Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 9, 1994 TAG: 9411090094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SUSAN BAER THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: CENTREVILLE LENGTH: Medium
For Marva Williams, voting the incumbents out and the challengers in wasn't a bold enough act of protest.
The AT&T project manager, a Democrat and mother of a 7-year-old, was so sick of the mudslinging, so angry at the gridlock, so dissatisfied with her choices that she went behind the curtain Tuesday and, voting to fill a U.S. Senate seat, wrote in the name of the only person she felt had her best interests in mind: Marva Williams.
``You say to yourself: `What is it with these people? What is going on here?''' says Williams, who also told her friends to write in their own names as an act of defiance. ``They have all lost sight of the fact that they're here for the people.''
Voters around the country went to the polls Tuesday, clutching their infants, their sample ballots and, in many cases, a cranky, ornery disposition that spelled itself out in Republican triumphs.
Even in Centreville, where the median household income of $59,284 is the highest in the nation - nearly double the national median - and where few have serious financial woes, voters said they felt overburdened by taxes, underserved by their politicians, fearful about crime, disgusted with negativity, worried that the country was in a moral decline.
And they were looking, with a push of a button or a pull of a lever, for change.
``I want 'em out of there,'' said Robert Behan, a criminal defense lawyer and former Democrat. ``The only chance I have to change things is to vote Republican. I'm not satisfied with what's been going on.''
Behan bemoaned what he called a loss of cultural standards.
``I spend all my time trying to defend people who are indefensible because they haven't been brought up right,'' he said. ``There are no standards anymore, and I'm good and sick of it.''
He said he was angry that, as he watched the country going down the drain, he also watched about 46 percent of his income, which he paid in taxes last year, go with it.
Even in this affluent Northern Virginia suburb, where townhouse complexes have sprouted like dandelions in the past decade and where the Concorde soars above, headed for nearby Dulles International Airport, voters had their minds in their pocketbooks Tuesday.
``It's money; it all boils down to money,'' said Saundra White, a manager for a radiology association, and another voter who stormed out of the polling place in a furor.
White, an independent who voted Tuesday for the Republican Senate candidate, Oliver North, as a ``partial protest,'' said she became enraged when she saw a TV report about a woman who received $30,000 a year in Social Security benefits because she claimed her three children were emotionally disturbed.
``Well, guess what? I'm emotionally disturbed. Aren't we all?'' White said in her outrage. ``What's going to happen when I'm ready to collect Social Security? I've worked a lot of years. I expect some of it to be there. But the government is robbing me of part of my pay to support drug addicts and alcoholics. Something is severely wrong with the system.''
Nearly every voter emerging from a Centreville elementary school cited negative campaigning, practiced with particular verve in Virginia this year, as the wrong way to go.
Gwendolyn Brim, a Republican homemaker, gave her vote to the independent candidate, Marshall Coleman, to protest the nasty tone of the campaign and what she sees as the moral bankruptcy of the two party nominees.
``What a good example we're setting for our kids,'' the mother of two said sarcastically. ``They're no different than children.''
Kevin Hagan, a Republican who was angry that the Democrats wasted time on such ``foolish'' initiatives as health care reform and gays in the military, said he keeps thinking of a sign he saw during the 1992 presidential election: ``Don't Vote, It Only Encourages Them.''
``I keep thinking the same thing,'' said Hagan, a real-estate salesman. ``One year, maybe they'll actually stick with true issues and not throw mud back and forth. They disappoint me - both sides.''
by CNB