Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 23, 1994 TAG: 9406280005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ray L. Garland
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
From this arid field, the citizenry is now bemused by a cornucopia of choice. For the hard right and nostalgic veterans of the Cold War, there's Oliver L. North, the official Republican candidate. For loving Clintonites, there's Sen. Charles S. Robb, the official Democratic entry. For bilious Perotistas and moderate Republicans who haven't bedded Dame Fortune in so long as to forget what it feels like, there's J. Marshall Coleman. Finally, for connoisseurs of broken-field running, we have the redoubtable former governor, L. Douglas Wilder.
Logically, Robb has the best chance. Propelled by his primary victory, all he has to do is keep on demonstrating he is the best bet to deny North a seat in the Senate. He will have all the money he needs and the entire apparatus of the Clinton administration, crying aloud how much the president needs Robb.
North, who has begun airing a TV commercial featuring his wife's endorsement, must soon position himself as the Republican/conservative with the best chance to win. If October finds him still trailing Coleman in the polls, Republican-leaning voters and the party's national leaders may begin giving up on North. If Clinton is still foundering and the GOP seems in striking distance of winning the Senate, that process would logically accelerate.
While not forgetting that Wilder has never lost a race, this one seems to present him with the most difficult hand of all the players, and it's a little hard to see why he's risking it. His kick-off was a conspicuously black affair. But even if you grant him the entire African-American vote, it's less than half of what he needs to win. And if this race appears to narrow to a choice between the Clinton-loving Robb and the Clinton-hating North or Coleman, even his base may start melting away.
In a real sense, this will be a two-phase campaign: The first between now and Oct. 1 to determine which candidate from the perceived liberal and conservative side will enter the final relay, and the second to determine the winner between those two. If you miss the cut, you run the risk of dropping like a stone.
Since Robb starts on the liberal side occupying the high ground of his primary win and an early lead in the polls, Wilder must soon contest him for it or be exposed to taunts of "spoiler" and demands from respectable Democrats to quit the race.
In many ways, Coleman has the easiest hand to play. Not dogged by personal scandals and too long out of office to be blamed for much of anything, he is free at last to design an appeal for that mass of voters turned off by both the influence of the religious right in the Republican Party and the diehard liberals who persist in erecting new monuments to socialism in the face of past failures.
With the help of Sen. John Warner, Coleman now must take the gloves off and say why North is unacceptable: He can't win; and even if he does, his agenda is one of purely personal aggrandizement. Coleman must make clear that what he's doing is more for Virginia and the Republican Party than for himself - that North has adopted both for purely self-serving motives and must be stopped before he's in a position to do real harm to either.
If Coleman makes the cut, he can easily switch to a traditional Republican/Perot line on the need for greater fiscal responsibility, etc. Granting Robb and Wilder the hard-core Democratic base of 40 percent that Clinton got in '92, and North his diehard following of some 20 percent, leaves a pile of voters in between ripe for the plucking.
Wilder's problem is twofold: How does he overtake Robb without recourse to old-hat personal attacks likely to backfire, and how does he expand his base with the credible conservative message his governorship entitles him to claim without causing many of those who supported him in the past to jump ship?
His speech formally entering the race betrayed that confusion. Wilder justifiably praised his record of sound fiscal stewardship. But most Virginians remember that only as a time of uncomfortable belt-tightening under a governor who seemed to delight in playing Scrooge. Those who honor him for it are among those least likely to vote for him.
On more current national issues, Wilder opposed the impending invasion of Haiti tacitly urged by many black leaders in Congress, but called for allowing more Haitians to come here. On national health, he dissented from the liberal dream of forcing employers to pay for most of it and came out against mandatory coverage for abortions. In sum, he seems very much in danger of falling between two stools: being too conservative for what should be his natural base and too liberal for the rest.
In leaving the governorship, Wilder said of his critics: "Because so few of them are truly free, they couldn't understand that I am a free man - and a free man is hard to confront." That seems right. But can that condition of being a free man among so many in servitude to so many failed shibboleths fashion a winning coalition?
The only course I see available is to assume a role for which Americans have always had a high degree of sympathy, but seldom more than now, that of Jeremiah: "Amend your ways and your doings." Lord knows, there's ammunition enough, from an illegitimacy race that soared more than 500 percent in 30 years, and deficits that stretch as far as the eye can see no matter how many taxes you raise. And coming from the great-grandson of slaves, who braved enemy bullets in Korea but couldn't buy lunch at the local Woolworth's and worked his way up to the governorship, that would carry particular moral weight. Besides, what else is there?
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
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