Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 31, 1993 TAG: 9311160231
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Before you answer, consider: That description might fit Roanoke's popular former mayor, the Rev. Noel Taylor.
It wouldn't have been a lie - would it? - had political foes used such innuendo against Taylor.
Then again, as someone once said: In politics, there are no lies - only terminological inexactitudes.
Well, terminological inexactitudes are being spread with great relish by a polling firm hired by Democratic candidates for Virginia's House of Delegates. And Republicans are right to complain about the sleazy tactics.
Consider the Salem race, for instance, in which Democrat Howard Packett and Republican Morgan Griffith are contending for the legislative seat being vacated by Del. Steve Agee. The Democrats' pollster has called and asked if people would vote for Griffith if they knew he had defended a child molester.
Griffith, an attorney, was once appointed by the court to represent an accused molester. The pollster, naturally, doesn't provide that little detail to those being called.
In other legislative races around the state, insinuations of wrong-doing - intended to inflame issues that will torch the Republicans - have been drawn from even skimpier foundations.
In Southwest Virginia, where there's a race to succeed retiring Del. Ford Quillen of Gate City, the Democrats' polling firm is asking prospective voters if they'd vote for Republican Terry Kilgore, Scott County's commonwealth's attorney, if they knew several members of his family are on the public payroll.
As it happens, those family members are mostly public-school teachers.
Well, what if they knew Kilgore had taken $4,000 from a client?
Kilgore says this was payment of a legal fee.
The polling firm, Cooper & Secrest Associates, defends its phone-bank tactics. So does Kevin Mack, executive director of the House Democrats' caucus, who provided the "opposition research" for the telephone surveys.
There is a factual, documentable basis for every question asked, says loose- cannon Mack.
Sure. Like in the Fredericksburg-area race where GOP Del. Robert Orrock is opposed for re-election.
"Although his mother-in-law runs a private day-care center, Bobby Orrock voted against legislation which would have led to increased state oversight and regulation of private day-care centers," is how the pollsters put it.
But the mother-in-law, a retired bank teller, doesn't run a day-care center and apparently never has. Mack's "factual basis" seems to be that she baby-sits for Orrock's children, sometimes baby-sits with her nephews whose families visit the area twice a year, and sometimes cares for a pastor's children when he's at wedding rehearsals at the church next door.
(Incidentally, Orrock says the "no" votes cited by the pollster were committee votes to kill a bill at the request of the bill's sponsor.)
Four hundred to 500 voters in his district were also asked if they'd vote against Orrock if they knew that he had "voted to spend $17 million to construct a new office building for the state lottery, even though there was plenty of unoccupied office space in Richmond."
Apart from the irony of Democrats pushing this point, the fact is that Orrock opposed the lottery building, and voted to remove it from a bond package. After trying to delete it, Orrock says, he did vote for the omnibus package because it contained needed funds for prison construction.
Democrats say the Republicans are just a bunch of crybabies - and hypocrites to boot, since they also have been known to use dirty tricks on occasion. Alan Secrest, who runs the polling firm, says GOP complaints about his tactics are "like being called nasty by Darth Vader."
OK, nobody is saying Democrats have a patent on spreading rumors and stretching or distorting the truth.
But sleaze - by whichever party it's practiced and however it's defended as "opposition research" or the like - still looks and feels like sleaze. And a sleazy poll cat - however you spell it - still smells like a skunk.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB