Virginians heed fiery new voice - support for senatorial candidate Oliver North - Cover Story

Speakers at the Virginia Republican Convention, including presidential hopefuls William Bennett and Dick Cheney, drove home the aggressive conservativism of Oliver North, the newly nominated U.S. Senate candidate. "We are going to kick the liberals' soft teeth down their throats," claimed Gov. George Allen, reflecting the kind of in-your-face campaigning Virginians seem to favor.

But North, the retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and former National Security Council staffer, needed no help getting out the word. "We are besieged by a liberal government," he said, accepting the nomination. "We send the Clintons and their cronies a simple but unmistakable message: This is our government. You stole it, and we are going to take it back"

North overcame a storm of media attacks and the opposition of key figures in the Republican establishment to claim a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent over former Reagan Budget Director James C. Miller III. According to most convention watchers, North's strong support among evangelicals was the key to his victory over Miller, whose positions on most issues were indistinguishable from North's. Virginia Republicans are attempting to win the seat now held by Sen. Charles S. Robb, the incumbent Democrat, who faces division in his own party over sex scandals and drug allegations that date back as far as the eighties.

Sen. John Warner claimed the GOP convention was dominated by a "small, tiny group" that supports North and threatened that if North emerged as the nominee, he would bolt and support a Republican not endorsed by the party - former Attorney General J. Marshall Coleman. Many Virginians understand the "small, tiny group" to which Warner refers to be evangelicals, fundamentalists or Christian conservatives who have become a force in Virginia politics through their alliance with veteran activists.

Election Day exit polling in Virginia's 1993 gubernatorial race showed that the tiny group Warner spoke of actually was quite large. Self-identified evangelical Christian conservatives represent 34 percent of all voters in this state. Warner's opposition to conservative Republicans such as North and Michael P. Farris, who lost a bid for lieutenant governor of Virginia last year, has put him on the enemies list of many conservatives.

On the national level, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole set off a furor among his fellow partisans by hinting he too would snub North as the Republican nominee and talk with Coleman, who has indicated he may run as an independent. Coleman already lost once to Robb in the 1981 gubernatorial election. The North nomination makes "some people" in the party uncomfortable, Dole said on CBS's Face the Nation. "I think it's going to take a while to sort that out."

North has elicited other opposition as well. President Clinton said in an ABC-TV interview that the Virginia GOP's nomination of North marked a clear victory for the "radical right" who, Clinton said, "have been working to try to take over, first, the Republican Party and, second, this country pretty hard now for more than 15 years."

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