Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410310074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Oliver North's trademark grin flickered into a scowl when two camera crews practically tripped over the Republican Senate candidate as they filmed him greeting shoppers at a suburban mall.
``Damn cameras,'' he muttered, reaching past them to sign autographs and hail a longtime supporter who was swept along with the tide of more than a dozen reporters and photographers chronicling North's slow progress through a lunchtime crowd.
The scene Tuesday would be a dream come true for many candidates - a thicket of cameras gathering charming footage of North with admiring voters. While unwieldy and sometimes rude, a pack of press essentially means free advertising in a political race.
But with just more than a week to go before Election Day, North sometimes treats the press as a necessary evil, and sometimes more as an invading army.
North, a former Marine officer who favors martial metaphors on the stump and adheres to a daily schedule printed in military time, generally seems to enjoy daily skirmishing with reporters. But some days, reporters can't find the battlefield.
North's campaign schedule is treated as a closely guarded secret - sometimes reporters are told about events and sometimes not. Many have taken to tailing North's RV, ``Rolling Thunder.''
The rules have changed several times. Two weeks ago, North's office drastically curtailed press access after North made a series of inflammatory statements in front of reporters.
``He made several gaffes, and he started showing signs of being tired, so I think they decided to keep him under wraps for awhile,'' said Nand Hart-Nibbrig, a political scientist at George Mason University. ``It's a common campaign tactic - you hide when you need to.''
North didn't really hide - he kept up his busy campaign schedule and held a few press conferences. But reporters were sometimes not informed until a few hours beforehand. The campaign never deliberately misled reporters about North's whereabouts, deputy campaign manager Mark Merritt said. ``Absolutely not. We would not do that.''
Currently, selected reporters get daily notice of the ``public'' events on North's schedule, and his campaign apparently is not trying to ditch reporters who follow along uninvited.
There are some hairy moments. North's RV has been known to run red lights, and the line of reporters and campaign aides following along behind generally runs them, too. ``We're trying to have at least one open event every day, to get our message of the day out,'' Merritt said.
The daily message concept worked well for both Clinton and George Bush in the 1992 presidential election. North has held sessions discussing Social Security, transportation and other matters.
``We are trying to give the press reasonable accessibility ... but, frankly, the press tends to trivialize events in direct proportion to their access to the candidate,'' Merritt said. In other words, the more the guy is in front of reporters, the more reporters will kick him.
In an unusual move, North is making no provisions for reporters to follow him in the final week of the campaign, when he will be flying among several cities each day.
To cover all his stops, news organizations must deploy several reporters, and the North campaign is betting few in the media will do so.
The low-profile strategy serves North's purposes on two other fronts.
He is running a series of ads funded by the more than $17 million he has raised so far and designed to buy the kind of exposure he really wants.
``Most candidates have a problem that we don't have - most candidates do not have 100 percent of the people know who they are, so they are trying to get on TV. We don't need that,'' Merritt said.
North also uses the press as a foil for his anti-Washington message, frequently blasting the ``liberal media'' and telling supporters that the press ``doesn't want me to win.''
``The liberal media has been a worthy adversary,'' Merritt said. ``Voters like someone who is willing to take on the media and Washington ... they see it as a David and Goliath-type struggle.''
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB