Coach’s Son Hitting Political Pay Dirt in Virginia Contest : Election: George Allen Jr. is pulling ahead in the governor’s race. He’s stumbled on some issues, but his gains are seen as a danger sign for Clinton.

At the end of the 1970 football season, the Los Angeles Rams fired Coach George Allen, and he moved east to take over the struggling Washington Redskins. That coaching change 23 years ago not only helped propel the Redskins, but it also may lead to a new Republican governor this year in Virginia.

George Allen Jr., who left UCLA after his freshman year to join his parents in northern Virginia, has taken a solid lead over Mary Sue Terry, the state’s Democratic attorney general, in the governor’s race.

Barring a late shift in opinion, the coach’s son will end a 12-year Democratic hold on the governor’s mansion.

“The ‘change’ theme that worked so well for Bill Clinton last year is working wonders for George Allen and the Republicans this year,” said Robert Holsworth, a political analyst at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Allen, 41, campaigns with a boyish enthusiasm and a down-home style: “I like to campaign in barbershops and hardware stores,” he has said at fund-raising dinners.

And he promises to “break the stranglehold of the Robb/Wilder/Terry style of liberalism,” linking his opponent to U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, who is a former governor, and current Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, both of whom are deeply unpopular in part because they have engaged in an embarrassingly public feud.

During the final television debate earlier this week, Allen pressed Terry to admit that she voted for the Democratic candidate in the 1992 presidential race.

“I voted for Ronald Reagan twice and for George Bush,” Allen said. “Who did you vote for, Mary Sue?”

Terry did not answer, choosing instead to launch into a discussion of her program to lower class sizes in the public schools.

Asked about the President later, Terry conceded that she has a problem. “We’re running into a real head wind,” she said, and then changed the subject.

Like former President Bush, Terry, 46, began her campaign with the advantages of incumbency. She had 10 times as much money as Allen during the summer and her name was known statewide. She touted her experience in Richmond and used “trust” as her campaign theme.

But she also offered few new ideas. She proposed a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns--after saying little about gun control during her years as attorney general--and she promised to spend more money on elementary schools.

In the early months of the campaign, she purchased TV ads around the state, but they evoked a picture of Terry as an old-fashioned grammar school teacher--stiff, a bit authoritarian and dull.

Having begun the campaign in June with a 20 percentage point lead in the polls, she is now trailing Allen by 7 points in recent surveys.

In the final two weeks, Terry has gone on the attack, charging that Allen is a captive of Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson and the “radical right.” Belatedly, she has loudly proclaimed her support for abortion rights.

“I’m pro-choice, and George Allen is multiple choice,” Terry has said.

Four years ago, Wilder showed the power of abortion as electoral issue. Running as a black Democrat in a generally conservative Southern state, Wilder rode to victory by promising that he would preserve the right to abortion in Virginia even if the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling guaranteeing the right to abortion. His Republican challenger opposed legal abortion.

This year, the abortion issue has faded, mostly because the court has recently reaffirmed the abortion right. And Allen has avoided a clear pronouncement on the issue.

Before his nomination, he told anti-abortion activists that he was inclined to “support the unborn.” Now he is saying that he favors a course of “reasonable moderation.”

“He’s not pro-life or pro-choice,” explained Allen’s campaign manager, Mike Thomas. As governor, Allen would support legislation to require pregnant teen-agers to notify their parents, he said. But because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year reaffirming a woman’s right to an abortion, any discussion of further state restrictions “is moot,” Thomas added.

A wild card in the race is Michael Farris, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and a 42-year-old lawyer who urges fellow born-again Christians to educate their children at home.

In 1983, Farris gained national attention by representing a group of Hawkins County, Tenn., parents who accused the public schools of teaching “secular humanism.” They opposed having their children read books such as “Cinderella,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

A federal judge initially ruled that the children could opt out of regular reading programs, but that ruling was overturned on appeal.

Farris has said that he did not oppose those books or ask that they be banned. Rather, he has insisted, he merely advocated “that all parents have the right to direct the education of their children.”

Clearly, he is no fan of public schooling. In a 1990 book, he called the public schools a “godless monstrosity,” and he has represented parents who want to teach their children. He practices what he preaches too. He and his wife, Vickie, teach their nine children at home in rural Loudoun County.

In debates with Democrat Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, a 43-year-old northern Virginia Volvo dealer, Farris downplayed his strong moral opinions and stressed issues such as cutting government spending.

Still, he raised eyebrows during the campaign by telling interviewers that he was “born again” at the unusually young age of 6, that he regrets having had a girlfriend in second grade and that abortion causes breast cancer. He cited a small study that, he said, showed a woman who gets an abortion has “a 90% increased chance of getting breast cancer.” But other, larger studies have found no such correlation and medical researchers have scoffed at the claim.

It is not clear what impact Farris will have on the gubernatorial race. In Virginia, the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run separately and Allen has not appeared with Farris during the fall campaign.

Recent polls show Farris running about 10 percentage points behind Beyer.

When asked about Farris, Allen has avoided specifics and has said that he brings “diversity” to the ticket. It’s typical of the statements that frustrate Democrats, who have said that Allen is adept at avoiding controversy.

“He says anything to any audience--and smiles,” complained state delegate Mary Van Landingham of Alexandria.

Indeed, Allen has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt to his surroundings.

Though a product of Southern California, he enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1971, and within weeks, he was a Southern good ol’ boy. He wore boots, chewed tobacco and displayed a Confederate flag in his room, friends recalled. He also became a master of Thomas Jefferson trivia.

His father, who ended six decades of coaching with a winning season at Cal State Long Beach, died on New Year’s Eve, 1990, at the age of 72.

These days, his lawyer son lives in a log cabin outside Charlottesville with his wife and two children. He served nine years in the state House of Delegates and one term in Congress.

“I’m a Jeffersonian conservative,” he has told every audience. “That means I trust in people, not in government.”

His anti-government campaign, if successful, will show that Bill Clinton and his activist style of governing is headed for trouble, Republican leaders are saying.