THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 26, 1994 TAG: 9410260450
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVID M. POOLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
Two aides to former President Richard Nixon stood in the shadow of the Watergate building on Tuesday to draw connections between the president-felling scandal of the early 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s.
Former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and former CIA Director William E. Colby joined U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb at a news conference to brand Republican challenger Oliver L. North as having Nixonian treachery.
``The question is not politics; the question is principle,'' Colby said.
Richardson said Watergate and Iran-Contra were constitutional crises in which executive-branch officials sought to evade the ``accountability'' built into the American political system.
Richardson - whom Nixon fired in October 1973 for refusing to replace the independent Watergate prosecutor - called Iran-Contra ``more evil and more flagrant'' than Watergate because it was a deliberate attempt to evade the will of Congress.
He accused North of creating a secret ``slush fund'' to pay for a foreign policy that was outside the oversight of congressional committees.
As a White House aide, North diverted profits from arms sales to Iran and used the money to circumvent a congressional prohibition on providing U.S. tax dollars to arm Contra rebels fighting the anti-communist government in Nicaragua. North has admitted diverting the funds without the permission of his superiors, including President Reagan.
Asked how North could be locked in a dead heat with a sitting senator if Iran-Contra was such a scandal, Richardson said: ``If I were as engaging on camera as he is, I would have been elected to the Senate in 1974.''
North, campaigning in Richmond, dismissed the Richardson-Colby comments as ``another desperate ploy by the foundering Robb campaign to bring Washington insiders to bear for them.''
The day before, North had called a press conference with former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and former Attorney General Edwin Meese of the Reagan White House to refute press reports that North tolerated drug-running on the part of Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
On Tuesday, North insisted that Robb was trying to divert the campaign away from issues. ``He knows he doesn't want to talk about the issues because his stands are so very bad,'' North told a partisan crowd at state Republican Party Headquarters. Robb ``would rather hurl mud and sleaze and distortions in the hopes his record in the Senate would be obscured or better yet never come up.''
North returned to the overriding theme of his campaign - that Robb is a clone of President Clinton - and extended his criticism to Jesse Jackson, who has been in Virginia for two days stumping for Democrats.
``Jesse Jackson, Chuck Robb - two peas in a pod. . . . Here's two liberal extremists trying to advance that liberal agenda,'' North said.
Independent candidate J. Marshall Coleman on Tuesday made an even stronger emphasis of issues-over-character, promising to spend the next two weeks releasing a series of position papers that spell out his stands.
Tuesday, his issue was the federal budget, and Coleman outlined a series of typical conservative positions: He wants to cut the capital gains tax in half, he wants to expand the eligibility for individual retirement accounts, and he wants to increase the child tax credit from $300 per dependent to $500.
``I am making the case that I am the best qualified candidate,'' he said.
But in keeping with his passive campaign strategy - counting on Robb and North to destroy each other - Coleman declined to say much about either one. ``I think the public has taken the measure of those two men,'' he said.
He added: ``The Senate is not a place for gamesmanship or evening scores.''
Coleman had hoped to spend all day campaigning in western Virginia with U.S. Sen. John Warner - the first time they would have appeared together in that region of the state.
But Warner's driver took him to the wrong airport in Northern Virginia on Tuesday morning - he went to National, when Coleman was catching a commercial flight out of Dulles - so Warner missed the morning's appearances in Roanoke.
Warner joined Coleman later in the day in Lynchburg.
Despite the struggle to keep debate focused on issues, the campaign day was capped by the release of ``Oliver North's Pack of Lies'' - a deck of playing cards containing 52 misstatements attributed to North - by Clean Up Congress, a nonprofit group seeking to derail his candidacy.
Some statements featured in the deck include:
North's claim at a Sept. 9 debate that the ``unionized'' Norfolk school system was so bad that the city has more students in parochial schools than in private schools.
His claim that his statements in support of a group seeking to fly the Confederate flag over a public museum in Danville did not mean he supported the public display of the Civil War symbol.
A North campaign brochure that describes his felony convictions in the Iran-Contra scandal this way: ``A jury of his peers looked at the evidence, and the evidence exonerated him.'' MEMO: Staff writer Alec Klein and Landmark News Service staff writer Dwayne
Yancey contributed to this report.
KEYWORDS: SENATE RACE CAMPAIGN CANDIDATE by CNB