THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411110266
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: On The Street
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
As the tumult from the recent political wars recedes into history, a few indelible images linger.
They shock the senses like the steamy and pungent air that rises from a recently vacated cattle pen.
Recall, if you will, the picture of the primary players in Virginia elections as they strutted the campaign trails just a few days ago. A few trod the path burdened by character flaws that voters did or didn't take into account when they walked into booths on Tuesday.
One, stone-faced Chuck Robb, weathered the marathon mud-slinging bout with cool hand challenger Ollie North to reclaim his U.S. Senate seat.
A plurality of Virginia voters apparently decided that Robb's nude back rub in a New York hotel room by a beauty queen who was not his wife was less odious than North ignoring the oath he took to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.
And, after the smoke cleared on election night, howls of outrage arose from the loser's camp. A lynching party was fast being formed to hang Sen. John Warner from the nearest loblolly pine for having the guts to refuse to back fellow Republican North because of his Iran-Contra involvement - among other things.
Warner's stand, party critics insist, cost Ollie the election. No sense of humor there, obviously.
Now, Robb and a bunch of incumbent Democrats, such as Owen B. Pickett, Norman Sisisky and Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, will return to Congress to face a hostile environment, a place where they're now members of the minority party.
Whatever influence they exerted before the election will be greatly diminished.
It's all part of a drastic change demanded by voters everywhere in America, pundits say - except in traditionally conservative Virginia.
Why? Go figure.
As in other states across the land, mid-term election campaigns seemed to have widened the chasm between so-called conservatives and liberals in Virginia.
An increasingly heated and vituperative debate over the way the country should be run quieted briefly after the polls closed. But expect the din to rise to a crescendo again - soon.
Issues like rising urban crime, abortion rights, school prayer, welfare reform, down-sizing government, balanced budgets, presidential line-item veto power, legislative term limits and the growing tide of illegal immigrants haven't gone away.
They will continue to fire up and divide the populace. The jawing and finger pointing will be at full bore within a month or two, and radio talk show blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy will continue to fan the flames.
And why not? It's a free country and Limbaugh and Liddy can blather about anything they want to, right?
Meanwhile, moderates of all political persuasions will largely be ignored as they have been in the past until the next election. Then they'll quietly slip into the polls to make their presence felt.
As they've done before, they'll steady the ship of state so zealots at both ends of the political and religious spectrum can come out of the woodwork and to do what they do best:
Tell everybody else how to live their lives, how to worship and what to think. by CNB