Could Jay Rockefeller be beaten?

February, 2002: The Yankee Trader

By Greg Rushford

Published in the Rushford Report

            John D. Rockefeller IV will turn 65 this June. But the senator from West Virginia , first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984, isn‘t thinking of retiring. This November, Sen. Jay Rockefeller will stand for election to a fourth term.

            Washington political analysts like the respected Charlie Cook consider Rockefeller’s a safe seat for the Democrats. For good reason. After all, West Virginians have been voting for Rockefeller since he was first elected to the state House of Delegates in 1966. And money is never a Rockefeller problem: Besides his personal family trust fund of more than $50 million, Rockefeller has a campaign war chest of some $1.4 million going into the race. If a viable challenger should turn up, the usual Washington lobbyists can be counted upon to see that Rockefeller gets as much money as he wants.

            But not everyone agrees that Rockefeller’s seat is so safe.

            The powerful National Rifle Association is furious that Rockefeller runs with the anti-gun crowd. In a state dotted with small towns that virtually shut down during deer hunting season, the fact that their representative in Washington hobknobs with the likes of Ted Kennedy, Charles Schumer, and Hillary Clinton rankles many. The NRA would love to see Rockefeller go down. “We are going to give it all we got,” declares Richard Whiting, who is president of the West Virginia NRA.

            David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, believes that Rockefeller has fallen out of touch with his constituents. Keene was angered last February when Rockefeller voted with the “pro-abortion, anti-gun lobby” against confirming his former Senate colleague John Ashcroft as Attorney General. “I wish Senator Rockefeller much luck in trying to explain this to the people of West Virginia during his re-election campaign,” Keene shot back in a press release. (West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, who has long overshadowed his junior colleague in the Senate, voted for Ashcroft. Nobody has ever accused the venerable Byrd of being out of touch with his constituents.)       

            “I think Rockefeller could be beaten, with the right candidate and the right amount of money,” Keene told me last month.

            An energetic, if little known, 46-year old former state senator from Salem named Jay Wolfe vows that he is that man. Although Rockefeller can claim credit for attracting some much-needed foreign investment to the state — Toyota of America, most notably — Wolfe isn’t much impressed. To Wolfe, Rockefeller’s claim on his senatorial website that he has helped bring 2,200 jobs to the state since 1995 isn’t earthshaking.

            From the challenger’s perspective, little has changed since Rockefeller first came to West Virginia in 1964, as a 27-year old federal  anti-poverty worker: Rockefeller is still rich, West Virginia is still poor. “When he ran the first time, he claimed that because he was a Rockefeller, he could walk into any board room in America , thus implying he could bring jobs to this state,” Wolfe says. “Hah, our greatest export is our children; we ship them out of state looking for jobs.”

            To be sure, the political deck would seem to be stacked against any West Virginian who would take on Rockefeller, a skilled professional politician who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, after two terms as the state’s governor. Rockefeller’s is one of the long-running acts in modern American politics.

            Wolfe does have one thing that the patrician Rockefeller will never have: a genuine common touch. “I own seven rental properties and know how to fix a broken toilet for a tenant that calls my house on a Sunday morning,” he declares. It is difficult to imagine Jay Rockefeller — whose mansion in Elkins has been likened by President Bill Clinton to Versailles — doing something like that on a Sunday morning.           

            Wolfe, who owns an independent insurance agency, doesn’t have much money to run a statewide campaign, at least yet. But some political observers say that West Virginia is changing in ways that put limits on the value of political money. Republican Congresswoman Shelly Moore Capito spent $1.2 million to win a House seat in 2000 in a district that should have been safely Democratic. Capito’s opponent, Democrat James Humphreys, spent $6.9 million.

            While Wolfe currently doesn’t have anywhere near $1 million, he (like Capito) has the enthusiastic support of the powerful NRA. Even without a lot of money, the NRA’s Richard Whiting says, the right kind of campaign on the Internet and the Good Ol’ Boy network can go a long way toward making Rockefeller’s record known in every nook and cranny of West Virginia .

