RICHMOND, Va. – Republican Sen. George Allen, bedeviled by his own mistakes and an unpopular president, fought for his political life in a tight race Tuesday against Jim Webb, whose disgust with the GOP made him a Democrat.
With nearly all precincts counted and the two candidates separated by a razor-thin margin, Virginians – and the nation – waited to see what would happen.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Webb had 1,143,756 votes, or 49.51 percent, to Allen’s 1,141,030, or 49.39 percent.
There are no automatic recounts in Virginia, but state law allows a candidate who finishes a half-percentage point or less behind to request a recount paid for by state and local governments.
With a margin greater than that but less than 1 percentage point, the trailing candidate can also seek a recount, but would have to pay the costs if the results are unchanged.
A former governor once popular for abolishing parole, Allen had once been expected to cruise to a second term this year as a warm-up for a presumed 2008 presidential run.
His solid conservative credentials and his sunny persona invited comparisons with the archetypal Republican, Ronald Reagan. In late July, Allen led Webb by 16 points in the year’s first independent statewide poll.
Then came Aug. 11, the day Allen pointed out S.R. Sidarth, a 20-year-old Virginia-born man of East Indian descent working as a Webb campaign volunteer, and introduced him at an all-white rally as “macaca,” an obscure racial slur that denotes a genus of monkeys.
Sidarth was tracking Allen across the state, videotaping his public appearances, and his video of Allen’s macaca moment became a major national story and was grist for comedians and cable talk shows.
Allen eventually apologized to Sidarth, but not until the comment had already provoked widespread scorn. By then, the political damage was done.
As Webb tied Allen to President Bush and the deadly U.S. occupation of Iraq, Allen battled back. He accused Webb of denigrating women in a 1979 magazine article decrying admission of women to the Naval Academy. Allen later tried to portray sexual descriptions in Webb’s six best-selling war novels as demeaning to women.
Webb, a Naval Academy graduate and decorated Vietnam veteran who served as Navy secretary under Reagan, bitterly opposed the war in Iraq and switched to the Democratic Party.
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