Napoli’s personality at the heart of campaign

By Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer | Saturday, October 28, 2006

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In a game where advertising is worth its weight in votes, incumbent state Sen. Bill Napoli begins each political campaign with a war chest full of notoriety.

Name recognition never seems to be a problem for the 58-year-old Republican with the scattergun mouth and seemingly endless supply of verbal buckshot. This year, however, some critics hoped that Napoli had critically wounded his re-election chances in the District 35 Senate race with an abortion-related appearance on a national news show.

It’s now known as the “religious virgin” interview — a typically flamboyant and, to many, outrageously offensive exchange between Napoli and an interviewer on “The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer” in March. In it, Napoli offered one example of how a pregnant rape victim might qualify for an abortion under the recently passed HB1215, a legislative ban that would allow the procedure only when needed to save a woman’s life.

Despite some Libertarian leanings, Napoli joined an overwhelming majority of other state legislators in approving the ban, which was then signed by Gov. Mike Rounds. Napoli was defending that vote on NewsHour when he offered this scenario as an example of when an abortion might be justified — outside of a critical medical situation — to save the life of a rape victim:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married,” Napoli told NewsHour correspondent Jim Lazaro. “She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

The comment propelled Napoli beyond his normal sphere of regional notoriety into the national news spotlight and into the more expansive world of the Internet. It also prompted a barrage of indignant letters to the editor and comments on Internet Web logs, as well as angry and sometime profane telephone calls to Napoli’s home and antique-automobile shop.

A Florida-based artist fanned the fire with an Internet cartoon that lampooned Napoli and raised, through an eBay auction, more than $2,000 for women’s reproductive health work. The cartoon also gave Napoli’s phone numbers, at home and at his antique car dealership.

But did it damage his re-election chances? Quite to the contrary, Napoli said.

“The slash-and-burn mentality on HB1215 by the opponents backfired,” he said. “Among many people that are good, moral South Dakotans, it backfired on the opposition. I’m still getting letters — just got one a couple days ago — from people who think it was absolutely immoral to put my home number and business number on the Internet.”

But if the controversy failed to profoundly affect Napoli’s chances of holding his Senate seat, it did seem to boost fundraising efforts by his Democratic challenger, Theresa Spry. In past campaigns for the Legislature, campaign cash came hard for Spry, a 55-year-old member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who worked in a variety of education- and health-related jobs before taking over, in 1994, home-care duties for a disabled son.

Spry isn’t rich in campaign money this year, but she has far more than in any previous campaign. Two years ago, she spent a total of $2,000 in an unsuccessful run for the House. This year, she spent $3,000 in the primary alone and will spend well in excess of that on her general-election campaign.

And it’s still coming, mostly through ActBlue, a national online clearinghouse promoting fundraising for Democratic candidates. Some money comes from WomenRun! South Dakota, a Minneapolis-based political action committee raising money for “progressive” female candidates in South Dakota.

And Spry also gets direct checks from strangers in other states. One of those checks, for $100, came from Katha Pollitt, a liberal columnist for The Nation magazine.

“It helps get the message out,” Spry said.

Pollitt has plugged Spry’s campaign in her column, urging readers to send contributions to WomenRun! Because Pollitt also mentioned other “pro-choice Native American women candidates” Paula Long Fox of District 33 and Diane Kastner of District 21 along with Spry, there’s more at work than the Napoli factor.

But that factor is at work, nonetheless, Spry believes.

“Yeah, I think it is,” she said. “There isn’t anybody who wrote and said, ‘Here’s a check because we hate Bill Napoli,’ but. …”

But some people do seem to hate Napoli or at least talk like they do. And it isn’t just the antipathy from those far-away liberals and their angry phone calls and Internet messages.

Napoli knows his provocative retorts draw strongly mixed reactions closer to home.

“Don’t get me wrong; there are some people in my district who hate me … because of what happened on the interview,” he said. “But most people feel bad about what happened to my wife and me.”