            Of course, not everyone even in the Appalachian mountains can be counted upon to vote the NRA way. Last month, after a disgruntled student from Nigeria gunned down the dean and two others at the Appalachian School of Law in nearby Grundy , Va. , the Charleston Gazette shot back with a blistering anti-gun editorial: “Horrors like this happen time after time in pistol-polluted America , where any angry or unbalanced person can obtain a gun.”

            But if you don’t think that guns are important to West Virginia voters, ask President Al Gore. 

            From the NRA’s perspective, it’s bad enough that Rockefeller dares to be anti-gun in a pro-gun state. But what’s intensifying feelings is Rockefeller’s perceived hypocrisy. “When he first came to West Virginia and was governor, he was very pro-gun. He helped us build ranges,” recalls the NRA’s Richard Whiting. “Then he went to Washington and turned around to become a different person. I don’t know why people don’t rise up and vote him out of office.”

            The NRA resentments have been building for years.

            In 1994, for example, after Rockefeller voted for a crime bill with an assault weapons ban, the Charleston Daily Mail reported the following from Washington :

            “If burglars are casing big houses around here, they may want to give wide berth to the Rockefeller mansion. The occupant is packing heat and knows how to use it. Sen. Jay Rockefeller disclosed that for the past 25 years he has been the proud owner of a Colt AR 15, a so-called assault weapon used in Vietnam . Rockefeller keeps the rifle in his Washington home.”

            The disclosure that Rockefeller had such a weapon in D.C. “was news to the Washington police,” where ownership of AR-15s is banned, author James Bovard quickly pointed out. When Rockefeller learned that such ownership was a crime in D.C., he “remembered” that he had actually kept the gun in northern Virginia , Bovard noted.

            Rockefeller has been telling his constituents of late that despite his anti-gun votes, none of his constituents have had their guns taken away. In the 2002 race, the NRA will be pointing out that such talk should be taken with more than the usual grain of salt, coming from a man who lives in a city where politicians of Rockefeller’s persuasion have taken guns away from citizens.

            The number two Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, the contradictions in Rockefeller’s politics also show up on international trade issues. He portrays himself as an ardent, self-styled free trader who takes internationalist positions on international banking and finance. At the same time, Rockefeller is also one of the most ardent protectionists in the Senate, particularly when it comes to steel.

            On steel, at least, Rockefeller has taken care to position himself with the interests of his steel constituents, to whom saving jobs at (bankrupt, again) Wheeling-Pittsburgh and (struggling) Weirton Steel is a passion. In this, Rockefeller’s advocacy of trade protection basically mirrors that of the Republican Party, which also has a consistent record of demanding quotas and high tariffs on imports.

            Yet even here one wonders how much gratitude Rockefeller can expect at the polls this November — particularly if Republican President George W. Bush gets the credit for slapping quotas and tariffs on foreign steel by invoking Section 201 of U.S. trade law. A Republican challenger like Jay Wolfe would seem to be in the position of arguing that Rockefeller and Bill Clinton might have talked a lot, but didn’t really do much.

            One big unknown going into this year’s elections could be called the Sept. 11 factor. Will voters in wartime continue to be kind to career politicians who personify the business-as-usual establishment in Washington ? 

            To some, Rockefeller’s chairmanship of a key Senate aviation panel with oversight responsibilities over the Federal Aviation Administration illustrates a don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that illustrates what is wrong with the Washington establishment.

            In the last two years, Chairman Rockefeller showed little interest in aggressively probing the FAA’s dubious record on airline security. Instead, he used his committee position mainly to bring pork to West Virginia , and to rake in campaign contributions from lobbyists for the airline industry. Delta Airlines, with $18,050 in contributions, is Rockefeller’s top contributor for the 2002 race, followed by United Airlines ($11,000), the Airline Pilots Association ($6,000), American Airlines ($5,000), and United Parcel Service ($5,000).

            On Sept. 11, Rockefeller — who had demonstrated no real interest in the issue previously — suddenly became Mr. Airline Security. The hillbillies back home aren’t supposed to notice the contradictions in such posturing.

            The challenge for challenger Jay Wolfe will be to make a convincing case that Sen. Jay’s act has become a bit stale, and that it is time to bring down the curtain on one of the long-running acts in modern American politics.

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