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By JOHN GOOLRICK
Often in life we are confronted by what is known as the law of unintended consequences.
That is particularly the case in politics where the best laid plans of mice and men, as well as women, often go astray. •
In Virginia, I think back to the times in the early 1970s when the liberal wing of the state Democratic party, anxious to advance its progressive agenda, seized control of the party leadership and purged its moderate-conservative elements.
But instead of electing liberal leader Henry Howell in either 1973 or 1977, the Democrats did much to convert Mills Godwin from their party to the Republican Party and make him governor again, and then to put John Dalton in office as a GOP chief executive.
The liberals certainly hadn’t intended it, but their actions were primarily responsible for turning Virginia into a true two-party state.
In 1989 Republicans came up with what seemed a good idea at the time-one I must confess I fully agreed with. Instead of nominating their statewide candidates by a mass meeting-convention process, they would hold a primary election. 4 The theory behind what many regarded as a stroke of genius at the time was that a primary would avoid the brutal intra-party warfare that had damaged the party’s candidates severely in 1985. It Jvould give all candidates a chance to take their cases directly to the people so that allegations of clever maneuvers to control smoke-filled rooms could be avoided. I Of course, as we now' know, the primary proved even more divisive than the process it temporarily replaced and inflicted what turned out to be fatal wounds on the eventual gubernatorial nominee. I Now the law of intended consequences may be Forking against the GOP again. • A decision was made to hold nearly all the party’s local mass meetings in March and get them out of the tvay well before the state convention in Richmond during the first weekend in June.
The theory this time was that clear winners of the dominations for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general might be projected by the time the
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