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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 27, 1994                   TAG: 9404280011
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DON'T LIKE NORTH? MUST BE A LIBERAL

sight on several counts. One is the tendency of some of North's followers to divide all the world into two parts: conservatives (i.e., North supporters) and liberals (i.e., everybody else).

This is an expansive - ultraliberal, you might say - view of liberalism. It may help confirm Northian paranoia (you never know who your enemies really are), but it also betrays a kind of disconnect, and makes for strange bedfellows.

Thus, in the battle for the Republican Senate nomination, North is the "conservative" candidate against James Miller - as if Miller, the taxation-aversive economics professor and expenditure-cutting federal budget director in the Reagan administration, isn't entitled to call himself a conservative as well.

Nor is Miller the only renegade, a man whose politics now are scarcely distinguishable from those of Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy. There's also ex-President Reagan himself.

"I solemnly promise not to be swayed by any propaganda the liberal cabal can dream up," writes a North delegate to the state GOP convention in today's letters column. Inasmuch as one of the hardest blows struck so far in the campaign has been Reagan's repudiation of North, the former president must have, alas, joined the cabal.

To be sure, North followers sometimes explain away Reagan's distaste for their candidate on the grounds that Reagan doesn't know what he is doing. But beware: That sounds like a suspiciously liberal thing to say.

No slack is cut, either, for U.S. Sen. John Warner, who has called North unfit to serve in the Senate. How could any Republican say such a thing about a prospective nominee of his own party, and for the silly little reason that said prospective nominee has a flexible view of the criminal code? Senator, where are your principles?

Warner, too, must be a liberal. "I've found that when Republicans claim to be moderates, in truth they're really liberals," asserted a letter to the editor on Tuesday's page. "John Warner is no exception. His voting record proves that."

It does?

From 1981 through 1992, the American Conservative Union gave Warner's voting record an average annual score of more than 75 (out of a possible 100). Since 1989, Warner's ACU score has even climbed a bit higher, to an average of more than 77. Only for the least empirical of observers does that put him in the same camp as, say, Ted Kennedy, who for the past 12 years has averaged an ACU score of 3.

From the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, by contrast, Warner's voting-records averaged less than 13 (also out of 100) from 1981 through 1992. Granted, in the two most recent years, 1991 and 1992, Warner's ADA score zoomed - all the way to 20.

Occasionally in his Senate voting, Warner strays from the GOP fold. But not often.

In the four key 1993 votes as selected by "Congressional Quarterly's Politics in America 1994," Warner voted against the family-leave bill, against national "motor voter" registration, against President Clinton's budget and against the president's right to lift the military's ban on gays. In the three key 1992 votes as selected by the same publication, Warner voted for a school-choice pilot program, against shifting money from defense to domestic purposes and against deeper cuts in the Strategic Defense Initiative.

These are the facts of his record. If Warner is a liberal, so is Ronald Reagan.

Which, of course, is what some of the North faithful may have to conclude, given a strangely blinkered vision that sees only light and dark and that draws the GOP, impervious to warnings, toward a political abyss.

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POLITICS