Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411170021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The senator's sin? Refusing to join the stampede of state GOP politicos to Oliver North, the politician with the record of a different kind, campaigning for Virginia's other Senate seat.
For that, warned the anti-Warnerites, the top Republican vote-getter in Virginia's history will find it hard to win GOP renomination in 1996. The stopper might be Michael Farris, the party's unsuccessful candidate last year for lieutenant governor. Or it might be North himself, in a quest for a Senate seat that eluded him this year.
The knife-wielders are right about one thing. Something's out of kilter with the Virginia GOP.
Against perhaps the most politically vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbent of them all, in a year more Republican than any other in nearly half a century, in a state where Republicans had surged in the gubernatorial and legislative elections just 12 months earlier, the party managed to nominate a candidate who could spend $20 million and lose. With good reason.
In part, this was simply the most recent act in a drama among Virginia Republicans that's been playing, on and off, for a couple of decades. A political contest arises that looks juicy to the GOP; an extremist wrests the nomination from a traditional conservative; the party loses in the general election. North added to the usual mix an extra dollop of nastiness, problems with the law and the truth, celebrity, enormous fund-raising ability, and the enmity of a number of Reagan-administration veterans.
Many voters were sincere in their willingness to overlook (in some cases, to admire) North's past. But the cynical rush to embrace North by GOP politicians in Virginia who knew better, by those who figured the Democrats were so weak this year that any Republican could be foisted on the public, partakes of the kind of myopic arrogance that got the Democrats into trouble.
Republicans will now control both house of Congress for the first time in decades, but who'll control the Republicans? Don't blame Warner for North's loss. More party leaders than Warner should have seen it coming.
by CNB