THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409250039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 123 lines
With writers from as far away as Europe gang-tackling Chuck Robb and Ollie North, when every pronouncement they make is flashed into headlines and teases for the 6 o'clock news, it's little wonder that some voters mistake Jim Chapman for the odd man out in the U.S. Senate race.
The problem is, Chapman is not the third man in the Senate race. Coleman is. J. Marshall Coleman to be precise.
Chapman is the other guy, the Republican trying to knock Rep. Owen B. Pickett out of the House of Representatives.
Coleman. Chapman. The names are similar, they have lookalike grins and guy-next-door manners, and they're both conservative. To an electorate that tends to be long on opinion but fuzzy on the fine points, Coleman and Chapman can seem like two shots from the same cannon.
James L. Chapman IV is doing everything he can to change that, but six weeks from Election Day he's running something of a shadowboxer's campaign. His Democratic opponent, Pickett, is tied up on Capitol Hill and has vowed not to peel the back off a single ``Pickett for Congress'' bumper sticker until Congress adjourns, probably in mid-October.
That's a standard Pickett approach to campaigning, said Morris Rowe, the congressman's spokesman. ``He just doesn't believe it's the right time to be campaigning,'' Rowe said. ``He pays attention to what's going on in Congress.'' Chapman ran into the same tactic when he challenged Pickett two years ago.
``He could afford to run that kind of campaign in '92, when nobody knew me,'' Chapman said last week. ``But '94 is different.''
Indeed.
A couple of days ago in Oklahoma, a powerful eight-term Democratic incumbent was unceremoniously dumped from the House of Representatives by a 71-year-old retired high school principal who had never run for office.
The grandfatherly winner, Virgil Cooper, ran a primary campaign that cost less than a Chevy sedan, but it was enough to beat Mike Synar, one of Oklahoma's most popular politicians.
Synar's sin was a close allegiance to Bill Clinton, a president who has suffered a precipitous drop in popularity and spawned a growing, nearly visceral dislike of his administration.
In that atmosphere there is no mystery to the nationwide Republican strategy of attempting to paint every congressional Democrat as a Bill Clinton clone.
The question in the 2nd Congressional District, covering most of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, is whether that strategy will wash.
Clinton is radioactive, the guy is just radioactive,'' said Scott Howell, Chapman's Alabama-based media consultant. Howell, who is doing commercials for several Republican campaigns across the country, was directing a full day of filming for a series of Chapman ads that will go on the air when the race gets intense, probably in the last three weeks before Nov. 8.
The scripts weren't available, but the film looked like standard campaign fare: the candidate hard at work in his office, the candidate at play with his wife and two daughters, the candidate flipping burgers for a group of young campaign volunteers.
The voice-overs won't be attack-dog stuff, Howell said, but the message will be peppered with lines right out of Chapman's growing file of campaign literature: ``Send Bill Clinton a message,'' or ``Owen Pickett supports Bill Clinton 82% of the time.''
The fact that Pickett has kept clear of Clinton and opposed the president on a number of high-stakes issues doesn't impress Howell. ``Those are camouflage votes,'' Howell said. ``That's the five or six votes he makes when everybody's looking. As soon as you look the other way, he's voting to back a big-spending agenda.''
Chapman is eager to push the campaign past the press-the-flesh stage, to go toe-to-toe with Pickett over issues and voting records. He's frustrated, he said, that the two campaigns have yet to set times and places for debates, that the only scheduled events are joint appearances at civic league forums where each will give a separate speech without the thrust-and-parry of a true political debate.
``It's difficult when he won't engage,'' Chapman said Wednesday as the film crew set up for a shot in his back yard in Virginia Beach's leafy-cool Thoroughgood section.
Although Pickett spends every weekend meeting with people in his district, his unwillingness to press the campaign harder is beginning to wear on the nerves of some supporters who sense that autumn 1994 may hold an early and killing frost for dozens of Democratic contenders.
``We've tried to convince him we've got to get active earlier this time around,'' one campaign aide said, ``but he's not budging.''
Pickett's approach relies on two precepts: That conservative Virginia Beach voters know him and will believe that he's not a Clintonite; and that Democrat-laden Norfolk precincts will favor him over any conservative Republican.
``That's certainly part of the strategy,'' said attorney Kenneth V. Geroe, a longtime Democratic activist in the 2nd District. ``Virginia Beach has in part been served by Owen Pickett in one body or another since 1972, and they know he's no wild-eyed liberal no matter what Jim Chapman says. They know him to be a pragmatic, prudent public servant.
``If anything,'' Geroe said, ``the hard-core Democrat types are upset with him for not being more supportive of the president.''
Geroe said internal Democratic Party polling in August showed the race to be ``pretty much a replay. . . . They stood pretty much where they stood two years ago.'' Republican polls showed roughly similar results, a party official said, though neither party would release precise numbers. Pickett won in 1992 with 55 percent of the vote to Chapman's 45 percent.
Chapman, though, claims he's stronger going into this race: better name recognition, a full-time professional staff and the shadow of a guy named Clinton over the ballot, acting more as dragging anchor for Democrats than a mainsail full of wind.
Reflecting on that disaster in Oklahoma, where a genial granddad slapped down a popular Democratic incumbent with shocking ease, Geroe acknowledged that the White House factor is playing heavily this political season.
``It's inexplicable,'' he said, ``this venomous thing against the president. Such venom, personally, I've never seen it so strong on a personal basis.'' House of Delegates Race Virginia 2nd district candidates ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Rep. Owen B. Pickett doesn't plan to campaign for re-election until
Congress adjourns.
James L. Chapman IV says his opponent is a liberal who supports
Clinton 82 percent of the time.
by CNB