ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE
Ross Perot brought his charts and twangy homilies about how politicians in Washington are "so busy chewing on other candidates' cats" that they won't talk about how the nation's government is going bankrupt.
Richard Lamm offered an academic-sounding lecture about the need for financial "justice across the generations" but found himself in a hallway debate with an 80-year-old widow who complained that Lamm's policies would lead to rationing health care for senior citizens.
The first road show of the two candidates competing for the presidential nomination of the nation's newest third party came to Virginia Saturday. Their face-off filled an auditorium with 200-some people looking for an alternative to the major parties and drawing a national audience via C-SPAN.
The Virginia event constituted the first official test of strength between Perot, the Texas billionaire who has bankrolled the Reform Party's organizational drive, and Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado who earlier this month said he would seek the nomination as well. On Saturday, at least, Perot was the clear winner.
Lamm was greeted with respectable applause, as he somberly made the case why younger families shouldn't be taxed to pay the health care bills of senior citizens who may be making the same amount of money but are paying less in taxes. But Perot was cheered enthusiastically as he talked more generally about the need to rescue the nation from an impending "financial meltdown."
Moreover, after the candidates left - flying off together to Maine for a second joint appearance - the state convention of the Virginia wing of the Reform Party (officially the Virginia Independent Party) rendered a more formal judgment in Perot's favor.
After more than an hour of debate among the 60-plus delegates, the convention voted 2-1 not to wait for the results of the national Reform Party convention next month, opting instead to exercise its legal right to go ahead and put Perot's name on the state's ballot now - with the provision that the party would change its nominee if the national conventional picked someone else.
"We are all sitting here today because of Ross Perot," convention delegate Karen Overocker of Northern Virginia told fellow party members. "We all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude. This shows our vote of confidence in him."
(The final tally: 54 percent for Perot; 25 percent to wait until after the Reform Party national convention; 20 percent for Lamm.)
The convention then proceeded to nominate Lamm for vice president, so for now a Perot-Lamm ticket is officially on the Virginia ballot this fall, occupying the coveted slot the party won through a ruling earlier this year by the State Board of Elections.
University of Virginia political scientist Brian Menard, who has followed Perot's attempt to start a new political party and attended Saturday's event, read national significance into the convention's balloting.
"The vote showed two things," he said. First, it showed Perot commands a loyal following with the Reform Party, but that Lamm is also viewed as a "legitimate" opponent. "Those two things combined were the best thing that Ross Perot could hope for," Menard said, because it suggests Perot "earned" the nomination of a real party, instead of merely funding a personal campaign apparatus.
The two candidates had much the same thing to say about the problems they see facing the country, with the contrast mostly in the way they said it.
Both warned that the federal debt, escalating Medicare costs and a growing imbalance between the number of taxpayers paying into Social Security and the number of beneficiaries were weakening the nation and passing on an unfair burden to future generations.
And both put the need for the nation to confront these issues in stark terms. "I believe this is about saving the nation, no less," Lamm said. "Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are not going to tell people the facts. We can be the party that tells the public the facts."
Perot clicked his way through a slide show of charts about debt and trade deficits, saying of Clinton and Dole: "They need to be talking about stuff like this.... I want to send a red flare to everyone in America: If we don't do something, we'll have a financial meltdown that would make the world a more unstable place."
Those in the audience seemed to find Perot's familiar style of down-home expressions more engaging than Lamm's more soft-spoken, scholarly approach. "I think Perot did a heck of a job," said Roanoke County businessman Rocky Wilkinson, "because he spoke to the true facts in a way everyone can understand them."
"He's better at building enthusiasm," said Blacksburg accountant Betsey Roberts.
And although Perot said only that something needed to be done about Social Security and Medicare, Lamm was more blunt about how he'd do it: by making each generation pay its own way. That prompted one spectator, 80-year-old Betty Smith of Charlottesville, to push her way through the crowd of journalists surrounding Lamm after his speech to confront him directly.
She complained that insurance companies already are refusing to pay for some medical procedures and that Lamm's fiscal policies would encourage more cutbacks - effectively rationing health care.
Lamm, who seemed to relish the encounter, shot back that the United States already rations health care, but the wrong way. "We should put more emphasis on getting everyone into the health care system and not worry that much about whether we can give a transplant to a 90-year-old," he said.
After an extended discussion, Smith said she agreed that Lamm's idea to make health care for all citizens a higher priority made sense to her. Unfortunately for him, she wasn't a convention delegate.
What happens next: The Reform Party will pick its presidential nominee through an unconventional mail-in balloting. Ballots will be mailed to anyone who has ever signed a Reform Party petition, or anyone who calls its Dallas headquarters and signs up as a party member. For information, call (800) 96-PARTY. The voting starts Aug. 11, and the winner will be announced Aug.18.
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESby CNB