Quicksilver Image in Senator’s Mirror

A rising star in the Republican Party and darling of the Christian right was remarkably flummoxed this week as he acknowledged his previously undisclosed Jewish roots.

It’s not the first time George Allen -- a Virginia senator running for reelection with an eye on the White House -- has undergone an identity transplant.

More than 30 years ago his makeover was by design, when the Palos Verdes High School quarterback and son of the legendary Rams coach of the same name methodically shed his California cool to adopt the folkways and mores of the rebel South, grooving on Confederate flags the way his peers did surfboards.

This time, though, the transformation of his public persona was foisted upon him during a televised debate when a reporter asked about his 83-year-old mother’s Jewish heritage.

If the first personality transplant from California to country served Allen well in his ascent from Virginia congressman to governor to senator, the latest flap may have spoiled his prospects as a leading presidential candidate -- not because of his ancestry, but because of the way he dealt with it.

The issue was one more in a series of gaffes in Allen’s campaign against Democrat Jim Webb that revealed a quick temper and a certain tone-deafness about the touchy issues of race and ethnicity.

“George Allen is damaged goods for the 2008 presidential contest,” said Larry J. Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, where he was also one of Allen’s classmates. “The controversy has nothing to do with his having Jewish blood. It has everything to do with how he handled the situation ... why he reacted so vociferously.”

Every successful politician tries to project an identity, their actual backgrounds notwithstanding. Ronald Reagan was the avuncular reflection of Middle America. Bill Clinton was the bright boy from hardscrabble circumstances. George W. Bush is the plain-spoken Texan.

And George Allen has sought to cast himself as an uncomplicated conservative who wears cowboy boots with his suits, spits tobacco and talks in football metaphors. His father’s move to coach the Washington Redskins brought the family to Virginia, and almost overnight Allen became a Southerner, transferring from UCLA to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he also attended law school before he launched his political career.

Despite his attempts to craft a new identity, he has spent the campaign mud-wrestling with who he is. A Virginian who isn’t really from Virginia. A senator who says he is a paragon of tolerance but blurts what some perceive as a racial slur at his opponent’s dark-skinned aide. And now, the product of a Christian family who has just found out he has Jewish ancestry.

None of those subjects are what Allen planned to discuss in a reelection campaign that was supposed to be a springboard to a 2008 bid for the White House. Last year, a survey of Washington insiders ranked Allen the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

But trouble began this spring when an article in the New Republic detailed his youthful fascination with Southern culture. He sported a Confederate-flag pin in his senior picture at Palos Verdes High, and classmates recalled another flag on his red Mustang.

While campaigning for governor in 1993, he acknowledged displaying the Confederate banner in his Virginia living room and a noose in his law office. He said the flag was part of a collection and the noose an Old West motif.

But those unusual displays, while cementing his Dixie image, also cast his record on race in a different light. As a Virginia lawmaker in 1984, he voted against a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. As governor a decade later, he proclaimed a Confederate History and Heritage Month, celebrating the South’s “four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights,” but never mentioned slavery.

Much of that was dismissed as an under-evolved political past that Allen had moved beyond. Then, during an August campaign stop, the senator referred to his opponent’s Indian American aide as “macaca” -- a word for a kind of monkey that is also a French slur.

He has repeatedly apologized, saying that the word was “made up” and that he was unaware of its offensive connotation. But because his mother was born in Tunisia, where French is spoken, some wondered whether he had learned it from her.

In the firecracker chain of events that political campaigns have a way of igniting, reporters were soon looking into the background of Henrietta “Etty” Allen, who still lives in Palos Verdes Estates. She could not be reached. (Sen. Allen’s father died in 1990.)

A Jewish newspaper, the Forward, determined that Allen was descended from a prominent Jewish family.

That led to the question posed at a debate Monday: “Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews, and if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?”

The question had been asked before because Allen often mentions in speeches that his maternal grandfather was imprisoned by Nazis. He has always said that his mother and he are Christian.

But this time the question came on the heels of another asking whether Allen might have learned the word “macaca” from his mother.

Apparently aghast that his mother might be linked to one of the most embarrassing episodes of his campaign, Allen fumed that her religion wasn’t relevant, adding, “My mother is French-Italian with a little bit of Spanish blood in her, and I’ve been raised -- and she was, as far as I know, raised -- a Christian.”

But in an interview with the Washington Post two days later, Etty Allen said she had told her son during a visit to her home last month that she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia. She said she and her husband concealed her background to protect their children from the fear she suffered during World War II. She told the Post she had sworn her son to secrecy.

In another change of demeanor, a teary Sen. Allen told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that his mother had begged him to keep her secret. “I said, ‘Ma, it doesn’t matter.’ But what’s more important, a political question from a reporter or your mother? My answer was defending my mother.”

Allen then embraced his roots, vowing to fight discrimination, “no matter what -- to advocate for freedom and justice and for tolerance of all people.”

But political observers wondered why his response varied from angry to flip to proud. (After Allen’s anger subsided, he characterized the new information to the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch as “just an interesting nuance to my background.... I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops.”)

“The mystery is why this came as a great surprise and why he reacted so vociferously,” Sabato said. “He has been asked this same question for years.”

Allen’s campaign is on the ropes in a Senate race that was supposed to be a cakewalk, causing some experts to wonder if he is ready for The Show.

“If Allen thinks it’s tough now, it’s going to be a lot tougher when he runs for president,” said Merle Black, who teaches political science at Atlanta’s Emory University and specializes in Southern politics.

Further complicating Allen’s predicament is the fact that Republicans have grappled with the issue of race since the civil rights movement pushed most black voters into the arms of the Democratic Party.

“I have encountered Republicans all over the country who don’t think it would be wise for the party to take on someone with so much racial baggage,” Sabato said.

Allen’s quest for the White House isn’t over, but it has clearly suffered a setback. And he is now in a tight race with Webb, a former secretary of the Navy.

Allen is spending more time and money in Virginia than he planned, rather than raising money and shaking hands in New Hampshire and Iowa, where the all-important first primary and caucuses are held. Even if he wins, a close victory will give his presidential campaign less bounce than the landslide he counted on.

“This is not the way you would design being introduced to people,” said Tom Rath, a Republican National Committee member from New Hampshire, where Allen’s rivals have been circulating and raising money. “He’s going to have to raise an incredible amount every day to catch up.”

Discussing whether Allen could overcome his rocky beginning, Rath said, “Sure.”

“But it’s going to be difficult. This is not the way you would want to start.”

faye.fiore@latimes.com