THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 15, 1995 TAG: 9504130014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
The 1995 Virginia General Assembly and the follow-up ``veto'' session last week, during which the legislature dealt with Gov. George Allen's emendations and objections to bills passed earlier, are history. Mr. Allen will ask the voters to stamp the legislature's work ``Unsatisfactory'' by electing a Republican majority in November.
That's when all of 140 General Assembly seats in the House of Delegates and the Senate will be up for grabs. Mr. Allen will tirelessly remind voters that Democrats predominate in each.
He will labor to change that in November. A Republican majority in one or both legislative houses would be a novelty - Virginians once seemed everlastingly wedded to state Democrats. But novelty may be in the cards: Virginians, no less than other Americans, have been voting for political change.
A Republican legislature might be more amenable to tax and spending cuts of the magnitude that the Democrats controlling the General Assembly denied Mr. Allen. But that's uncertain. Large numbers of Republicans in both houses were surprised by and resistant to Allen-proposed cuts in taxes that local officials deem essential to retain and cuts in state programs that their constituents like. When the dominant Democrats engineered an up-or-down vote on the spending cuts that Mr. Allen called for, Republicans joined in overwhelmingly rejecting the governor's handiwork.
The whacks that Mr. Allen exhorted the General Assembly to make in funding for state colleges and universities provoked protests from Bedford to Virginia Beach. Three former governors, Republicans Mills Godwin and Linwood Holton, and Democrat Gerald Baliles publicly warned of long-term injury to Virginia's economy if the cuts were approved. So did prominent business and banking executives. The protesters prevailed.
Mr. Allen rightly sees the November elections as a referendum on the Democrats' response to his shrink-government initiatives. At first cowed by Mr. Allen's popularity, Democrats now relish the prospect of talking about their differences with the governor on the hustings.
That's because, though it is clear that Virginians wanted the state to get tougher on criminals, enthusiasm for the Allen fiscal agenda is lacking. No clamor developed for the tax cuts that Mr. Allen dangled before the populace. The spending reductions that he championed stimulated spirited grass-roots resistance.
The Democrats have blunted the soft-on-crime issue by going along with the Allen truth-in-sentencing and parole-abolition proposals and much of his prison-building push. With Lieutenant Governor Don Beyer heading the effort, the Democrats were addressing welfare reform before Mr. Allen began beating the drum for it. In his quest for national attention, the governor now trumpets the welfare overhaul that emerged from the General Assembly, which he can say is sterner than it would have been without pressure from him.
The outcome of Virginia's November elections is unforeseeable, of course. The thumping defeat of George Bush in the 1992 presidential race, the Allen landslide victory in Virginia's 1993 gubernatorial election, Christine Todd Whitman's narrow simultaneous win in New Jersey's, and the Republican near-sweep in the 1994 congressional and state-house elections attest to wholesale voter unhappiness with the way things are.
Two decades of eroding earnings and the disappearance of acres of well-compensated blue-collar and white-collar jobs have bred unease, bewilderment and anger. Political incumbents - who are blamed for welfare mothers, crime in the streets, the immigrant flood and adding to middle-income families' burdens - are fat targets for voters' wrath.
Mr. Allen gained office by characterizing the state's taxes as onerous and government as profligate - a fantasy with no connection to reality. The same theme may resonate less with voters in November than it did two years ago, in part because of Mr. Allen's successes on the anti-criminal and welfare-reform fronts and Democrats' success in blocking further deep cuts in education.
If these outcomes were to Virginians' taste, fewer may vote for further change in November. And many Virginians, properly disquieted by Mr. Allen's attempted tax and education cuts, may vote against change proponents. The political ground's muddy out there.
KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY by CNB