
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 1, 1993                   TAG: 9311160232
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SLEAZE IN SALEM (CONTINUED)

THERE'S A game children play. Somebody whispers a story in someone's ear, and that someone whispers it in somebody else's ear, and so on and so forth - until the last person whispered to tells the story. Which, if the game's going well, will be so different from the original that everybody laughs like crazy.

We feel a little like the last person to be told the story.

On Tuesday, this newspaper editorially took to task a Virginia pollster for asking loaded questions based on twisted facts.

We said that the pollster, working for Democratic House candidate Howard Packett, had called residents in the Salem area and asked, among other things, if they would vote for Packett's opponent, Republican Morgan Griffith, if they knew Griffith had defended a child molester.

We said Griffith, an attorney, was once appointed by the court to represent an accused molester. This is true, and had been reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Packett, however, called to inform us (after the editorial was published) that the question asked by his pollster did not refer to this child-molestation case, but to another. According to Packett, the poll query was: "Would you vote for Morgan Griffith if you knew Morgan Griffith once defended in court a swim coach who had been accused of sexual misconduct."

(A subsequent Washington Post story got the question right, but also reported, incorrectly, that Griffith had been appointed to this case by the court.)

We then called Griffith, who told us that several people in the Salem area had personally informed him that they had been called by Packett's pollster and asked the child-molestation question.

Assuming that such a question was indeed being asked, Griffith said he'd told reporters and the Republican legislative caucus that the only such case he could recall was the one where he had been appointed by the court.

OK. You can believe both Packett and Griffith. When you deal in the currency of innuendo, misinterpretation is an obvious hazard.

The question still remains: Why is Packett's pollster asking about the 1987 case involving the swim coach?

The case, incidentally, did not involve a charge of sexual misconduct - though, granted, sexual misconduct might have been suspected. The swim coach, accused of harboring two teen-age girls in his home for at least one night, pleaded guilty and was fined $50 on the misdemeanant charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Is Packett implying that the swim coach should have been denied legal representation? Is he implying that attorneys should be judged by the quality of their clients?

Because the Democrat refuses to show us the entire poll, with all of the questions being asked, we really don't know what's being implied.

We do know this: The Salem-area House race has been nasty from the start, and continues to be. In May, Griffith criticized Packett for invading his family's privacy by digging up court documents that revealed the identity of Griffith's father, who had divorced Griffith's mother and hadn't paid child support, and whom Griffith said he never knew as a child.

That was pretty outrageous.

Since then, it's been revealed that Griffith had his mother listening to nine years worth of tapes of Salem City Council meetings, presumably to dig up dirt on Councilman Packett. That, at least, is legitimate research of Packett's public record as an elected official.

Packett's "opposition research," like that of many Democratic candidates around the state this year, is not so legitimate. The first time we heard about some of the pollsters' "questions", they sounded sleazy. After hearing Packett's defense, they still sound sleazy.

Keywords:
POLITICS

by CNB