Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 20, 1995 TAG: 9510200059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In 1989, Del. Richard Cranwell co-sponsored legislation that added "deliberate and premeditated" murder in the commission of an attempted robbery to Virginia's list of capital crimes.
The bill passed and was signed into law.
Yet last week Republicans mailed literature to voters in the Roanoke County Democrat's district that charges:
"Dickie Cranwell Voted Against Stronger Death Penalty!
"Dickie Cranwell voted against capital punishment for the deliberate and premeditated killing of any person in the commission of an attempted robbery."
How can they say this? Because in 1989 there was a second bill dealing with the same issue. It even had identical language. It was simply sponsored by someone else. As is the legislative custom, the General Assembly passed one version and killed the duplicate.
But that's evidence enough for Republican strategists in Richmond to claim that Cranwell voted against the death penalty. "He had a chance to vote for it and didn't," says Gerry Scimeca, director of House campaigns for the state Republican Party. "If it's a serious issue, you should vote for it every time you get the chance."
Cranwell calls this attempt to portray him as anti-capital punishment either "one of the most incompetently put-together mail pieces I've seen in my 20-plus years of politics or it's one of the most vicious and insidious attempts to mislead voters I've seen."
His Republican challenger, Trixie Averill, calls it completely defensible. "He voted against it," she says. "He's playing semantics."
Some of the state's leading political analysts call the GOP literature simply politics as usual - especially in the "stealth campaign" world of political mail.
With less than three weeks to go before Virginians go to the polls to elect all 140 members of the General Assembly - and with partisan control of the legislature hanging in the balance for the first time in more than a century - voters are finding their mailboxes stuffed with campaign literature.
They're also finding it full of what could be called, quite literally, half-truths.
"More and more, the most negative attacks are coming in direct mail," says Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton, an expert in campaign advertising who has recently been studying such mail. "Oliver North last year spent more on direct mail than he did on television. That surprises some people."
The appeal of "direct mail" - so-called because it goes directly to the voters - is twofold.
One is that candidates can quietly target certain neighborhoods, or certain types of voters, with different messages.
For instance, state Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, is sending different mailings to voters based on how strongly they identify with partisan politics.
The mail going to voters his campaign has identified as Republicans plays up his party affiliation, attacks Democratic rival John Edwards, and stresses an endorsement by Roanoke's Republican congressman, Bob Goodlatte.
The Bell mail going to more independent-minded voters makes no mention of Edwards. Instead, it shows Bell and his wife "at their home in Penn Forest," lists his activities in various civic groups, including Total Action Against Poverty, and declares: "Brandon Bell - One of Us."
The other appeal of direct mail is that it allows candidates to buttress their charges with the appearance of factual research. Many direct mail pieces meticulously cite bill numbers or newspaper articles to underscore their credibility.
The problem is, Denton says, "most of it is true, but it's not the whole truth."
Both parties practice this art of selective truth-telling in their mailings, although the strongest attacks this year appear to have come from Republicans. That's partly because Republicans tend to favor direct mail as a campaign technique, partly because they've got more money to spend this year, and partly because they're generally the challengers, who by definition must make the case against the incumbents.
Democrats seem to prefer more subtle methods. When a Republican mailing accused Cranwell of having "one of the most liberal records in the General Assembly," he responded with a mailing that described himself as "a conservative leader in the Virginia tradition" and listed "Dick Cranwell's leadership on Conservative Issues."
Democrats, meanwhile, take the lead in complaining that Republicans are misleading the voters. Cranwell called a news conference this week in a bid to refute the allegations made in the Republican mailing sent to voters in his district.
One by one, he ticked off what he described as "the lack of factual accuracy" in the piece - going over a list of bills the flier said he voted against and each time producing copies of the official General Assembly journal that showed him voting in favor.
Republicans concede that Cranwell voted for the bills but say the basis for the GOP charges is that Cranwell opposed amendments that would have made them tougher.
On many of the bills, there's plenty of room for debate on both sides.
Take the charge: "Dickie Cranwell Led the Fight To Let Violent Criminals Out Early!''
The basis for the GOP claim is that "Dickie Cranwell" - the Republicans always refer to him by his college nickname "Dickie" - "voted against Governor Allen's plan for adequate prison space for murderers, rapists and robbers."
Cranwell did vote against Allen's prison-financing plan. However, there's bipartisan agreement on how many prisons Virginia needs to build between now and 2001. The real debate has been over how and when to pay for those prisons - Republicans prefer to borrow money, Democrats push for pay-as-you-go; Republicans also want to authorize a 10-year building program, Democrats want the state to take a slower approach, warning that the state shouldn't fund prisons until sites have been selected.
What this point-counterpoint shows is how easy it is to distort legislative records by singling out specific votes.
"A legislator who has served a long time has cast so many votes than an opponent can find a vote on every side of every major issue," contends University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato.
That's because many of the choices lawmakers face turn on the technicalities of proposed legislation, not the merits or demerits of a particular issue.
Take, for example, an issue that has surfaced in the Bell-Edwards state Senate race.
Edwards has said repeatedly during the campaign that Bell voted against the Omnibus Education Act of 1995, a massive school system funding bill that added state funding for all school districts - including Roanoke and Roanoke County.
Bell has repeatedly replied that he voted for the bill.
Both are correct.
Bell was one of three Republican senators who voted against the measure when it first came up for a floor vote in the Senate. Bell says he opposed the bill because of language mandating that parents sign and return to schools a statement acknowledging that they have read the school's disciplinary code - an issue that has since generated controversy.
But he voted for a conference committee report on the measure, the final version of the bill.
Averill, Cranwell's Republican opponent, agrees that zeroing in on a single vote can distort the bigger picture - but says it's Cranwell who's not telling the full story. That death penalty bill, where he voted to kill the duplicate bill? She says the problem is the "duplicate" bill was introduced a month earlier, by a Republican - then-Del. George Allen.
When Cranwell a month later sponsored his own version and deep-sixed the Allen bill, "it only shows the animosity he's harbored against George Allen ever since he was in the legislature," Averill says. "That's typical of the games the Democrats are playing. The fact is, Republicans submit bills and Democrats blast them and gut them in committee and then, if it's a good idea, they adopt it as their own."
But is it misleading for Republicans to make it sound as if Cranwell opposes the death penalty? Averill sticks by the the mailing. "I think he's trying to make excuses and he does not want people to know how he's playing the game."
But political analysts see another game being played, and think it's bad for democracy.
"Campaigns unfortunately aren't about citizen education," Denton says. "They're about winning and losing." That means pretty much anything goes, he says. Denton thinks that many of the charges and countercharges that come in direct mail and other forms of political advertising "contribute to the disillusionment and cynicism of voters, because you don't know who to believe."
Sabato won't go that far. "It is totally unrealistic for people to expect politicians to act like angels. They're not devils, either. They're just human beings." If a candidate shades his record, or omits key facts about his opponents, that's just human nature, Sabato says.
When it comes to picking candidates, he says, voters must exercise the same judgment they do as consumers when it comes to shopping for a new car - or a used one, for that matter.
"Voters must always realize they're being sold something," he says. "There are very few people dumb enough to believe all the claims made in a campaign."
And he's got a special word of advice for voters when they receive mail close to Election Day.
Ignore it.
"Personally, I think voters should disregard anything they get in the mail the last week of the campaign," he says.
"Throw it in the trash. That's when campaigns send out their least substantive charges, because they know the press doesn't have time to check it."
Staff writer Dan Casey contributed information to this story.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB