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BY JOHN GOOLRICK
Rappahannock Newg Special Writer
A statewide political campaign is, particularly in the final weeks, a grueling roadshow that often takes a heavy toll on both the candidates and the reporters who cover it. ' * Even in an age when television commercials have the main impact on voters, the candidates must still make the obligatory swings around various parts of a diverse state amid the beauty of autumn.
Yet for all its rigors, for politicians and those who report about politicians, there is little more exhilirating than bounding from Northern Virginia to Tidewater to Southside and great American towns like Grundy and Pulaski and Big Stone Gap in the Southwest.
It is a ritualistic kind of thing in the last few weeks when the press corps is out in force and a candidate’s schedule is packed with events from sunup to sundown.
During the nearly quarter-century I covered Virginian politics, I was fortunate enough to travel Virginia by bus, train, planes and even boats while keeping track of men and women running for governor, lieutenant-governor, attorney-general and the U.S. Senate.
The finest campaigner I ever saw, or at least the most ebullient, was the irrepressible Henry Howell. While he might not have been the inventor of the country store whistlestop campaign, Howell certainly perfected it.
Going into a particular region, Howell would gather local polls and some of the press aboard his borrowed Howellmobile camper and set out along country roads.
At each country store, he would f leap from the camper, his hands filled with campaign brochures, and inside the store shake hands gleefully with its proprietor, commiserate with amused customers on the high price of food while at the same time handing them his literature, and then say, “Listen, friend, when I’m Governor we’re going to do somethin^ about that nasty sales tax on food that picks the pockets of average hard-working men and women like you.”
Hqwell would invariably persuade the owner to put one of his campaign posters in his store window alongside a freshly taken Polaroid photo of the candidate and owner. ; The whole thing took less than five minutes, but Howell said it was important, “because in rural areas the country stores are the community centers, the places where folks see each other and talk about , things.”
Howell’s nemesis, Mills Godwin Jr., was a completely different kind of campaigner, much more traditional. But he was the best orator I ever encountered in Virginia with the possible exception of J. Lindsay Almond. He could fire up a crowd of conservatives with his blasts against . federal meddling in state business and his admonition that when elect
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