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

DATE: FRIDAY, September 16, 1994                   TAG: 9409170012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DOUG WILDER: DEMOCRAT AGAIN?

Not as strong as many Virginians would like. Stronger parties would have produced nominees other than Sen. Charles Robb and GOP challenger Oliver North.

But Wilder is right: The conditions prompting his withdrawal point to the resiliency, and also the value, of the two-party system.

The Democrat-turned-independent's statement notes "the difficulty in financing independent candidacies." Access to money is one advantage enjoyed by party nominees. Ready-made campaign organization is another. Both Wilder and the remaining independent in the Senate race, Marshall Coleman, have struggled in isolation from their parties.

But their suffering may serve a larger purpose.

In elections between two party nominees, victory requires winning over the electorate's broad middle. Parties that nominate marginal figures, who are incapable of gaining majorities, will tend to lose. In this way, a strong two-party system encourages consensus and moderation.

Wilder is nothing if not a moderate. As governor, he won praise from the Wall Street Journal and attention around the nation for his fiscal conservatism. But if he could not win as an independent in the Senate race, his effect on it might have proved immoderate. He might have thrown it to a candidate who would have lost a two-way race.

Give credit to Wilder where it is due. His erratic in-and-out decisions seem less inconsistent and incomprehensible when regarded as the behavior of a politician who does not stay in races he doesn't think he can win.

When Wilder questioned Robb's and North's moral qualifications, he articulated a question all Virginians should be asking themselves. Wilder's own candidacy was justified by his record of public service.

The primary thing he lacked was his party's nomination.

On that fact, of course, he can't place all the blame for his disappointment. He marred his own successful record as governor - and his standing with Virginians - with his penchant for political feuding and his ill-considered run for the presidency.

But neither did he help himself, first, by agitating last year for a senatorial primary, presumably so he could run against Robb; then grandly announcing his decision not to run; then entering the race after all as an independent.

He could have run the old-fashioned way, by challenging Robb for the nomination. Instead, he tried to circumvent the system - and was punished.

Sometimes the system forgives. While the Republican Party looks forward to excommunicating Coleman and his mentor, Sen. John Warner, for their inability to stomach North, Wilder may win a welcome-back of sorts from Democrats who have provided his political home and sustained his historic career.

The extent of reconciliation, between Wilder and the party and the electorate with which he has shared some history, remains to be seen. But the party system in any case endures.