THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606140025
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Margaret Edds
LENGTH: 72 lines
Asked a few months back to handicap the fall election, U.S. Sen. John Warner dismissed his Democratic rival with a trademark blend of pompousness and good humor.
Young Mark Warner will do well if he keeps his campaign on the high road, forecast the senator-from-central-casting. In the end, of course, the challenger will lose, he added.
But not before collecting a reward: plaudits for courage in ``taking on the king.''
The king?
Well, yes.
The king was on his throne last week after dispatching the latest pretender so easily one wondered what the GOP primary fuss had been about. Warner's 2:1 victory on Tuesday over former Reagan budget director Jim Miller was heady vindication, not only for the senator but for thousands of GOP moderates who've suffered under party domination by a right-wing crowd.
Next up to try for the scepter will be Democrat Mark Warner, a self-made megamillionaire with a yen and a talent for public service.
Thus far in his 18-year Senate career, John Warner has proved that experience couldn't best him (see Andy Miller, 1978). Gender didn't work (Edie Harrison, 1984). Nor race (Maurice Dawkins, 1990). Nor philosophy (Jim Miller, 1996).
Now Mark Warner offers another option. The former Democratic party chairman is a better person, and perhaps candidate, than the bottom line on this race implies. But what makes the Warner-Warner match-up even remotely competitive is money, as in young Warner's estimated wealth of $100 million.
Can dollars depose the king when experience, gender, race and philosophy did not?
The timing of the question coincides with the one-year anniversary this week of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich's famous handshake over campaign-finance reform. Seated on a stage in Claremont, N.H., the pair agreed to back appointment of a nonpartisan commission to study reform.
To date, no such commission has been named.
Meanwhile, the latest plan of campaign-finance reformers may be put to a Senate vote later this month. The bill - which faces a likely filibuster - will not become law in any event before the November Senate election.
If it did, the proposed changes would impact the Virginia race in at least several ways.
First, both Warners are sure to surpass a voluntary spending limit of $1.9 million that the bill recommends for a Virginia Senate campaign. In fact, challenger Warner almost certainly will exceed that figure in contributions from his own bank account.
Mark Warner is coy about his campaign budget. But he tells reporters: ``I've always invested in myself.'' Warner, who made his fortune in cellular phones, probably won't match the $28 million that California businessman Michael Huffington dropped on his 1994 Senate race. But Mark Warner hasn't come this far without planning to give the contest his best shot.
Meanwhile John Warner, a favorite beneficiary of defense and other political-action committees, will almost certainly get more PAC money than reformers recommend. PACs contributed $215,000 to his primary effort. They'll gladly up the ante for the second-ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee this fall.
Outlays may not equal the all-time high of $44 million spent on the Huffington-Dianne Feinstein race in 1994, or even the second-place finish of $26.6 million spent in Virginia in the Chuck Robb-Oliver North matchup that year.
But when well-connected millionaires square off, as in the Warner-Warner matchup, it's another reminder that the U.S. Senate more and more is off-limits to common folk.
It does, indeed, take a king to aim for the nation's most exclusive deliberative body.
Midas.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE CANDIDATE by CNB