Moran hopes paying dues pays off

When Brian J. Moran was a child and his spinster aunt needed company in her Maine retreat, he was plucked from his friends and shipped north for the summer.

When Moran's father was dying, it was Brian who left college and moved home to nurse him.

"He always got the responsibility of being the dutiful son," says his oldest brother, Rep. James P. Moran, D-8th.

Years later, in 2001, when Republicans controlled the House of Delegates and the Democratic caucus needed a leader, Brian Moran took the job, knowing gains would come slowly.

Now Moran, 49, is running to be governor of Virginia, and he is engaged in a full-throated struggle to wrest the party nomination from rivals Terry McAuliffe and state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, who are equally hungry and had more money as of the last reporting period.

The reserved Moran -- known for studious qualities -- doesn't suck the air from a room like McAuliffe. While Deeds speaks in a native Virginia drawl, Moran delivers his decades-spent-fighting-for-Virginians speech in a hard-edged Boston accent.

Moran says he has been working for Virginians for 20 years, from Arlington County, where he served as a prosecutor, to the halls of the state Capitol.

It was him -- not the others -- who in 2004 sat with Republicans in a 24-hour diner to draft a budget reform compromise on a paper napkin over beers, he says.

"I do believe that we are on the right track," in Virginia "and we need somebody that's been there and can lead us," Moran said this week. "I truly believe I have that ability."

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But it has been a struggle to cut through his opponents' multiple TV ads, splashy campaign promises and McAuliffe's celebrity endorsements. And it has most recently thrust Moran into the position of trying to pull the millionaire McAuliffe back by picking apart his business background and campaign rhetoric.

It's a position, pundits say, that's out of character.

"What you have with Brian Moran is a knowledgeable, competent legislator who has won the respect of his peers in Richmond," said Steve Farnsworth, political scientist at George Mason University.

"I describe him more as a workhorse and less of a show horse. In modern media-dominated politics, people seem to be drawn to show horses more than workhorses. And show horses with money -- that is a second advantage."

Moran started working at 14, bagging groceries near his home in Natick, Mass., a suburb west of Boston, where he lived with his parents and six siblings. He lived there until moving away to the University of Massachusetts, where he briefly played football. By the end of his junior year, cancer had tightened its grip on his father, and Moran moved home to help.

He never returned to the university, instead putting himself through the local Framingham State College and later Catholic University law school working jobs on a construction site, at a gas station, in a bar, and as a subcommittee aide on Capitol Hill.

In 1989, he joined the Arlington prosecutor's office. It was there, when he was a rookie prosecutor, that the assault and stabbing death of a 23-year-old woman as she walked upon a Rosslyn bicycle path challenged his opposition to the death penalty, which was based upon his Catholic teachings.

"You see something like that, and it makes you . . . reassess your position," said Moran, who now supports the death penalty. "I'll have to answer to somebody when the time comes, but seeing a crime, having that experience, it was a profound effect . . . "

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Moran entered private practice after he was elected in 1995 to the House of Delegates, representing Alexandria. Two years later, he married his wife, Karyn. They had met in a Northern Virginia shopping mall on Christmas Eve while she was wrapping gifts to raise money for juvenile diabetes.

They have a 7 year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter who often accompany their parents on the campaign trail.

In his 12 years in the General Assembly, Moran successfully introduced legislation to expand task forces to combat Internet crimes, to require employers to allow crime victims to leave work to attend court and to create a one-stop permitting program for small businesses, among other initiatives. In December, Moran resigned his House seat to campaign for governor full time.

House Minority Leader Ward L. Armstrong, D-Henry, a close friend, shared an apartment with Moran during General Assembly sessions for a couple of years. They had a pact to rouse each other from sleep to hit the gym in the morning, where they'd talk shop -- Armstrong on the elliptical machine and Moran pedaling the stationary bike.

When they entered the legislature, House Democrats were in the majority, but it didn't last very long. After the 2001 elections, Democrats held 34 seats out of 100. Moran took on the role of caucus chairman, which Deeds had vacated when he won his Senate seat in a special election.

"Moran ran then and nobody else wanted to take it. We were at our low point, down in the 30s, and Brian worked really hard to move us up to the point where now we're at 45 and have a chance at taking the House back," Armstrong said.

"He worked like a dog," said Armstrong. "But he knows as well as I do there are no entitlements in politics. It's not necessarily the people who work hardest" that prevail.

That is a lesson Moran picked up from his father.

Times were tough growing up, Moran says. To this day he says the taste of powdered milk returns when he hears stories of people who are scraping to make ends meet.

One misfortune in particular has stuck with Brian and his oldest brother. The way Jim Moran tells it, their father was a loyal, hardworking employee for a beer distributor. That was, until one day, when the company was bought out. Their father was shown the door and the family's station wagon -- his company car -- was towed out of the driveway.

"These people who came in didn't have loyalty to the company or the product or anything else," Jim Moran said. "They just wanted to make a quick buck."

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Fast forward a few decades, and Jim Moran draws a correlation to what Brian faces as he tries to knock down McAuliffe.

"Brian has invested so much in this state just like our dad invested so much in his company. There's real loyalty there. He doesn't want someone to come in with a lot of slick talk and not much investment and walk away with the prize."

"There's something that makes it personal with regard to Terry."

And it's not hard to see.

At the candidates' first joint appearance in December -- even before McAuliffe formally joined the race -- Moran quipped that "Virginia's not for sale." In Moran's booth at the annual Shad Planking, aides played a recording of The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" over and over.

"From the time McAuliffe got in, he unsettled Moran's strategy," said political analyst Bob Holsworth, author of the political blog, virginiatomorrow.com.

With few major differences on issues, Moran has emphasized his opposition to offshore drilling and his willingness to work to repeal a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, among other things, Holsworth said.

That may allow him to harness votes of activists who can dominate thinly attended primaries, but could make it more diffcult for Moran to move to the middle in the general election campaign.

When asked about McAuliffe, Moran talks about himself, saying he is "personally invested" in building a successful Democratic party and "personally invested" in making sure Virginia is the best place to live, work and raise a family.

"I will be a stronger nominee because of this primary process," he said.

His campaign so far has tried to target voters likely to turn out in the primary. It has run radio ads and automated calls, and Moran has spent Sundays in churches across the state.

His camp has already replaced the tires on its 2004 gold Chevy Uplander -- a minivan dubbed "the no-fuss bus" -- in which Moran rides shotgun. It lumbers down Virginia's highways like a huge dustbuster with stickers for Moran, Mark R. Warner and Barack Obama on the back.

And when the candidate steps out at events, he often talks about lessons from his childhood. He says nursing his father gave him perspective on elder care. And he'll never forget the day the family car was hauled away.

"Whether voters decide I'm the best candidate or not, I'm going to put myself out there. I really want to take Virginia to the next step building on where we've come," he said.

"I think because of my upbringing I am truly empathetic with what people are going through."

Contact Olympia Meola at (804) 649-6812 or .