Send Ollie? Two centuries ago Virginians showed a knack for sending leaders to save a nation. Next week they will decide where to send North. It’s a strange, unedifying election season–sullen, distraught, down and dirty. But no candidacy is more pivotal, or more emblematic of political trends, than North’s search-and-destroy mission to take the Senate seat held by Democrat Chuck Robb. In Virginia, dowdy Mother of Presidents, the future of politics is visible in exaggerated form: a war of the widely despised candidates. North has the edge. Tribalistic and vaguely messianic, estranged from traditional party ties, geared for zealotry rather than broad appeal, his high-tech, lavishly financed campaign is built for a sulfurous atmosphere–which is to say, the future. The game as the Terminator would play it.
In some ways, Noah already has succeeded. A few years ago he was disgraced, booked and convicted in the Iran-contra scandal, though his felony raps were later overturned. Now he’s back, bidding for a seat in the very institution whose laws he violated, whose members he misled. Many Republicans are as upset as Democrats. GOP luminaries, from Norman Schwarzkopf to Elliot Richardson to Ronald Reagan, have dissed him. Even Nancy Reagan chimed in last week, tartly saying that North “has a great deal of trouble separating fact from fantasy.”
Yet North is neck and neck with Robb, and far ahead of independent challenger Marshall Coleman. A North victory would crown him the prince of a reinvigorated religious right: Southern-based, Biblically inspired, defiantly (perhaps disruptively) conservative on cultural matters. And it would send a thundering up-yours to the Washington establishment that turned its back on him. “To many voters, his history won’t matter much,” says GOP poll-taker Frank Luntz. “He’s the handy voice of talk-show anger.”
As Election Day approaches, it’s unclear just how far beyond talk shows the anger reaches–or who can ride it. In a NEWSWEEK Poll and in focus groups (page 42), voters seem more melancholy and equivocal than outraged. They disdain all leaders and institutions in near-equal measure-the president, the Congress, the corporations, the media. Like Hamlet, they fret, but aren’t eager for a world they know not of. With a strong economy, Clinton is working his way back into the good graces of voters. NEWSWEEK’S Poll shows that over the past month his approval rating has risen eight points to 44 percent. The voters decry “gridlock,” but it may be an all-too-accurate reflection of their confusion. They want leaders to change everything–and nothing; to be independent of everyone else–but beholden to them; to use a machete on spending–but hold their own benefits harmless. In their sourness, they could strike in any direction.
Election results, accordingly, will be mixed. Incumbents of all kinds are shaky. Democrats will sustain heavy losses, especially in the South, but some symbolic figures, such as Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, Mario Cuomo in New York and Dianne Feinstein in California, may survive. Republicans, once sure of winning the Senate and hoping for a dramatic sweep elsewhere, were lowering their expectations a bit. They may undermine their cause with bickering. In New York City, Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani endorsed Cuomo, whose Republican opponent the mayor derided as an empty suit. In California, Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett attacked Gov. Pete Wilson, accusing him of stoking nativism by supporting a ban on state services for illegal immigrants. The intramural feuds left the GOP’s chief spokes-man–Bush Limbaugh–nearly speechless on his talk show last week.
But this election ultimately isn’t about Republican triumphs or Democratic survivalists. In a larger sense incumbents are in deeper danger than they know, fighting for market share in a dwindling societal sector. Other features of American life are under siege from foreign competition. from new communications modes, from changing mores. Now it’s the political system’s turn to be down-sized and out-sourced and more carefully focused, says polltaker Mike McKeon. “It’s just like what happened to the auto industry,” he says. “The whole enterprise is being torn up. It’s getting leaner and meaner.”
That’s where Ollie’s army comes in. It was born lean and mean. In Vietnam, a biographer says, North thrived in chaos. The jungle with no front or rear was good training for the Virginia Senate race, in which the goal is to avoid being fragged by voters in your own party. Many Democrats despise Robb, a Senate cipher best known for hanging with beach bimbos and for a conspiracy–mounted by his lieutenants–to tap the phones of Douglas Wilder, the former Democratic governor. Wilder was persuaded to drop his own Senate bid–but has only recently, and with great reluctance, agreed to campaign for Robb. Many Republicans despise North for inflated claims of derringdo and for lying to Congress about Iran-contra. So far, Coleman’s independent campaign is siphoning more votes from Robb than North. Indeed, North strategists privately hope Coleman stays in the race. “Frankly, we have a hard time winning a straight two-way race,” one top North strategist concedes.
