Youth bolsters old guard among Virginia's delegates

Virginia's Democratic Convention delegation is the fourth youngest.

By CHRISTINA NUCKOLS
The Roanoke Times
Aug. 14, 2000

RICHMOND - It takes a dedicated Democrat to leave the tranquillity of Southwest Virginia for a week in Los Angeles.

Virginia's delegates to the Democratic National Convention pay their own way to suffer through the traffic, the smog, the belligerent protesters and the heat.

The decision of many convention regulars to stick to the safety of the East Coast has given Virginia's delegation a different look this year.

The backbone of the delegation hasn't changed. The labor leaders will still be there in force. But alongside them will be a new crop of Democrats. They're young, computer-savvy and not afraid to challenge the status quo.

"The convention is about as far away from Virginia as you can get," said Craig Fifer, a 22-year-old delegate from Roanoke. "I'm thankful for that, because that's the reason I'm going."

"I submitted my name as a kind of long shot," added Jason Ellenburg, a 24-year-old delegate from Radford. "What's surprising was there wasn't a whole lot of interest. I'm starting to see why,
because it's so expensive."

Twenty-somethings and even a few teen-agers have pushed the average age of the Virginia delegation down to 46.9, making it the fourth youngest delegation attending the convention. Party officials view the interaction between two generations of Democrats this week as an opportunity for revitalization.

Here's a look at the delegates traveling to the convention from the Roanoke and New River valleys

Craig Fifer is the Web master for Roanoke city's Web site. A graduate of Virginia Tech, where he studied political science and computer science, he is drawn to projects that challenge him to use
science as a tool for improving public services. He is the census coordinator for Roanoke, organizing the campaign to ensure an accurate count of the city's population. As a member of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education, he helped write guidelines to assist teachers using the Internet in their classrooms.

Fifer said his family has always encouraged him to take an interest in public affairs.

"We've always been a very issue-oriented family," he said. "Our family discussions center on the issues of the day and not so much in a partisan way."

For that reason, he used to resist identifying himself as a Republican or Democrat. But while he was a student at Tech, he saw a flier for a Young Democrats meeting and decided to join.

"The rest is history," he said. "I always knew if I made a list of my beliefs, I would be closer to the Democrats."

During this year's primary season, Fifer said he found his affections vacillating between Bill Bradley and Al Gore. But Fifer said he is happy with Gore as the party's nominee.

"He's a smart guy," Fifer said of Gore. "He's involved with science and technology and issues some other politicians don't get into very deeply."

Fifer is one of eight Virginia delegates attending the convention who are Young Democrats (younger than 36).

Jason Ellenburg of Radford also is in that group.

Ellenburg grew up in Michigan and moved to the New River Valley this year when he got a job at Radford University as assistant director for student media.

"I got involved just for the learning experience," the 24-year-old said. "I wanted to see how the whole process worked."

Last summer, he worked at the Washington, D.C., headquarters for C-SPAN. The cable channel's exhaustive regimen of political news gave Ellenburg a front-row seat for the party primaries, and he got "charged up" over Bradley.

Like people in both parties who saw their favorite candidates fall victim to the nominating process, Ellenburg would like to see that process reformed.

"I think the Democratic Party needs to seriously evaluate the primary system," he said.

He said he would prefer to see the country divided into regions, with those blocks of states holding primaries on the same day. The goal, he said, would be to give more states a role in choosing the nominee. It also would help candidates, who find themselves criss-crossing the
continental United States on donor-funded jets trying to stump in several widely scattered states. Although he's got his own ideas about how to improve the party, Ellenburg is realistic about implementing those changes.

"I'm still pretty young and a little wet behind the ears," he said. "I'm still learning."

Phillip Hawks of Pulaski County is old enough to be Fifer and Ellenburg's dad. The 55-year-old describes himself as "a regular old country boy" who was raised in Carroll County and served his country in Vietnam.

"I just grew up kind of poor and trying to make a living in this old world," he said. "Most of my neighbors were ten times as poor as we were and we were on the wrong side of the tracks."

In Hawks' generation, political affiliation was often handed down by genetics, but he had the freedom to make up his own mind.

"I had some relatives as Republican as they could come, I had some relatives who were as Democratic as they could come and I had some who wouldn't talk about it," he said.

He was close to his grandfather, a small farmer who admired Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman. Still, Hawks admits he's split quite a few tickets on Election Days past.

"It seems like the older I get, the more Democratic I become," he added. "I always think back to the Bible. When Jesus Christ was here on Earth, he didn't mingle with the rich. He mingled with the poor. A lot of Democrats try to narrow the wage gap between the rich and the
poor."

And that's the bottom line for Hawks, who checks for repetitive defects on the assembly line at the Volvo Trucks North America plant and has been an active member of the United Auto Workers for more than two decades.

In a time when "family values" is often used as a catch phrase for Republican principles, Hawks invokes the words with gusto. And he makes it clear that among those values he includes fair wages, retirement benefits and health and dental insurance for all working men and women.

"I can go out in my neighborhood and see many people that have got a mouth full of rotten teeth," he said. "I just feel for those people."

Hawks is one of several union members from the Roanoke and New River valleys attending the national convention. Alma Lee, president of the National Veterans Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, will be there. So will Mike Mays and Doris
Crouse-Mays, a husband-and-wife team active in Roanoke Valley unions.

Mike Mays, 45, is a member of the Sheetmetal Workers Local 100 and a 26-year union veteran. His wife is a state field worker for the AFL-CIO and has been involved in attempts to unionize Roanoke city employees.

Like many union members, Mays said he became involved in the Democratic Party through his union.

"Republicans are not for the working people," he said.

A Bedford County native, he serves as co-chairman of the county's Democratic committee. This week's national convention will be his third in a row, and he admits to being a little nervous about it. He's never been to Los Angeles before "and probably won't want to go back."

But he and Crouse-Mays said they were determined to be at the convention in 2000 to symbolically bring in the new millennium and, they hope, a new Democratic president.

"The Democrats have been in the White House eight years now but four years ago we were renominating Clinton," said Crouse-Mays. "This year, it's almost like starting over again.