Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411160054
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Despite fair warning, those who put themselves forward as delegates to the Republican convention in June nominated North with their gut and not their head. That said, the nominating process was open and fair, and those who didn't want North but couldn't bother to get involved bear equal responsibility with those who persisted in the choice of a man whose best (only?) chance of victory resided in a race with three, preferably four, candidates. That was an absurd premise from which to begin a campaign of this importance.
But absent the baggage North brought to the race and never could shed, he was a superb campaigner. His defeat should not obscure the almost heroic personal effort he made, and the coolness he showed under withering fire. Whether he deserved better than he got can never be known. But insofar as our domestic politics are concerned, perhaps at long last we can bury the messy history of that final winding down of the Cold War in which North played a small role.
In Virginia political history, there is no clear correlation in measuring ultimate success between those nominated by primary and those nominated by convention. Given his high name-recognition and ample purse, it's likely North would have won a GOP primary. But it's wrong on principle for a few party leaders to be able to determine whether nominations shall be by primary or convention. The General Assembly could fix that, but isn't likely to do so.
This is hardly an academic question, as we shall shortly discover. Only a year from now, Virginians will begin to focus on the contest for the seat held by Sen. John Warner, who said as recently as election night he intended to seek the nomination of the Republican Party for a fourth term. But his right to a primary may be challenged by GOP leaders embittered by his defection from North.
While the public yawns, pundits will long debate the impact of Marshall Coleman's independent candidacy. It is probable that the final collapsing of Coleman's support down to a measly 11 percent gave Robb his margin of victory. But the overall effect is less clear. Common sense says Coleman's final vote consisted mainly of Republican-inclined voters who couldn't stomach North, but if forced to choose either wouldn't have voted or would have cast their lot with Robb. That is, there weren't enough potential North voters among the 227,000 Coleman got to change the result.
But suppose anti-North Republicans led by Warner had simply shut up once the GOP convention spoke. The continuing savaging of North by Republicans surely took its toll. In that sense, perhaps, you can make the case that Coleman had a more significant impact on the outcome of the election than the raw polling data suggest.
In any event, you might have thought that something in John Warner's moral code would have prevented his dragging Coleman out for another beating. That Coleman alone among the three candidates had the opening to be the candidate of new ideas and did not do so makes his demise doubly sad. To have gone down fighting for things that sensible people could salute would have given him some dignity in defeat, now denied.
Robb deserves credit for constancy. Never in his darkest days did he trade in self-pity or demagoguery. And by sticking with President Clinton and surviving a national landslide against his party, he may have proved himself a wiser strategist than those Democratic candidates in Tennessee and elsewhere who tried to repackage themselves as Republican sympathizers, or at least as very conservative Democrats.
With six years stretching before him, Robb is free at last to be the conventional national Democrat it was always in his soul - or his wife's - to be. Having been exonerated by Virginia voters, it is no longer fair game to keep bringing up those troubling questions that almost brought him down. Truly, they now belong to the past.
The political landscape Robb will face in the year 2000 - should he seek a third term - is beyond the power of mortal speculation. But he might pause to reflect that almost any Republican candidate other than North would have beaten him, and his 46-percent showing is hardly a ringing endorsement.
I do not pretend to have measured in advance the magnitude of the tidal wave that engulfed Democrats. You have to go back to 1946 to find a similar midterm protest to the party holding the presidency. But that came amidst post-war frustration after 14 years in which Democrats held both Congress and the White House. It was also within the context of a historic tradition of wide swings in party strength in Congress, we haven't seen much of lately.
Modern midterm elections have a mixed record in predicting the outcome of the presidential election two years later. Republicans won big congressional victories in 1938 and 1946 but couldn't win the presidency in 1940 or 1948. Democrats scored in 1954 but Eisenhower had no trouble winning two years later. Ditto for Reagan.
While the country seems to have repudiated Clinton, the GOP would make a mistake in believing that means the country has embraced Republicanism. But Clinton may be a special case of a president having permanently forfeited the trust of the mass of the people and, thus, be ripe for a challenge from within his own party. Presidents so challenged seldom see a second term.
\ Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist
by CNB