The “North for U.S. Senate” signs roll up along U.S. Highway 29 on the outskirts of this leafy, horse-country community 50 miles southwest of Capitol Hill.
A larger campaign sign is posted in the window of the Clark Bros. Gun Shop, a busy sporting emporium and shooting range, a place where “Ollie” stickers abound and prints of GOP senatorial candidate and retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North-still in his uniform-are sold behind the counter.
Above the counter, hard by the pistols and skinning knives, a hand-written sign offers visitors a chance to sign a petition calling for the impeachment of President Clinton. No specific charges are mentioned.
“Lots of folks who come in here are interested in helping Ollie and getting rid of (Democratic Sen.) Chuck Robb,” said James Mitchell, a local contractor on his way into the shooting range. “Some people think Ollie is the lesser of two evils, but to a lot of others he’s a real hero.”
Finding Ollie North backers outside a gun shop is hardly a surprise. He is esteemed by many Virginia gun owners, by social conservatives and members of evangelist Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, by many veterans’ groups, term-limit advocates and those ardently opposed to the policies of the Clinton administration.
But North is also a galvanizing figure in American politics, a man apart. And in a year when voters across the country are proclaiming their disgust with the political process, emotions run particularly high in the Old Dominion.
No contest is more fevered, mean-spirited or divisive than the Virginia Senate race.
Sen. Charles Robb, 55, appears to have no message beyond the reality that he is the most logical means of keeping North out of the Senate.
North, whose felony conviction on lying to Congress delights many of his supporters, casts his candidacy as the ultimate commentary on the despised legislative branch and an unpopular president. And one-time GOP gubernatorial candidate Marshall Coleman, running as an independent, is struggling to offer an alternative to the major-party candidates.
“Admittedly, it’s an ugly choice,” said Woody Holton, the son of a former GOP governor who for more than a year has been running a grass-roots anti-North operation in northern Virginia.
“It’s fair to say about half the people in the state intensely dislike one candidate or another.”
North, the controversial Iran-contra figure, has already spent $13 million to defeat Robb, a once-popular former governor whose career has bogged down in personal scandal and intra-party feuding.
North’s television ads declare that Robb is a Clinton toady, and that he “can’t tell the truth,” a remarkable attack from North, a man tried and convicted in 1989 of three felonies, including lying to Congress.
The convictions were later overturned on appeal, but the ruling by a panel of federal judges turned on the question of immunity granted by Congress to the former National Security Council aide.
North, 51, has questioned Robb’s record as a Marine in Vietnam, called Clinton “a bonehead,” and two weeks ago told a group of high school students in suburban Washington that a jury had acquitted him of lying to Congress. The jury did the opposite.
Robb, the son-in-law of the late President Lyndon Johnson, has run a lackluster campaign for a second term, pounding away at North’s credibility in TV ads while attempting to distance himself from his own past.
His electoral mission was to keep reminding voters of North’s penchant for lying and dissembling, shortcomings for which North has been criticized by Ronald Reagan, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Navy Secretary and Vietnam vet/author James Webb, and Virginia Sen. John Warner, a Republican.
Burdened with his own difficulties, Robb has thus far been unable to gain an advantage on North, who has waged an aggressive campaign.
“One of the things North has done is make the election about Congress and Clinton rather than about Iran-contra,” said Mark Rozell, a political scientist at Mary Washington College in Fredricksburg, Va.
“It’s an issue-free campaign,” Rozell said, “It has been reduced to a question of voters deciding who’s the bigger liar.”
Robb, once viewed as a likely player in the national political stage, has suffered a host of self-inflicted embarrassments in recent years, most notably his New York hotel room encounter with a former Virginia beauty queen.
There, in circumstances he later characterized as “not appropriate for a married man,” Robb said he had a nude back rub. His companion, Tai Collins, turned up later in Playboy, and that magazine cover became part of a recent North TV ad.
As his statewide popularity ebbed in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Robb also faced a formal investigation into charges that, as governor, he’d attended parties at a Virginia resort where drugs were used.
And, in 1991, three of his aides Senate resigned after allegations of telephone tapping involving his longtime nemesis, former Democratic governor, L. Douglas Wilder. Robb was the object of a grand jury inquiry in that matter but was not indicted.
Despite their animosity, Wilder endorsed Robb Friday night.
The rap sheets and clouded histories of both candidates have come to dominate this election, where Republicans feel they have a chance to pick up a seat in the next Congress.
An independent Mason-Dixon Media Research poll released Wednesday showed North leading Robb 37 percent to 33 percent, with independent Coleman pulling 16 percent and 14 percent undecided.
The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percent.
The Mason-Dixon survey also showed that 44 percent of those asked had an unfavorable opinion of Robb, while 46 percent had an unfavorable view of North.
Democrats have been startled by Robb’s slow-motion re-election effort, and many find it hard to believe than a man with North’s background could be on the cusp of national office.
