Jack Reid was from suburban Richmond. Jane Woods was from suburban Washington, D.C. Their views were as different as the regions they represented in the state legislature. He was rigidly conservative. She was flexibly moderate. They had different styles of politics, too. He was confrontational. She was conciliatory.
They had one thing in common, though: Both were Republicans.
Reid, 79, who represented Henrico County in the House of Delegates, and Woods, 75, a delegate-turned-senator-turned-Cabinet secretary from Fairfax County, both died this past week.
They were in the General Assembly together, serving when the state GOP was — after more than a century out of power or on its fringe — ascendant as a legislative party. The party was also a big tent, though one that was rapidly shrinking and lurching further and further to the right.
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That contraction, accompanied by resistance to diversity of views, reflected the nationalization of Virginia’s politics. It has infected, too, the state’s Democratic Party. It is lurching further and further to the left, shunning the middle-of-the-roadism that allowed it to return from the wilderness in the 1980s and early 2000s.
The Republican Party of Reid and Woods accommodated cultural and economic conservatives, philosophical purists and practical-minded problem-solvers. Now a mostly rural party, it had a significant presence in the metropolitan areas that dominate the state’s politics and tilt to the Democrats. Indeed, the seats held by Reid and Woods are now blue.
The Henrico that sent Reid to the legislature in 1989 had become reflexively Republican, hastened by white flight from majority-minority Richmond over the previous two decades. The Fairfax that sent Woods to Richmond in 1987 was politically competitive and preferred Republicanism rooted in suburban sensibilities.
Reid’s campaigns were usually cakewalks. Not Woods’.
She was narrowly defeated — by 37 votes out of some 30,000 cast — by Leslie Byrne, previously the first woman from Virginia elected to Congress. Woods’ defeat came in an historic year for Republicans: 1999, when they won the House and took total control of state government for the first time since the 1880s.
It would be, for Reid, a political as well as a personal triumph.
The GOP breakthrough was led by Gov. Jim Gilmore, a close friend and ally of Reid. The pair were part of a core group of Republicans — veterans of the battles with the old segregationist Democratic machine and younger activists inspired by Nixon and Reagan — who toiled for years to make Henrico a GOP haven.
Reid, known for a bellowing voice in which he could squeeze several syllables out of a one-syllable epithet, served 18 years in the House, retiring in 2007. He arrived as a member of the minority and departed as a member of the majority.
Reid was a curmudgeonly conservative who unsuccessfully pushed for repeal of the helmet requirement for motorcyclists. He snarled when a Black Democratic colleague convinced the House to remove a likeness of the Confederate flag from a proposed license plate for descendants of rebel veterans.
And Reid, a firearms-rights guy, practiced what he preached, keeping a handgun for personal protection. While he was unloading the pistol in his legislative office in 2006, the weapon discharged, sending a round across the room, where it lodged in a bullet-proof vest that was hanging on the door.
Woods was in the House for two terms before her election to the Virginia Senate. There, because of the GOP’s slender majority, Woods led the Education and Health Committee. That assignment augured her appointment in 2002 — by a Democratic governor, Mark Warner — as secretary of health and human resources.
As the Warner administration’s face and voice on social safety net issues, Woods was deeply involved in the governor’s monthslong fight in 2004 with anti-tax House Republicans over a giant cash fix for welfare, law enforcement and education.
Warner finally prevailed on a $1.4 billion tax increase because of votes from moderate Republicans, many of whom had served with Woods and have since disappeared — casualties of time or, in some cases, forced retirement, having been defeated for renomination by a conservative.
Her centrist views on abortion rights and gun control — issues on which most contemporary Republicans are firm nays — put Woods at odds with her party’s heavily male caucuses in the House and Senate. She occasionally clashed with Gilmore and his predecessor, fellow Republican George Allen, and considered quitting the GOP to become a Democrat.
But with a flash of her sly sarcasm, Woods, who was a health care lobbyist before and after her four years in the Warner administration, would explain that she’d been a Republican too long to give up on her party. She was Fairfax City GOP chairwoman when she announced for her first House race.
Despite their expansive differences, Reid and Woods were alike in an often overlooked way: Both were career educators.
Reid had been a middle school principal in Chesterfield County, a suburb south of Richmond. He would also be a school system administrator. Woods was teaching first grade in Fairfax County — and had been for 15 years — before she ran for the legislature.
And from both of them, all of us learned something about Virginia politics.
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis 7:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. Friday on Radio IQ, 89.7 FM in Richmond and 89.1 FM in Roanoke, and in Norfolk on WHRV, 89.5 FM.