Spry doesn’t advocate crank phone calls but argues that Napoli brought much of it on himself with insensitive comments that reflected poorly on him and on his state. And she believes it had to hurt his standing in the district.

“It was just demeaning,” she said. “It was misogynistic and demeaning. And there are a lot of women in District 35.”

But defeating Bill Napoli in District 35 is no easy bet, even if he has been nicked by the ricochet of his own words. The 12-year legislative veteran works hard to reach out to the largely blue-collar district, which sweeps throughout the eastern part of Rapid City from the south to the north and includes Rapid Valley, part of North Rapid and some of the downtown area.

“They’re the working people of this state, which fits me perfectly, because that’s what I am,” Napoli said.

He’s also a self-confessed “hell-raiser” who dropped out of school as a teenager, drank too much, landed in jail and managed to barely avoid a three-year prison sentence when a judge offered him an option of county incarceration, night school and technical training.

Napoli grabbed that option, a choice he believes saved his life. He was a quick study in auto mechanics and eventually began working to own his own antique auto business. But Napoli said the struggles along the way gave him a deep appreciation for both the working class and the often-ignored underbelly of society.

“I’ve got two degrees: first from the high school of hard knocks, second from the college of hard knocks,” he said. “And I think that’s benefited me greatly, because I can really relate to people who don’t have a lot of opportunity or lots of money or education or highly placed people to help them.”

Napoli believes he can help by fighting the overreach of government and the increasing burdens of a property-tax system that hits hard in the blue-collar and retired communities. As the man behind Amendment D, a property-tax limitation proposal on the general-election ballot, Napoli has focused on the ballot issue and left much of his Senate campaign for the final weeks.

Now, he hopes to lean on his name I.D.

“I’m hoping my name recognition and the fact that I’m sincere and honest will help me a little,” he said.

Spry admits Napoli has the edge on name recognition. When she goes door to door in the district, it’s clear that the incumbent Republican is well-known but not universally well-loved.

“Yeah, they’re talking about him,” she said. “But I can’t repeat it.”

Spry said Napoli makes headlines more often then he makes good legislation. And she notes that with all of his talk about holding down taxes, Napoli’s years in the House and Senate produced little in the way of long-lasting property-tax relief or a logical system of property valuation.

“Our biggest tax issue is that we run our state on property taxes and on the backs of property owners,” she said. “Obviously, an income tax is not something people want in South Dakota. But I think our tax burden could be shared fairly across the board with businesses and corporations.”

Napoli said the best way to deal with property-tax increases is to support the Amendment D plan that he wrote. But Spry said legislators, including Napoli, spent too much time on abortion and related issues and not enough time finding solutions to low wages, high health-care costs and ways to increase education aid without raising taxes.

Few people in District 35 bring up HB1215, which was referred to a general-election vote by opponents. Although the proposed ban — which appears on the ballot as Referred Law 6 — is hot news, it ranks below issues that affect families more directly, Spry said.

“Unless I ask the question, abortion is rarely raised,” she said.

Spry asks the question because she opposes Referred Law 6 as too extreme and probably unconstitutional. She also wonders why Napoli believes that he has the inside track on reaching the blue-collar vote.

As a North Rapid resident who advocates for American Indian medical care as a member of the Sioux San Hospital Task Force, Spry said she knows the needs of the people she would serve in the South Dakota Senate. She also knows Napoli, personally, from her early years in Rapid City.

“We’re talking homeys now. Bill’s parents and my uncle played in a band together,” Spry said. “We’re not exactly like buds. We’re talking about two people who lived in a community for a long time. But I can’t say I ever got along with Bill very well.”

Getting along with Napoli can be a challenge. He admits as much and acknowledges that his rough-edged style and explosive mouth can aggravate people.

But he doesn’t apologize for being who he is.

“Yes, I can be very abrasive and, yes, I can be difficult to deal with,” Napoli said. “But I think I’m doing it for the right reasons.”

And all that commotion over the “religious virgin” interview? Napoli believes that was all overblown.

“I don’t do well with the

media,” he said.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com