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By GEORGE BOWLES
Whatever triumphs the Republicans may have scored in Virginia and nationally during the political campaigns of 1964, they face a whole new ballgame when the Old Dominion’s electoral wars of’85 get under way. • In the upcoming year, of course, the voters of the Commonwealth will elect a governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the 100 members of the House of Delegates. Such years in the quadrennial electoral cycle are frequently referred to, with considerable justification, as the "World Series of Virginia Politics. ”
For the past decade GOP candidates for statewide and other offices have done what Republicans, and conservative candidates generally, do best. They have run against the horrors they argue would befall the state if those whom they regard as liberals were to be selected.
The formula, to he sure, has a for longer history. For years the old Democratic Byrd organization used it with devastating efted against both the struggling progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the then-progressive ' Republicans in the state.
But in 1972, when the conservatives took over the GOP and the Democratic liberals ousted the last of the Byrd men from the party's leadership, the liberal bugaboo weapon passed to the Republicans. They have wielded it with gusto and considerable effectiveness ever since, t 'In 1978 and 1977, successful gubernatorial candidates Mills Godwin and John Dalton won election by billing their campaigns, in effect, as crusades to save the world from Henry Howell- ell1 Ita 1961, Marshall Coleman, the GOP candidates for governor, was buffing his newly-acquired conservative image. In his .campaign he made an effort to hang the liberal record of President Lyndon Johnson around the neck of Democrat Chuck' Robb, Johnson’s son-inlaw. That effort, of course, foiled; Robb simply could not be forced into a national Democratic liberal mold with any degree of believihility, . , The .attempt, incidentally, had more than a bit of irony about it.'
Four years before Coleman had rub as a moderate liberal in the race for attorney general He won the election largely because he was able to link Ids opponent, Democrat Edward E. Lane, with the Byrd organization’s massive resistance policy of two decades earlier. The tactic gained him the attorney general’s office but cost him the governorship in ’81 when the state’s conservation money men and voters refused to accept his late blooming conversion to born-again conservatism as genuine. The doubts it created dog Coleman’s political ambitions to this day. s
Thus the independent conservatives yrent with Robb in the *81 race. Apparently they have had no cause to regret their choice. A recent survey shows that he enjoys the highest job performance approval rating of any state official since the pollsters began measuring such things.
Which brings us to the Re
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