Breakthrough In Virginia

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Wilder's strategy appeared to be working so well that few expected election night to be a Maalox Moment. All the published pre-election surveys had shown Wilder leading his Republican rival J. Marshall Coleman by margins of 4% to 15%. Even an initial television exit poll had anointed Wilder with a 10 percentage-point triumph. But by the time Wilder felt comfortable enough to declare victory, his razor-thin lead had stabilized about where it would end up: just 6,582 votes out of a record 1.78 million ballots cast. That was enough, however, for Virginia's Governor-elect to declare proudly, "As a boy, when I would read about an Abe Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson . . . when I would read that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . I knew it meant me."

Wilder's wafer-thin win should have been all the more satisfying, for it underlines the extent of the racial barriers that he has surmounted. But in the topsy-turvy world of political analysis, this Virginia victory was measured against the unrealistically optimistic expectations raised by the pre-election surveys and as a result was somehow found wanting. According to the final CBS/New York Times exit polls, Wilder won an impressive 39% of the white vote. In 1988 Democratic primaries, Jackson never came close to this type of biracial mandate. Moreover, Wilder ran neck and neck with Coleman among all voters over 45, the group most likely to remember the era of "massive resistance" in the mid-1950s, when Prince Edward County shut down its public schools rather than integrate them.

Wilder, himself a product of segregated education and law school at Howard University, will be the embodiment of state government for the next four years. When he is inaugurated in January, he will command more day-to-day administrative power than any other elected black official in the nation's history. (P.B.S. Pinchback, hitherto the nation's only black Governor, served for just four weeks in Louisiana during Reconstruction.) But there is also an important symbolic dimension to Wilder's election. It is sobering to remember that just one other black has been elected to major statewide office since Reconstruction: former Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Only two black Congressmen and a handful of the nation's other 7,000 black elected officials serve constituencies in which blacks are not a majority. Even David Dinkins' triumph in New York City was a reminder of the constraints on black political power; most big-city mayors operate in a no-win environment, where their capacity to be blamed for insoluble urban problems far exceeds their powers and resources.