Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 15, 1995                   TAG: 9504180068
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

BRIEFLY PUT . . .

First, he doesn't stand a chance of winning. Whew!

Second, if he has any impact on the race, it will be to help rather than hurt the Republican Party's other far-right candidates. Though he'll pull few votes away, he can actually make Pat Buchanan seem diplomatic and Phil Gramm presidential.

Third, he poses a dilemma for editorial writers. How to fairly describe this congressman, who does things like accusing Bill Clinton of giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" during the Vietnam War, without contributing to the very lack of civility that we lament and Dornan embodies?

MEMBERS of Congress resist campaign-finance reform in part because they fear exposing their dirty laundry. Under current so-called "soft money" practices, for example, anyone can contribute as much as he likes to a political party, whereupon the laundered money is passed on to campaign coffers. There's no limit.

And so it happens that, three days before hearings on a U.S. House bill that would ease export quotas and tariffs for Caribbean countries, Fruit of the Loom donated $100,000 to the Republican National Committee. Why not? Fruit of the Loom has business in some of those countries.

Anyway, its gift is by no means the biggest around. Tobacco giant Philip Morris gave $280,000 to the RNC in just the first two months of this year. Such giving is nonpartisan and unideological. Democrats got the big bucks when they controlled Congress. Now Republicans are raking it in. Absent campaign-finance reform, this is politics as usual.