Selling Hope in West Virginia

By S.C. GWYNNE

West Virginia's spectacular landscape belies the conditions facing its inhabitants: dying coal towns and widespread rural poverty and illiteracy. When a coal-company manager was hustled off to prison last month in Huntington for his role in a vote-buying scheme, it seemed simply more of the same: a handful of predators picking over the ruins of a once booming coal economy, and a stagnant, wasteful government.

Yet across the state a near miracle was happening. On that same day, West Virginia legislators completed a session unlike any other in the state's history. Democrats and Republicans pushed through a thick package of legislation that would trim the state's tangled bureaucracy, reorganize its disastrous finances and launch an ambitious program of educational reform. The measures were ramrodded into law by rookie Democratic Governor Gaston Caperton, 49, a man who is determined to upend the state's feckless political tradition and sell mountaineers something they haven't had in decades: hope.

Only a year ago, Caperton, an insurance executive and political novice, was known to a scant 3% of West Virginia's voters. Flanked by his wife Dee, Caperton lit out for the hollows in a van, spent $3.2 million of his own money and ran away with last November's election, upsetting powerful three-term Republican incumbent Arch Moore Jr.

In his inaugural address, Caperton stunned the legislature by calling it into emergency session, declaring West Virginia to be "in crisis." During his first three months he has managed to reduce the number of state offices and commissions from 150 to seven. Confronted by a $230 million deficit and a scandalous $280 million loss in state pension funds, he persuaded lawmakers to raise taxes on groceries and gasoline. He introduced an innovative health- cost-containment plan for state employees, arranged for payment of West Virginia's debts and put through his own radical restructuring of the state's education system, including larger pay increases to teachers and new bonds for school construction.

Caperton owes much of his success to his personal style. While Moore tended to be aloof and adversarial with legislators, Caperton has invited Democrats and Republicans alike to the mansion for pizza after a long day spent on his agenda. At first, some Republicans wanted to obstruct the Caperton juggernaut, but the G.O.P., outflanked and outnumbered 4 to 1, had little choice but to go along. "Whichever side you were on," says house minority leader Bob Burk, "you realized we had to do something about the fiscal integrity of the state."

Caperton's success is also rooted in his experience running his family's insurance business in Charleston, which he built from a small operation into the nation's 18th largest brokerage. His politics, like his business management, depends on a salesman's enthusiasm and a willingness to listen. "I've never felt I had all the brains or all the answers," says Caperton. "If you expect more from people and respect what they have to say, it improves performance tremendously."

In spite of his early success, Caperton's task of selling change to West Virginia is a tough one. A skeptical public resents paying 6 cents more for each dollar's worth of food and 5 cents more for each gallon of gas. Opponents contend that Moore tried many of the same proposals only to be sabotaged by the legislature. Once the honeymoon is over, they predict, Caperton will face the same rough treatment.

Critics also charge that reducing the number of departments in government will simply add another layer of bureaucracy. Says agriculture commissioner Cleve Benedict: "This issue represents nothing more than a cynical attempt to gather more political power and influence." Benedict, it should be noted, may lose his job this fall in yet another of Caperton's reorganization proposals: abolition of the offices of agriculture commissioner, secretary of state and treasurer.

But Caperton, a tall, genial man with more than a hint of a West Virginia twang, insists that his organization will be leaner than what came before, and that the state's illnesses are being healed with a new formula. He is counting on, among other things, a wave of small entrepreneurial business and tourism to pick up where the declining coal, railroad and chemical industries leave off.

"One of the things that was so important about this revolution we had in the legislature was that people can now begin to see that there can be change, that there can be hope," says Caperton. Few West Virginians claim to be as confident as their new Governor, but the fresh air of optimism is something that had been missing from this state for a long time.