In a race like Virginia’s, as in the rest of the country, it now pays to run your own supply lines. North’s army is his own creation, renting space in the Republican Party but not really part of it. His crusade has roots in the work begun 23 years ago by Jesse Helms. He wanted to build an independent, culturally conservative force in the South that would not have to truck with President Richard Nixon, whom Helms regarded as a vacillating tool of communists and liberals. Helms, a television commentator by trade, fused Manichaean rhetoric with the new machinery of direct mail to build his own powerful empire–and win a North Carolina Senate seat in 1972.
It’s a straight line from Helms to North. The Helms crowd inspired the first New Right groups and businesses. They were headed by people such as Richard Vignerie, who made direct mail a profitable high art; the late Terry Dolan, who built the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) into the first independent “negative campaign” PAC in the country; and Jerry Falwell, who was throwing his weight around in politics before Pat Robertson got the inspiration to try. Because office space was cheap and the political climate congenial, most of these enterprises settled in northern Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington.
Now deeply rooted in Virginia, allies and disciples of the New Right founders comprise the North high command and on-hoard entourage. Vignerie is doing the direct mail, grossing vast amounts. Advertising whiz Mike Murphy, the GOP’s hottest media consultant, started with NCPAC. Top campaign aide Mark Merritt was an adviser to Bobertson. North’s personal aide-de-camp, 22-year-old Todd Slosek, was taken into the circle by Duane Ward, a longtime North adviser and former aide to Falwell. Consultant Mark Goodin isn’t New Bight but qualifies on other counts: he worked for Strom Thurmond and the late Lee Atwater.
It’s the return of “Blue’s Bastards,” the name of North’s tightknit platoon in Vietnam. (Blue, a battle code for north on the compass, was Ollie’s nickname then.) And the theory is the same: it’s deadly out there. Though North’s manner is breathily sincere, though his eyes get doelike and dewyon cue, his approach is anything but sunny and Reaganesque. Accepting the Republican senatorial nomination last summer. North depicted Clinton’s aides as a squad of fey men given to wearing earrings. (Only one ever has, at least in the White House.) Attacking Robb’s military record, North described him as an “Eighth and I marine.” It was a cheap-shot reference to the Washington location of the parade-ground duty Robb had pulled long ago. And it conveniently ignored the fact that Robb, too, had served with distinction in the Vietnam War.
Aboard Rolling Thunder, the real enemy isn’t Chuck Robb, but Bill Clinton. To get pumped, Ollie seems to need a dreadful enemy, and he has worked him-serf into an apocalyptic lather over the president. To North, it’s the Nicaraguan struggle all over again, this time in America. Ollie’s troops are the contras, the Clintonites are the Sandinistas. He regularly brands Clinton a “radical” and “extremist,” and talks of Washington as though it were a capital city under occupation. North couldn’t bring himself last week to say even one kind word about Clinton’s recent foreign-policy successes. “I told him that it wouldn’t kill him to say something nice, but he’s afraid to,” said a top aide. To Noah, it’s still 1968 and Clinton is the guy with shaggy hair and a peace sign. North recently declared that the president was “not my commander in chief.” Aides later tried to explain that he had meant it in a literal sense, since he’s retired from the marines. Sure, and “Semper Fi” means “peace.”
In Virginia, North has built his campaign on three groups of supporters. There is a macho Clancy Crowd, the pro-military voters who love a thick Tom Clancy novel and like the presence of so many Pentagon installations in the state. There are the Blue Blazers, the young men at the conservative Virginia colleges who came of age watching and admiring the dashing and handsome young North in the televised Senate hearings in 1986.
But the voters who put in the time–and got him the Senate nomination–were the conservative churchgoers, most of them women. Some 70,000 of them in Virginia are members of Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Over the last two weekends before the election, they were expected to distribute 1.7 million “voter guides” in churches throughout the state. The group will make 250,000 “get out the vote” phone calls and “drop” 250,000 pieces of mail. “With Ollie’s people it’s a crusade,” said a worried Robb aide. “All of his voters are going to turn out, unfortunately.”
Congress and the courts, it turns out, did North a favor. They forced him to sojourn among the people who would become his most ardent supporters. He is a Christian soldier, literally: his born-again experience came in the marines. An evangelical, North decided to salve his career wounds (and added to his income) by traveling the church-based speech circuit after his felony trial in Washington in 1989. He was a draw at the usual sales conventions–but also at church meetings. His guide to the church world was former Falwell aide Ward. Iran-contra made North a national star, but the churches made him believe that he could be a candidate. “That’s really what saved him and got him started on the road to politics,” says Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition. “The churches took Ollie in when no one else really would.”
In the North campaign, “media relations” are oxymoron: there essentially are none. In a state that once featured a gentlemanly intimacy between press and candidate, distance now is the rule. North holds at most one brief “press availability” per day, and otherwise focuses on “closed press” events and photo ops. Most of the campaign cash goes into TV ads, which North himself sometimes previews, standing next to a monitor like a game-show host. He calls reporters by their first names, but needles them about what he sees as their implacable bias.
Ollie’s aides have a reason to keep him under wraps. In their view, he can be a loose cannon. They dare not leave him without top lieutenants in the entourage. They were absent one day early last week when he wandered into a risky discussion of whether it might be advisable to make social-security participation voluntary for younger workers. Campaign insiders went nuts–and the next day the entire top brass was back on the bus. Too late: Robb will air a social-security attack spot this week. “Ninety-five percent of the time he is the best political raw talent I have ever seen,” said one of those aides. It’s the other 5 percent that they have to worry about.
Detailed discussion of the “issues” don’t have much place in the North campaign–or the Robb campaign, for that matter. Both sides waded into the “character” issue in ads the other week, with North launching a pre-emptive strike. He went “up” with an ad rehashing Robb’s famous “massage” encounter with a beauty queen–complete with a picture of the Playboy cover on which she had later appeared. Robb’s ads revisited the Iran-contra ground. Most rhetoric on both sides is a variation on a simple refrain: liar, liar, pants on fire. As a result, the “negative ratings” of both candidates, their private polls show, are a radio-active 50 percent. “Voters think both of these guys are scum,” admitted a North adviser.
Now the challenge for the North team. as this aide puts it, is to convince enough Virginians that “Ollie is the scum on your side.” That means tying Robb, wherever possible and under whatever pretext, to Clinton. The North campaign has even come up with the novel idea of printing mass quantities of glossy, expensive CLINTON TEAM bumper stickers–and plastering them on every Robb road sign they can find. “We want to make this a simple ideological choice at the end,” said media consultant Murphy.
That leaves Ollie to travel the landscape in his RV, working the suburban malls and small towns of Southside Virginia, checking the minutes to E-Day on his black-dial Moon Watch chronograph. Wherever he goes in the Old Dominion, he is on historic ground. Last week Rolling Thunder ventured into down-town Richmond. He was to stop by GOP headquarters on Grace Street to show off his latest ad. A few blocks to the east stands the white-clapboard St. John’s Church, in which Patrick Henry made his famous and defiant speech 219 years ago. A few blocks west is the brick home of John Marshall, who sanctified the Constitution as second chief justice of the Supreme Court. And that’s where Ollie North is positioned now, in Virginia and America: somewhere between revolution and the rule of law.
If the 1994 elections for U.S. Congress were being held today, which candidate would you vote for?
46% Republican 44% Democrat 10% Undecided/Other
How important is your view of Clinton in determining your vote for Congress?
33% Very 24% Somewhat 23% Not at all 15% Not too
ASKED OF REGISTERED VOTERS ONLY. THE NEWSWEEK POLL, OCT. 27-28, 1994
Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in this country today?
68% Dissatisfied 26% Satisfied
Asked of those dissatisfied: How much do you blame the following for the problems that make you dissatisfied? (Percent answering blame somewhat, or a lot.)
80% Moral decline of people in general 73% News media 73% Democrats in Congress 70% Republicans in Congress 70% President Clinton 60% Large corporations
