Monday, Jan. 3, 2005 | 11:08 a.m.
People tell Lia Roberts she has a new glow since her failed bid for the presidency of Romania, her native country.
Roberts arrived in the United States in 1979 and eventually became the chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party. She became known for holding fund-raisers in her elaborate Rancho Circle home.
But this summer she dropped out of Nevada politics and launched her own campaign in the factories, farmers markets, churches and hospitals of poverty-torn Romania.
Roberts campaigned against the corruption that has infiltrated Romania since the fall of communism in 1989, but she said she couldn't overcome the state-influenced national media that virtually ignored her effort, even spurning her when she tried to buy commercials.
Roberts, who holds dual citizenship in the United States and Romania, dropped out of the race in late September after spending at least $500,000 of her own money.
"I'm not disappointed," she said. "People don't understand; I'm elated about what I've done."
Now that she is back in Nevada politics, she said she will help raise money for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev. And Roberts has not ruled out the possibility that she will run for office in Nevada.
Some political observers said they wouldn't be surprised if she got the bug to campaign.
"She's a political animal," said Republican consultant Steve Wark. "And if there are openings for her on the political landscape that she can pursue, she obviously would give those a look."
Roberts said the time and money that she spent on her effort overseas was worth it if she nudged Romania toward democratic thinking in any way.
And, some say, she might have.
Many Romanians believe all political parties are tied to the same corrupt roots, but Roberts motivated some voters to get interested in the race, said Armand Scala, president of the Congress of Romanian Americans.
"Here's an American, or at least a person of American citizenship, coming to their country," Scala said. "There are probably no people in the world in any other country of the world who think higher of the American people.
"She brought more attention to the political arena, and that was a very good thing, whether she stood a chance of winning, that was a different subject."
Corruption in Romania is "endemic and systemic," said Mark Meyer, chairman of the Romanian-American Chamber of Commerce and a New York attorney who practices in Romania.
Small- and medium-sized companies are afraid to invest their money and tangle with the nation's corrupt court system, Meyer said.
"It's getting to the point where Romania is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe," Meyer said.
Other Romanians who fled the country have attempted to return and run for office, and it turns off a certain segment of voters, Scala said.
"People resent it," he said.
Roberts said she grew up in a family of intellectuals, including her father, who taught mining and engineering at the University of Bucharest.
She described the government as totalitarian, and she said she watched as her father was forced to join the communist party to advance his career.
In 1979, Roberts, who had worked as a geotechnical engineer, decided to leave the country. She married a wealthy American. They met when he was visiting Romania and saw her tossing snowballs on the street with her young son.
Even though she cleared her marriage with the communist government, her father's career was somewhat hamstrung by her departure, Roberts said.
"I was still an outcast," she said. "My father could not become a professor at the University of Bucharest."
Roberts, who was widowed twice, eventually served as honorary counsel for Romania, helping to promote the country's businesses and culture.
She established herself as a tenacious fund-raiser for the Nevada Republican Party, raising millions of dollars.
And she watched the struggles in her country, where, she said, seniors wasted away on a pension fund illegally depleted by the government, teachers sold diplomas and millions of residents left the country to find work.
It's a country of about 22 million people in an area about the size of Oregon, she said. Since about 60 percent of the economy is underground, it's difficult to clean up, she said.
But after receiving thousands of responses from people who watched her talk about democracy on a Romanian talk show, Roberts said she decided to throw in her hat for the presidential election set to be held Nov. 28.
She hired Dick Morris, a one-time campaign consultant to former President Clinton. And in February, Roberts -- decked in a white suit to symbolize her purity from corruption -- announced she was in the running.
"Some habits must stop," she told a crowd of about 300 people when she announced her candidacy in Bucharest, according to Reuters. "Corruption is the first. Investors will come to this country once its image is cleaned up."
While her announcement came as a surprise to many back in Nevada, people typically describe Roberts as feisty.
A friend, Republican political consultant Mike Slanker, called the open presidential seat in Romania an "opportunity of a lifetime."
Not many immigrants get to go back to their home country and run for president, he said.
"She's a gutsy lady, she's a ball of fire and a tremendous person," Slanker said. "I don't blame her one bit."
Roberts thought she could win by appealing to several groups of people.
More than 3 million Romanians have left the country because there is no work in Romania, she said, and other young Romanians are concerned they'll have to do the same thing.
And elderly Romanians, whose pensions have been squandered by the government, have long hoped Americans would come to their rescue, she said.
Roberts was on the cover of most national newspapers at first, but when she ranked third or fourth in national polls, the government became nervous, Roberts said.
"I was an island in a sea of corruption, that's what it was," she said. "Of course they were going to gang up against me."
She claims the mainstream media started to ignore her soon after her announcement, giving coverage to the two front-runners. They even rebuffed her attempts to buy campaign ads, she said.
The state-owned national outlets were controlled by the government, and and private networks were beholden to the government because they owed millions in taxes, she said.
As late as August, a national poll ranked Roberts fourth in a list of candidates. She said she collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to put her name on the ballot and had a strong base of support.
But Romanian law required Roberts to sign off on each page of signatures. As she flipped through the pages, Roberts realized that many of the signatures she had paid people to collect were forged, and she suspected government workers had infiltrated her campaign to sabotage it.
She worried she would be accused of massive fraud if she turned in the signatures to be placed on the ballot, and she decided not to run.
In her departure speech, she said she was surprised the country didn't embrace her message of change, especially because of the rampant poverty Romanians face.
"My conscience and the very thought that I could do something to help the nation escape from this agony, the Good Samaritan that I am, made me return to Romania to run for the highest position, convinced that a change is needed, especially within the political class," she said.
The eventual winner of the election, Traian Basescu, declared that corruption and poverty were the two fundamental problems Romania must solve before entering the European Union, which it is scheduled to do in 2007.
His Justice and Truth Alliance party was a change from the Social Democrats who have run the country for 11 of the last 15 years.
Roberts said she hopes she convinced people to vote against the ruling regime.
"It was not a vote for the person who won, it was a vehement vote against the other candidate," she said.
archive
