THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 4, 1994 TAG: 9411040715
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, DAVID M. POOLE AND ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
Is Bill Clinton's Pentagon bureaucracy mobilizing to help in Sen. Charles S. Robb's re-election drive?
Not at all, a Defense Department spokesman insisted Thursday. But an aide to Republican Senate candidate Oliver L. North thought he smelled a rat in the Pentagon's agreement to re-evaluate plans to shift more than 3,000 Navy employees from offices in Northern Virginia to Maryland.
``It will not save a single Virginia defense job, and Chuck Robb knows it,'' said North spokesman Mark Merritt, who deemed Robb's effort ``pathetic'' and ``politically motivated.''
Robb, in a tense battle with North and independent J. Marshall Coleman, has spent much of the past week displaying the advantages of being the incumbent. In Norfolk on Thursday, he attended a briefing about the proposed MacArthur Center shopping mall - which just won a federal loan guarantee.
In Richmond on Wednesday, he attended a briefing about newly awarded federal anti-crime grants. And in Newport News on Monday, he attended a ceremony for a federal loan guarantee for shipbuilding.
On the proposal to shut the Navy office in Crystal City, Robb asserted earlier this week that new cost estimates indicate the move to White Oak, Md., would be prohibitively expensive. The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission ordered the shift of the Navy offices in 1993 as part of its effort to close unneeded military installations.
The Navy workers, part of the Naval Sea Systems Command, are among 11,000 defense employees in Crystal City who will be displaced based on the commission's decisions. Robb said the cost of moving the Navy component has almost tripled in the past year, from $74.5 million to $218 million.
Pentagon spokesman Dennis Boxx said Robb's political plight was unrelated to the military's willingness to take another look at the moving plans.
``We receive congressional requests all the time . . . and we try to honor those requests,'' Boxx told reporters.
Campaigning in Roanoke on Thursday, North set his sights on another federal program, one that has caused him grief in recent days: Social Security.
The Republican signed a pledge to oppose any cuts or taxes to Social Security benefits, but he side-stepped questions about his earlier suggestion that Social Security could be voluntary for future generations of workers.
North described his ad-libbed remarks last week as a ``theoretical discussion'' about what might happen ``five, six, seven generations from now.''
North declined to say what types of long-term reforms he would favor.
From Roanoke, North campaigned up the Shenandoah Valley into the breadbasket of his support.
Bonnie Ware, 24, was struck temporarily dumb as she grasped North's hand and gazed into his baby blues at a discount store outside Roanoke. ``I'm so glad to see you,'' the Wal-Mart employee from Blacksburg said, her lips trembling. ``I'm 100 percent behind you - my husband and I both.''
Robb, meanwhile, spent the day campaigning with former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. A half-dozen sheriffs and commonwealth's attorneys joined the two at a Richmond news conference where they accused North of turning his back on illegal drugs while helping arm the Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-1980s.
``What we have now in this country is the vestiges of his blind eye and deaf ear. . . . That's when the floodgates opened in this country,'' said Chris Hutton, Hampton commonwealth's attorney.
North has denied any concrete knowledge that drugs were being brought into the United States by his arms couriers. He says he passed rumors to that effect on to the Drug Enforcement Administration. No recipient of the reports has come forward.
Under questioning, Robb insisted that his own proximity to drugs while socializing in Virginia Beach a decade ago was less serious than North's alleged activity. ``I made it very clear from the outset that if I had ever been in the company of anyone I knew was illegally using drugs, I would have made that known,'' he said.
Robb and Wilder traveled on to Hampton Roads, first stopping at Norfolk City Hall and then attending an early evening campaign rally at Portside in Portsmouth. Wilder urged the largely black audience to look past the recent feuding between the former governors.
``Whatever differences there may have been, perceived or otherwise, were between he and me,'' Wilder said. ``Once that's settled, it's between he and me.''
Coleman campaigned in Roanoke and the far Southwest on Thursday, and with new polls suggesting that he is taking potential votes away from Robb, Coleman recast the nature of the race: ``A vote for Chuck Robb is a vote for Oliver North,'' he declared.
With U.S. Sen. John Warner at his side, Coleman appealed to Robb supporters to switch to him, contending that Robb is stagnant in the polls and only his independent candidacy has the ability to ``grow'' enough to stop North.
``A vote for Chuck Robb is a wasted vote,'' Coleman declared. ``It's a vote for six more years of the status quo. It's one more vote for the Clinton agenda.'' MEMO: Staff writer Margaret Edds contributed to this report.
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KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES
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