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When I first began to look
carefully at each of the candidates running for the Senate in Virginia, my initial response was to feel sorry for George Allen. When I printed out, and compared, side by side, each candidate’s credentials, accomplishments and background, it didn’t seem possible anyone could possibly choose George Allen over Jim Webb. It wasn’t personal, or meant to be unkind, it just seemed like a comparison between a glass of champagne and a can of Colt 45. Jim Webb was head and shoulders above George Allen as a candidate for the United States Senate.
Yet the polls have consistently favored Allen from day one. “It’s the power of the incumbency,” I told myself. “As the campaign progresses it will all come into focus.” It never seemed to. Not even after Mr. Allen indulged himself in a fit of temper on the campaign trail and showed a pretty ugly side of himself did the polls so much as budge.
It was baffling. I checked the amount of money each candidate had to spend on the campaign. Mr. Allen’s war chest was huge in comparison to Mr. Webb’s. “Can that possibly matter this much?” I asked myself. “Don’t we elect candidates on issues and ability in this country? Can money possibly account for these poll results that still say Allen is favored to win?”
When the Allen camp came up, a week or two after the macaca incident, with a 30year-old article Jim Webb had written in a local publication suggesting women shouldn’t serve in certain combat roles, along with one of those comments men sometimes make when their guard is down, “the Naval Academy is a homy woman’s dream,” I could see one thing money could buy: researchers to dig something like that up out of the past. My thought was that if they had to go back that far, and the best they
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