Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 28, 1994 TAG: 9409280075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER NOTE: above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Instead, turn on the tube and see Charles Robb in coat and tie talking about education and protecting our kids. Or Oliver North in checkered shirt talking about term limits and saving our kids.
Only independent Marshall Coleman is running radio ads tweaking the public's memory of drug parties and document shredding - and even he is carefully couching the assault in hillbilly humor.
What gives?
Is it possible, just possible, that Virginia will be spared the bloodletting of an all-out negative campaign?
Not likely, say those who design and watch campaigns. There already has been some name-calling - just Friday, for example, Robb and North accused each other of being racially divisive.
But an unpredictable multicandidate field, a tight race between the front-runners, and the fact that both major party candidates live in glass houses have delayed the onslaught, observers say.
Last week, the major political consultants to Robb and North maintained that they would prefer to keep the rhetoric on a higher plane.
Asked if things could turn nasty fast, North adviser Mark Goodin insisted that "I certainly hope not; all of us hope not."
At the Robb campaign, adviser David Doak said last week that "for now, we're content to talk about Chuck's record."
But both men - each blaming his opponent - also predicted that the calm won't last, and the candidates themselves seemed to be bracing for that eventuality.
``There is a time and a place for everything,'' said Robb when asked at an informal news conference last week why his recent television ads don't mention North. Claiming that he has been turning the other cheek as North takes potshots, Robb warned that "I am not the bearer of an inexhaustible supply of cheeks, and there will come a time when I run out of cheeks."
North implies that it's Robb who's spoiling for a fight. "When he came down out of his ivory tower, he didn't start campaigning on the issues. He launched a personal attack on me," North said as he toured Southside Virginia.
Robb describes his campaign as "mainstream vs. extreme." North responds: "If Chuck Robb wants to play by those rules, look out, Chuck. If he wants to mud wrestle, stand by."
Such sparring bolsters the belief of Ron Faucheux, editor of Campaigns and Elections Magazine in Washington, D.C., that the quiet is temporary. "Stay tuned," Faucheux said. "When the first stone is thrown, it won't be a stone. It will be a mountain. ... And once it starts, it won't stop until the election's over."
Analysts say there probably are several reasons why the Senate campaign, aside from a few notable exceptions such as Friday's dustup and the Sept. 6 debate at Hampden-Sydney College, has been conducted on a relatively positive note so far.
First is the surplus of candidates. Until former Gov. Douglas Wilder dropped out, it was a rare four-man race. Even a three-man contest raises a specter sometimes seen in three-way primaries: the candidate who does the least negative advertising gets a goodwill bonus in votes.
"I just assume it's a pretty tough call for both [North and Robb] about how to proceed, partly because there're three people in the race," said Doug Bailey, who runs the Hotline political information network and is a former GOP campaign consultant.
By conventional wisdom, Bailey said, if North and Robb focus their attacks on each other, "the real beneficiary may be Coleman.''
Also complicating strategy is the fact that the public is already intimately familiar with the negative aspects of Robb's and North's histories.
Usually, negative advertising works to a candidate's advantage if it helps define an opponent who is not well known by voters or highlights an issue on which public knowledge is sketchy, analysts say.
"What makes this so fascinating is that you're probably not going to find any other race in the country where people have as much [information] about the two candidates," said Paul Goldman, a Democratic strategist who has recently joined the Robb campaign.
The result, Bailey said, is that strategists may want to save their heavy artillery. "To use it now might be viewed as a waste," he said. "It keeps it from being fresh and effective at the end."
Analysts say the possibility that the Senate campaign might never turn negative is too radical a departure from modern-day tactics to expect.
"You'll see both candidates unloading very heavily," Faucheux predicted. "There's no such thing as a truce" on negative ads.
That is more true now than ever, added Robert Goodman, a Maryland consultant who advised Coleman in his 1989 race for governor. "It's part of the national mood, how we are less civil to each other, care less about the needy, are more cynical about politicians. ... It's very discouraging," he said.
Politics has always had its seamy side. A few decades ago, newspapers were more often the vehicle for negative attacks. A few days before the 1973 gubernatorial election, for instance, former Rep. Watkins Abbitt of Appomattox wrote a letter to his local newspaper that was quickly circulated throughout the state.
The letter accused Norfolk lawyer Henry Howell of financing his independent campaign though "big union bosses ... and the liberal left-wing millionaire Jew from Richmond." The reference was to philanthropist Sydney Lewis, co-founder of Best Products.
The letter was disavowed by Howell's opponent, Republican Mills Godwin, but in an insular era, the damage had been done.
By the mid-1980s, media consultants were sharpening their stilettos. Even then, Goodman insists, there was "more humor than meanness." He recalls ads showing hound dogs searching for officials who supposedly couldn't be found or farmers shoveling manure as a comeback to campaign charges.
"What changed the whole world was videotape," Goodman said. Suddenly, turn-around time between shooting a commercial and getting it on the air was hours rather than days.
"The culprit is the speed and the technology," he said.
And the determination of candidates to win elections.
"Campaigns are about the differences between people. If information's true and on the record, that's fair game," Doak said of the Robb campaign.
As for the days ahead, if it's fair for North to portray his role in Iran-Contra as being about patriotism and saving lives, "then it's fair for us to give the other side," Doak said.
The philosophy prompts an instant rebuttal from Goodin of the North camp. "Robb should be on notice," Goodin said. "For every stone, we're going to hurl nine 90-mm shells at him.''
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB