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Ouch.

"You have to enjoy competition," Allen says of his infamous remarks. "I had said, 'And I say this figuratively' ... Maybe I'm a bit too much like my dad. But we were in a locker room-type situation, we were at the Richmond Coliseum and I was trying to get folks fired up. It was a political convention, after all."

"Allen is the kind of politician who is much harsher in both language and approach," says Sabato. "You're either 'for him or agin' him,' and that comes across."

Sabato points out that, in contrast with the current Republican governor, James Gilmore III, Allen provoked strained relations with minority communities, failed to get most of his budget passed and unsuccessfully tried to lead the House of Delegates into GOP hands. Gilmore, though no less conservative, has used a softer style to be much more successful on all three counts.

"Allen's not warm and fuzzy," Sabato says.

Still, the Virginia economy boomed during Allen's gubernatorial reign, mainly in high-tech. As he came into office, Allen's stated goal was 125,000 new jobs; the end result four years later was more that twice that. Motorola began construction on its $3 billion semiconductor plant in Goochland, and others -- IBM-Toshiba, Motorola-Siemens -- and billions of dollars followed. Allen nicknamed his territory "the Silicon Dominion."

Allen made other moves that were popular with voters and perfectly consistent with what he had promised. He abolished parole, increased penalties for drug crimes, slashed the welfare roles, led the charge for a parental consent law for minors seeking abortions. There were skirmishes over education, the environment and gun laws, but the vast majority of Virginians seemed to side with Allen.

The gun issue, for instance, had little traction in the recent House of Delegates elections, though Allen had staked out a potentially vulnerable position in favor of a law allowing Virginians to carry concealed weapons, even into recreational centers.

"There was all sorts of hollering and screaming that we were going to turn Virginia into Dodge City," Allen says. "But the reality is that no one who received a [concealed-carry] permit has committed a crime with a gun." (That's not quite right. In February 1996, Robert Asbury -- a January 1996 CCW permit holder -- died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after killing his estranged wife, Susan M. Asbury, with a gun.)

As for the environment, where Allen's record is less than exemplary, he says that Democrats attack him on the issue because they have nothing else to say. "We've had such success on economic development -- gosh, it's been unprecedented -- they have to say, 'Oh, well, the way you've done this is by ignoring environmental laws.' But that's absolutely false. Democrats can grouse and mew and whine all they want, but it's absolutely false."

Democrats plan on taking rhetorical salvos like this and using them to paint Allen as an extremist.

"He's got that pleasing exterior -- the cowboy boots and the tobacco -- which does a lot to soften the edges of a pretty frightening ideology," says Jim Jordan, political director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Upon reexamination it's going to hurt him."

"His weakness is education," assesses Sabato, who attended the University of Virginia with Allen. Democrats will point to Allen's proposed budget cuts for K-12 -- student-health programs, at-risk youth programming, English as a second language -- as well as his desire to eliminate a college-aid program for minority and low-income high school kids. They'll remind voters that Allen was the only governor in the country to refuse Goals 2000's federal money because he didn't want the federal government to have any say in Virginia education. ("It was a pittance of a flea on a hair of a dog wagging the whole dog," Allen says.)

Most significantly, Allen's Christian Coalition-backed revisions of the commonwealth's "Standards of Learning," or SOLs -- which included adding Bible studies and changing the terminology of African slaves to "settlers" -- found adamant opposition in the Northern Virginia suburbs. "His positions on SOLs were enormously unpopular," says Sabato.

But it's unclear how resonant that issue will seem to the electorate in its entirety. Votes will come in from the whole commonwealth -- Norton and Bristol, Salem and Roanoke, Lynchburg and Appomattox -- not just the northernmost area closest to D.C., which is dismissed by the rest of the commonwealth as "The People's Republic of Alexandria."

No question Allen is a tough S.O.B., but he also left office with approval ratings around 60 percent. Sabato points out that Allen's popularity tops out in that he failed to win control of the General Assembly in 1995 by "coming on too strong" and "making it a statewide referendum on him." And the 60 percent approval rating might be a decent showing compared with other governors from other states, but in Virginia it's "quite low."

Allen's vulnerability, therefore, is underestimated, Sabato insists, but "it's just that Robb is the walking wounded."

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