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effective campaigner even though his political philosophy may be more often based on expediency than principle. Virginians did nothing to discourage that kind of behavior when they almost let Mark Warner buy the election with negative and misleading ads followed by a barrage of feel-good commericals that revealed only that he was for God, country and apple pie. By contrast, John Warner, a man with convictions and the courage to act upon them, was pilloried mercilessly by his own party's rightist element.
Even so, Warner won with 53 percent of the vote in a strange year when the state was almost voting Democratic in the presidential election. The hunch here is that Clinton's star will quickly dim in Virginia and that John Warner has shone a beacon that can be followed by Gilmore and other GOP candidates toward the shore where a majority of voters dwell. But if Gilmore rows his political boat strongly away from the center it may well founder on the same extremist shoals that have dashed the hopes of other statewide candidates, Democrat and Republican alike, in the past.
John Goolrick, a former political reporter, if now an aide to 1st District Rep. Herbert H. Bateman. Opinions expressed are his own.
96.3%