In early June, Republican Bryce Reeves organized a low-dollar, meet-and-greet in Spotsylvania County for his state Senate candidacy. Among friends and volunteers was someone rarely seen these days at political events, much less outside his hill-country haunt: Vance Wilkins.
Installed in 2000 as the first GOP House speaker, Wilkins was hounded from office 30 months later by a sexual-harassment scandal. His wilderness years are ending. Wilkins is quietly coaching Republican candidates for the Senate, the last redoubt of Democratic power at the statehouse.
"I'm trying to keep them from making the same mistakes I made the first time I ran," says Wilkins, his fluty voice punctuated by his signature tremulous giggle.
Vance Wilkins may be the Dick Nixon of Virginia politics: driven off by controversy but clawing his way back to a measure of respectability — and by extension, power — as the scarred strategist, the underestimated schemer who, from his Elba in Amherst County, ponders the big picture.
Wilkins avoids advising candidates who are in primary fights, meaning he's not doing anything — at least publicly — for former chief of staff Claudia Duck Tucker, who's running for a Lynchburg-to-Goochland County seat. She was a casualty of the eavesdropping imbroglio that also rocked Wilkins' speakership.
To Reeves, challenging Edd Houck, the No. 2 Democrat on the Finance Committee, Wilkins is more experienced Machiavelli than accused Lothario, someone who underscores campaign essentials: a consistent, simple message and frequent contacts with voters.
"That was so long ago," Reeves says of the springtime of Wilkins' discontent nearly a decade ago. "I had to do some reading to find out what he was all about."
Wilkins called Reeves as part of a larger cause: restoring total Republican control of Virginia government for the first time since 2001. And while that requires a GOP majority in the Senate, some wonder if Wilkins' activity is more about installing a solidly conservative GOP majority.
Wilkins says that's not the case. His first priority is getting rid of Democrats — clearing obstacles to pet causes: more restrictions on illegal immigrants at public colleges and fully shielding from prosecution gun owners who use lethal force to protect their homes.
But with retirements, the Senate GOP caucus is lurching right, perhaps auguring a coup toppling moderate leaders, such as Tommy Norment and Walter Stosch, with whom Wilkins clashed in 2001 over expanded car-tax relief and regional tax increases for roads.
And that's where the similarity between Nixon and Wilkins ends. To Wilkins, Nixon sacrificed principle for expediency. That's why Wilkins was always a Barry Goldwater guy. In 2011, as in 1964, Wilkins — now the occasional tea-partier — lives Goldwater's watchwords: Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice.
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