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this year. Some believe Warner’s campaign could raise as much as $3 million for this year’s race, perhaps three times what Harrison will spend.
Warner denied, as some have charged, that he’ll be buying a second term in the Senate.
“I don’t think we bought it the first time,’’he said.
Warner touched on a number of issues during the interview, but focused primarily on defense issues and his role in the platform battle. A secretary of the Navy from 1972-74, Warner sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and is chairman of its subcommittee on Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces.
Warner said he fought against party conservatives who insisted upon pi«Ang in this year’s platform language from the 1960 party platform, which called for “overall military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union. ”
That language, Warner said, was “a misrepresentation to the American people.” He cited statistics showing that during the past decade, the Soviets have produced far greater numbers of tanks, field artillery, armored vehicles, attack submarines, interceptor aircraft and other weapons than the United States.
“How can we tell the American people in good conscience that we’re trying to strive for superiority against graphic information like that?” he asked.
“How can we do that in the face of deficits projected at $200 billion?”
Warner said he fought successfully against conservatives such as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Phyllis Schafly for a more realistic pledge: that the United States strive and achieve “qualitative superiority” in weaponry, improved through superior technological research and development.
The more hard-line approach advocated by conservatives, he said, also “plays into the hands of the Soviets” slid is, in effect, “saber rattling.”
The Soviets, Warner said, could take that rhetoric and use it to their own advantage.
‘'They’ll go to the world and say, Took, we’ve got to go ahead and build and build as justification for what they’re doing. Because here’s the Republican Platform. It says they’re trying to achieve overall military
and our allies, we’ve got to continue Jjiis arms race.”*
“So it provides them rhetoric,” Warner said of the Soviets.
Conservatives within the GOP were critical last week of those who questioned the platform. Former Vitginia Gov. Mills Godwin, once a Democrat and now a Republican, was even quoted as suggesting that those who didn’t like the platform could go to the other party.
“He never mentioned that to me,” Warner said, when asked if he had heard of Godwin’s remark.
In general, Warner said, he supports the GOP platform. But he added, “Once you stand up and you say you’re not going to sign it, then everybody says that you’re deputing.”
Aside from the military plank, Warner tried unsuccessfully to get more emphasis in the platform on coal. He also opposed unsuccessfully lan
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