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By JOHN GOOLRICK
Rappahannock News Special Writer
If Douglas Wilder should get on a national Democratic ticket there is just no way Republicans will be able to successfully slap the “Liberal” label on him as they have done with so many others in the past.
Any doubt of that was certainly erased recently when Gov. Wilder stayed silent and let convicted murderer Wilbert Lee Evans die in Virginia’s electric chair despite repeated pleas for executive clemency.
The Evans execution can be used as exhibit one that Doug Wilder is tough on crime and criminals, just as Lee Atwater and company used Willie Horton to make the case that Michael Dukakis was soft on crime.
As the furor was going on about the Evans case, with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP criticizing its handling by Wilder and others, staunchly conservative Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia was giving high praise to Governor Wilder.
Appearing on C-Span, Rep. Gingrich pointed to Wilder’s handling of Virginia’s budget crisis as a “responsibly conservative” way of reducing a projected deficit not by raising taxes but by cutting spending. “He was willing to make the hard choices,” said Mr. Gingrich.
Meanwhile, as Rep. Gingrich, the current darling of Republican conservatives, was passing out bonafide conservative credentials to Wilder, the Governor appeared before a group of 700 northern liberals
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