Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 28, 1994 TAG: 9410280075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY and DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Mike Farris - the Loudoun County home-schooling lawyer who blames his loss in last year's lieutenant governor's race on Sen. John Warner's failure to endorse him - has been making calls this week to put together the exploratory committee for his anticipated 1996 challenge to Warner.
The incumbent, meanwhile, is getting into fighting form, already casting Farris as a nobody - an extremist nobody, to boot.
"Mike Farris is basically an enigma to me," Warner said Thursday during a visit to Roanoke. "I do not see in Mike Farris a breadth of experience that translates into statewide office."
Warner pointed to his own recent work on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and his fact-finding visit to Kuwait, two heavy-duty issues that he believes will make an impression on Virginia voters.
"What the hell does Mike Farris know?" Warner asked. "He's an excellent constitutional-religious lawyer. But you hold him up in front of the state with a very narrow base of experience and philosophy and I'll shred him. I just hope it's Mike and Ollie and all of them coming after me. Throw in [state Republican chairman] Pat McSweeney; I hear he's interested in it, too."
Farris, by the way, is getting a warm reception from many of the longtime Republican activists he's contacting. One who's signed up with him is Trixie Averill, the Roanoke County GOP worker who headed George Allen's gubernatorial campaign in Western Virginia.
"Elephants have long memories," she says, and Warner's failure to endorse Farris last year and his patronage this year of independent Marshall Coleman will rankle grass-roots Republicans for years to come. "Everybody in the party who supported North is going to be mad as hell."
Warner, she says, has proven his ineffectiveness with the voters: "He can't even push Coleman out of the teens."
Coleman's coffee fetish
Coleman has developed a secret vice on the campaign trail this fall - the yuppie coffee bars springing up across the state.
Whenever Coleman is in Roanoke, he makes a point of sipping a cup at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea. In Northern Virginia, Coleman likes to drop in on the Starbucks chain.
He and his wife even have a special code they've developed. She'll call him on his car phone and inquire as to his "DFS" - "distance from Starbucks."
There's just one problem: Coleman is trying to hide his passion for high-priced java from his mother back in the Shenandoah Valley.
"My mother would kill me if she knew I was paying $3 for a cup of coffee," he says.
Tai what?
As he campaigned up the Shenandoah Valley recently, U.S. Sen. Charles Robb insisted that reports about his past marital infidelities should not be a factor in his re-election campaign because they are ``purely private'' matters between him and his wife.
Tell that to the James Madison University College Republicans in Harrisonburg.
Robb was greeted by about 20 rowdy pickets, one of whom carried a sign, ``Robb is not the education senator; he's the fornication senator.''
Robb sought to win the young conservatives by shaking their hands, but the gesture only emboldened them to begin chanting, ``How was Tai?''
They were referring to Tai Collins, the former Roanoke beauty queen who claimed she had an affair with Robb during his 1982-86 term as governor. Robb has denied having an affair but admitted receiving a nude massage from Collins in a New York hotel room.
Later, when asked to comment on his reception, Robb said, ``They were chanting slogans, not all of which I could understand, that I don't think were designed to reflect their support for my candidacy.''
It seemed urgent at the time
North recently sent his direct-mail contributors an ``EXTREMELY URGENT'' letter in an envelope designed to resemble an overnight parcel.
The letter was dated ``11:30 p.m. Thursday'' - creating the impression that North had stayed up late into the night to type an urgent appeal for donations. But a glaring error suggests the letter had been gathering dust in the computer of one of North's direct-mail contractors.
``Advertising takes money,'' North's letter said, ``and since the Virginia Senate race has not just two, but four candidates, advertising is even more critical to the success of our campaign.''
The race has been a three-man contest since Sept. 15, when former Gov. Douglas Wilder dropped out.
One James Madison woman had a sign that asked, ``Want a massage?''
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB