Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 31, 1993 TAG: 9401140036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Darden, formerly rector of the University of Virginia, an important adviser to Gov. Gerald L. Baliles and a Norfolk businessman of extraordinary civic attainments, systematically demonstrates that, despite Wilder's claims for himself, he has been not only a failure but an embarrassment to Virginia in the very areas most crucial to its future: economic development and higher education. In all phases of these areas, Darden argues, the commonwealth has entered a regressionary condition brought on largely by Wilder's policies and which, unless the policies are reversed promptly, is likely to land Virginia with Arkansas and West Virginia among the nation's "third world" states.
Darden also devotes some comment to Wilder's personal vindictiveness, noting that he eventually has turned on foe and friend alike in his desire to punish those who disagree with him or who fail to support his frequently loony ideas enthusiastically enough.
Having had some firsthand experience of Wilder's perfidy, though it was not personal, and having seen how willing he has been to destroy even the best-laid plans of state boards and institutions if doing so would enhance his standing with this interest group or that, I wish Darden had given us more chapter and verse. The streets of Richmond are lined with the bodies of Wilder's victims, as they say. But Darden ran out of space, as we all do, and could only summarize his point.
It seems to me worth adding, then, as an extension of Darden's thoughts, that although Wilder may leave office Jan. 15, no doubt snarling at somebody as he goes, he leaves Virginia in an awful fix economically and educationally, but that Virginians, alas, will hardly have seen the last of him. And the same personal viciousness that has marked his governorship threatens, in 1994, to wreck not only the Democratic Party of Virginia, but in the process to make it almost certain that a convicted felon, liar and scoundrel will become United States senator from Virginia.
This would be long-term damage with a vengeance, but Wilder has made both long-term damage and vengeance the only accomplishments of his public life. Anyone who doubts he is willing and able to inflict them had better look again.
Wilder, whose hatred of incumbent Sen. Charles Robb is now a Virginia legend, expects to challenge Robb's renomination in the party's June primary. Robb carries baggage that has made him, the polls show, deeply unpopular with Virginia voters; some of it, though not all, is of his own making.
But Wilder, even more disliked in Virginia politics and now - next to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson - the most feared and despised by all but his most ardent followers, cannot win the nomination by any stretch of the imagination. But he can make renomination so difficult for Robb, who probably can win, that Robb is then likely to enter the general election exhausted and, at Wilder's hands, the most discredited candidate the Democrats could nominate.
This leads at once to the almost certain Republican nomination of Oliver North, the hero of Iran-Contra, who, according to a recent issue of The New Yorker, will not and cannot, his friends and enemies agree, tell the truth. Convicted of lying to Congress, North eventually was freed on the sort of legal technicality - something minor like "due process" - that he generally condemns as moral laxity.
North is a knave and a hustler, but being either has never been a barrier to the U.S. Senate, and the backwaters of Virginia are full of "born-again" fundamentalists, wild-eyed and slavering for the punishment of the wicked, eager to vote for his gassy promises of virtue and rectitude.
If North is elected, as I predict he will be, it will be Douglas Wilder's work, the perfect legacy of a dreadful governor whose motto was "rule and ruin."
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB