LEESBURG, Va. — If Republican Sen. George Allen survives the charges of racial insensitivity that have recently rocked his reelection campaign, it will be thanks to voters like Peter Nicholson, a 42-year-old wine consultant in this historic town on the edge of a Civil War battlefield.
"What if he is a closet racist, so what? I'm interested in what they are going to do for Virginia," Nicholson, a Republican, said amid the towering stacks at the wine store where he works.
If Allen loses, it will be due to voters like Fabian Saeidi, the 59-year-old owner of a bakery a few doors away. Saeidi is also a Republican and has voted for Allen at least once. But not this time.
"Allen is a racist man, a very bad man," Saeidi said as he manned the register at his cozy cafe. "There is no way I am voting for him."
Whatever the outcome Nov. 7, there is no question Allen is in a much tougher race than almost anyone expected, largely because of remarks that many say smacked of racial insensitivity. His double-digit lead over Democrat Jim Webb, a political newcomer, melted after he referred to his opponent's dark-skinned campaign worker as "macaca" during an August rally.
Things grew worse as Allen awkwardly wrestled in public with new information that his grandfather was Jewish, and again last week when several former college classmates stepped forward to accuse him of using an anti-black slur. One said Allen had stuffed the severed head of a deer into the mailbox of an African American family. Allen dismissed the allegations as "ludicrously false" and produced several witnesses to vouch for him.
Another voice from his past surfaced Thursday, charging that Allen repeatedly used a racial slur when referring to blacks while on the sidelines of a rugby pitch in the late 1970s.
Patricia Waring, 75, then the wife of a University of Virginia rugby coach, said she heard Allen use the epithet while she sat on the sidelines of a match. Allen had graduated but had come back to play unofficially.
"He was showing off, using the n-word quite lavishly. He said it more than once, probably three or four times in this diatribe," said Waring, who now lives in Maryland, where she is a Democratic Party volunteer. "I got out of the bleacher and I said, 'Hi, kid. I'm the coach's wife, and it would be awfully nice if you didn't talk that way.'
"He was rude and told me to buzz off or something."
