Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 19, 1993 TAG: 9401140025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In the most notorious instance, Republican consultant Ed Rollins boasted to a breakfast meeting with Washington reporters that the campaign staff of successful New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Christine Whitman, of which he was chief ``strategist,'' had spent $500,000 to encourage black ministers to discourage their parishioners from going to the polls (where they would have voted, presumably, for Whitman's Democratic rival, incumbent Gov. Jim Florio).
In the second, North Carolina Republicans charged that Democratic operatives of Gov. Jim Hunt had bugged and then recorded conversations of Republican officeholders in an effort to get usable campaign dirt on them. (The similarity of the charges to those laid at the feet of U.S. Sen. Charles Robb, of Virginia, by Gov. Douglas Wilder was disturbingly close and showed, if little else, that cellular phones, like computers, aren't necessarily all they're cracked up to be.)
In New Jersey and elsewhere, Democrats and similarly high-minded citizens loudly protested the ``system'' had been grievously wronged and cried for (a) confessions, (b) apologies and (c) an investigation and a possible overturn of election results.
Rollins, whose mouth is known to be large, later said he'd ``exaggerated,'' and a probe got under way. But Rollins did not, as some reported, ``retract'' his claim. Meanwhile several black clergymen came forward to say they'd at least ``heard of'' the GOP efforts and to lament its possibility, if it happened. (No one, of course, admitted to taking the money.) Whitman heatedly denied it had, but accepted the inevitability of an investigation, in which her own brother could turn out to be one of the offenders.
Everyone immediately headed for high moral ground, in other words, wearing expressions of wounded virtue and shaking their heads over the inexplicable transgressions of the other party. Since the black vote had indeed been lower than usual in New Jersey, however, the true effect of the sin, if it occurred, remained moot.
The high moral tone of all concerned should not be allowed to conceal the fact that throughout the nation's history politicians of both parties have bought and sold votes shamelessly. Some are saying that what was unique in New Jersey was that the GOP was offering to pay voters f+inoto to vote, but that is scarcely true. In New Jersey, as in Virginia and everywhere, money has been spent both to get voters to go to the polls and to get them to spend the day elsewhere.
This may be an offense against supposedly ``democratic'' principles, but it is anything but new. Both parties conducted notorious campaigns in the last century and earlier in this century to win the votes of newly arrived immigrants - Irish, Italian, Jews - who conveniently lived in clusters and often understood little of how the ``system'' worked. This scarcely makes partisan vote-buying (or non-vote buying) palatable, but it has a long American heritage.
But there are at least two other considerations political moralists ought to remember:
The chronically poor turnout of American voters encourages party workers to attempt to affect election results by manipulating party (including the other party's) voting. More nearly ``universal'' voting would do much to make vote- buying less common.
The parties, both of them, do not woo the ``black vote'' or try to swell or diminish it without expectation of success. In all too many cases, the votes of black voters have been for sale and that fact, as unsavory as many will find it, has clearly encouraged campaigners to twist it to their advantage. The answer to Rollins' claim is not sanctimonious moralizing but responsible black voting. If blacks are not a ``bloc vote'' to be taken for granted, then they should show it at the polls - both by voting in strength and dispensing their favor more generally.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
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