The Silliest Race of the Season

By James Carney

Oliver North was set to appear in a Halloween parade with some local police in Vienna, Virginia, last week when he got word that followers of Lyndon LaRouche, dean of the American political fringe and Virginia resident, might ambush him along the way with a salvo of rotten fruit. "What do we do?" North asked an adviser, Mark Goodin. "Be sure and duck," Goodin replied.

The fruit attack never came, but in his bid to unseat Charles Robb as the state's junior U.S. Senator, the retired Marine colonel and damp-eyed star of the Iran-contra hearings has been doing a lot of ducking and counterattacking in a campaign that has turned Virginia's political season into a freak show. The race reached new levels of notoriety last week when Nancy Reagan, during a public appearance in New York City, blasted North's veracity. "Ollie North has a great deal of trouble separating fact from fantasy. He lied to my husband."

The former First Lady was the latest in a line of prominent Republicans who have publicly questioned North's honesty, but he refused to fight back this time. Declaring that Reagan was "the greatest President of my lifetime," North said his "mother told me never to get into a fight with a lady." Vice President Al Gore added his own voice to the squabble, referring to North as "a pathological liar."

; North's travails were met with glee at Robb headquarters, where aides were considering whether to use footage of Nancy Reagan in an ad for their candidate. Robb, after all, has been bathed in shame as well. The Democratic Party's onetime star-in-waiting has been dogged by stories about his attendance at swank parties with alleged drug users while he was Virginia's Governor and his alleged marital infidelities. While refusing to admit specific transgressions, Robb has conceded to having "let my guard down" in the past. That line, joked The Tonight Show host Jay Leno, "is just Washington talk for 'I let my pants down.' "

Indeed, the North-Robb race has proved to be a rich source of comic material. David Letterman drew up a Top 10 List of mock campaign slogans for North. No. 7 was, "A man of convictions. None of them pending." (North's three convictions in the Iran-contra case were overturned on a technicality.) And Garry Trudeau featured North as arrogant and a chronic prevaricator in his syndicated Doonesbury comic strip last week.

Despite North's embarrassments, he is in a dead heat in public polls with Robb going into the final week of the campaign. North has been effective in linking his Democratic opponent to President Clinton, whose ratings are low in Virginia. North can also thank the independent candidacy of Marshall Coleman, a Republican opposed to him who received 17% in the latest poll. Coleman has been siphoning support that would have gone to Robb.

More than anything, North's success is due to his prodigious fund raising as well as his skill in articulating the anger that Virginians feel toward the political establishment. To his backers, the attacks on North by members of the elite only provide more reason to back him. "His supporters are impervious to negative news about him," says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. If that holds true for one more week, North could soon be sitting in congressional hearings once again -- this time as a U.S. Senator.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Bonnie I. Rochman/Richmond