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

DATE: SATURDAY, September 25, 1993                   TAG: 9309250193
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DALE EISMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium

THEFTS, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE: IT'S A CAMPAIGN

Thefts of ideas, of legislation, of glory and perhaps of videotape dominated Virginia's increasingly bitter gubernatorial campaign Friday.

Democrat Mary Sue Terry and Republican George Allen each claimed credit for a state law that permits the seizure of drug dealers' cars, homes and other property. Their surrogates accused one another of lying about the candidates' respective roles in speeches and in a Terry television commercial.

The Terry ad was the flashpoint for the daylong debate; there even was controversy over whether it actually had been on the air.

The commercial attacks Allen's claims, repeated almost daily for months, of pride in the 1990 passage of a constitutional amendment permitting drug-asset seizures. Allen was among the first state legislators to push the idea; he sponsored or co-sponsored bills on it in every General Assembly session between 1984 and '89.

But when the amendment finally passed, it was as part of an anti-crime package advanced by Terry, then state attorney general. Though she had been a co-patron on at least two earlier versions of the amendment, it was not an issue with which she had been strongly associated.

Her commercial includes none of that history, asserting that "the law was proposed, written and passed not by Allen but by Mary Sue Terry.

"And now, while taking credit for her anti-crime work, George Allen is attacking Mary Sue Terry on crime," the commercial adds.

A squadron of GOP legislators passed out transcripts of the commercial and a detailed legislative history of the amendment to reporters at a news conference Friday morning. "Mary Sue Terry is lying to the people of Virginia," said state Sen. Charles Hawkins, R-Chatham. "Long before it was politically correct for Mary Sue Terry to back the Drug Asset Forfeiture legislation, it was George Allen who introduced the bill."

At a midday appearance in Richmond, Allen trotted out U.S. Sen. John Warner, who volunteered that the candidate worked with him extensively on federal problems with the drug-asset issue in 1988. For most of the day, the Allen campaign asserted that the ad appeared first at 6:15 a.m. Friday on WTKR-TV in Norfolk, less than five hours before the news conference.

Not true, the Terry camp countered. The ad had been distributed to stations statewide with explicit instructions that it not be shown until further notice, said campaign consultant Tom King. And checks with each station in Hampton Roads confirmed that it hadn't been shown, King said.

Keywords:
POLITICS

by CNB