Schapiro: Marshall not praying to St. Jude — yet

Bob Marshall's playbook is the Book of Saints.

In 1991, when he first ran and won for the House of Delegates, Marshall didn't have much money. A traditional Roman Catholic — what might be labeled the bells-and-smells variety — Marshall prayed to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, for just enough cash to get through the campaign.

St. Anthony delivered, but Marshall still had a $7,000 debt.

Now seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Marshall is again appealing to St. Anthony — "this time," Marshall says, "for more than enough money."

Marshall will need even more than that.

An outspoken — some say, outrageous — conservative who's amassed impressive wins controlling abortion, blocking new taxes and curbing gay rights, Marshall is a late entry in the June GOP primary. He aims to do what he hoped tea partier Jamie Radtke might: defeat George Allen, the former governor seeking the Senate seat he narrowly lost in 2006 to Jim Webb.

What Marshall lacks in money — Allen has already raised about $4.5 million — he makes up for in ideological consistency, a characteristic some Republicans and many Democrats say is absent in Allen.

For that reason, Marshall, among the four lesser-knowns challenging Allen, is considered the only credible threat to him. There are about 4.5 million reasons why that may not be the case.

Cash is a one of them, short of reeling in a super-PAC sugar daddy. Having run statewide three times and headed the fundraising arm of the Senate Republican caucus, Allen has a national network of donors. His front-runner status in the primary is a magnet, too, for fat checks.

Money means Allen can expand the pool of primary voters, using pricey, flashy tools: television and online advertising, direct mail and the latest in social media. The idea: dilute the influence of the narrowest bands of the electorate: issues- and values-voters who can dominate the GOP nominating process.

These are Marshall's people — people Radtke has failed to ignite — and they are most effective in the most compact, most strictly controlled setting: a convention, as Marshall demonstrated in 2008, when former Gov. Jim Gilmore edged him by 60 votes for the Senate nomination.

When Marshall jumped in this month, some wondered would Radtke drop out? The arithmetic of a primary may not favor Marshall to begin with; it's less so if there are multiple alternatives to Allen.

Besides, Allen, who's learned a lot by winning and more by losing, has worked diligently to enlist as supporters and staffers movement and tea-party Republicans who would gravitate toward Marshall. That includes Steve Waters, Marshall's manager in the squeaker with Gilmore.

A former Democrat turned off by George McGovern in 1972 and who ran unsuccessfully as an independent for a suburban Washington seat in the Maryland legislature in 1974, Marshall was on-message before his election as a Virginia lawmaker, pressing for restrictions on abortion as a congressional lobbyist.

Marshall doesn't hesitate to break with his party; it's his signature. He affirmed his anti-establishment credentials, initiating — in concert with former GOP chairman Pat McSweeney, an Allen adversary and Radtke adviser — the successful legal challenge to a 2007 road-finance plan thrown out by the Virginia Supreme Court as taxation without representation.

In 1994, he tormented Allen, then governor, by opposing a giant package of taxpayer-supplied goodies for the Walt Disney Co. for a history-based theme park in the fast-growing outer D.C. suburb where Marshall lives, Prince William County, and where he has survived efforts by both parties to get rid of him.

There's little about Marshall's record to suggest he's go-along, get-along. That's the image that emerges of Allen, critics say, having voted in the Senate to raise the nation's debt ceiling and, hoping to return, backing personhood, the concept that life begins at conception and which Marshall hopes to carve in state law this year.

Even in a Republican-controlled legislature, that, like Marshall's Senate bid, may be a lost cause. But he's not praying to St. Jude, patron saint of desperate cases — yet.