's mayor.

"You don't wait until 2006 to see what the Confederate flag means," he said.

However, Wilder said that never, in one-on-one dealings that span three decades, has Allen said or done anything to convince him that Allen's heart is racist. Wilder, perhaps Virginia's most influential black leader, has not endorsed a candidate in this year's Senate race.

Allen helped secure federal funding for historically black colleges and universities in Virginia. With Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., he sponsored a resolution apologizing for Senate's failure to pass laws banning lynchings and mob violence that terrorized blacks well into the 20th century. Among his black supporters are Democratic state Sen. Benjamin Lambert and the Rev. Gerald Glenn, pastor at one of Richmond's largest black churches.

And what about Allen's temperament? Is he an angry man? Is he a bully?

When Washington television reporter Peggy Fox asked Allen about his Jewish roots at the Sept. 18 debate, she experienced his wrath firsthand.

"I'd like to ask you, why is that relevant?" Allen asked, turning the question back on Fox before a cheering crowd of about 600 business executives.

His grandfather, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis in a World War II. His mother, who grew up in Tunisia, was raised a Christian as was he, Allen told the debate audience. "But if you really need to get into that," he said, turning back toward Fox.

"Honesty, that's all," she replied, sounding shaken.

"Oh, that's just all. That's just all," he mocked her.

In an AP interview a week later, Allen said he was angry that someone was attacking his mother, who had tearfully told him of his true heritage only a month before. Fearing the anti-Semitism that had traumatized her family as a girl, she hid it from her children for decades and told the senator, her firstborn child, in August only after swearing him to secrecy.

"She said, `Are you still going to love me?' and I said, `Oh, Mom, I still love you,' and she was still shaking," Allen said.

"Somebody probably who doesn't know me and doesn't know what I saw and felt with my mother and how this affected her probably could never understand," he said.

It was hardly the first time he had used sharp words on adversaries in public. In his first year as governor, he exhorted Republicans to savage Democrats in that year's campaigns and "figuratively, knock their soft teeth down their whining throats."

He has labeled opponents as "federales" and "monarchical elitists" and once blasted the Supreme Court for "acting like a bunch of commissars" in a famous 2005 ruling on eminent domain from Connecticut.

He laughed, his sunny disposition again in full view.

"Aw, that's not angry," he insisted. "That's fighting for principles. Fighting for principles."

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Bob Lewis has covered Virginia government and politics since 2000.