The University of Richmond Collegian 11/10/94

Staff Editorial

by Jeffrey Carl, Opinion Editor

What We Think

an Opinion from the Collegian Staff

“GOP Yes, North No”

Tuesday night, as we all sat around the TV eating popcorn and watching CNN, something strange began to reveal itself as having happened.

In fact, it was the political equivalent of the fabled Three-Headed Mutant Martian Male Nurses coming to town and eating the Radio Shack. It was your Great Aunt Bertha changing her name to “Muffy” and getting a job at the Red Light Inn. It was Michael Stipe not being pretentious. It was hell freezing over and the Detroit Red Wings playing the Chicago Cubs for the Stanley Cup on the ice.

Mario Cuomo was not re-elected to the governorship of New York. Texas Governor Ann Richards lost to George Bush’s son. Tom Foley – the speaker of the house, the man who is third in line of succession for the presidency – was not returned by his home state to the Congress, the first time this has happened to a speaker since the Civil War.

Chuck Robb, who appeared a year ago to be a sitting-duck lame-duck, won the race after facing three challengers (including Oliver North, who raised three times the funds that Robb did). North lost despite being the cause celebré of the “religious right” all over the country and the center of national press attention. Robb won despite being in the doghouse over staunch Clinton support and serious character questions. The moral of the story: yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Anything is possible here.

What does it all mean? Nationally, it means that the voters have cast their votes – and their stones – against Clinton’s neo-liberalism. This is not, as White House spin doctors suggested, “another mandate for change.” The nation has decided what it doesn’t want – now the GOP must convince the nation that it has what the nation does want.

The meaning in Virginia is more clear – and clearly more directed at Republicans. In the midst of the greatest Republican tidal wave in American history, a discredited, too-liberal Chuck Robb was still able to beat the Republican nominee, Oliver North. The lesson of North's defeat must be that the Religious Right's handpicked candidate cannot win – even in a Republican landslide, even in Virginia, the home of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The Old Dominion GOP must analyze its base and clean its house.