In the 1989 governor’s race in Virginia, media consultant Robert Goodman produced a powerful anti-abortion TV ad for Republican Marshall Coleman. It showed a baby taking his first steps, as an announcer criticized Democrat Douglas Wilder for backing legalized abortion, even in extreme cases like gender selection. The ad would have put Coleman on offense on the abortion issue, but it never ran. Lee Atwater, then Republican national chairman, intervened and kept the ad off the air. It clashed with his iron rule that whenever abortion is a major topic of discussion in a campaign, it hurts the GOP candidate. According to Atwater, the less said about abortion, the better. The issue lingered, however, and without the ad, Coleman was vulnerable to Wilder’s criticism on abortion. Wilder won.
Jim Gilmore, this year’s Republican candidate for governor, is in a similar situation. Like Coleman, he is basically pro-life, but his opposition to abortion is hedged. Like Coleman, he is under sharp attack for favoring a ban on abortion, at least after the initial two or three months of pregnancy. And like Coleman, Gilmore is desperate to change the subject. Thus, two weeks before Election Day, he is in what his aides call “the parry and thrust mode,” attempting to dodge Democrat Don Beyer’s criticism on abortion and to push the tax issue forward instead. This follows from another Atwater rule: Whenever taxes are the dominant issue, it helps the Republican candidate. If Gilmore is successful in reviving the tax issue — the centerpiece of his candidacy is the abolition of Virginia’s loathed personal-property tax on cars and trucks — he’s all but certain to win.
Gilmore may win anyway. “He has a demographic advantage because he’s a mainstream conservative in a conservative state,” says Gilmore pollster John McLaughlin. In statewide races, there’s a “big time” GOP tilt, maybe six to eight percentage points, argues Susan Platt, Bever’s campaign manager, who’s eager to lowball his chances. Republican George Allen was elected governor in 1993 in a landslide. Bob Dole won the state over Bill Clinton last year. True, Ollie North lost to Democratic senator Charles Robb in 1994, but the state GOP was badly split. Now, Sen. John Warner, who refused to back North, is vigorously supporting Gilmore. In TV ads, he lauds Gilmore for “honesty, integrity, character” — and for proposing to kill the personal-property tax. “The fundamentals favor Gilmore,” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, whose specialty is Virginia politics. The economy is strong, the incumbent GOP governor (Allen) is enormously popular, and most voters say the state is moving in the right direction. Allen, by the way, is set to stump full-time for Gilmore in the last two weeks of the campaign.
Still, there’s the abortion issue. Gilmore, 48, who resigned as attorney general last June to run, takes the fine-tuned position favored by Republicans who are queasy on the issue. It’s designed to satisfy pro-lifers without provoking pro-choice voters. Gilmore says abortion should be legal in the first 8 to 12 weeks, but he’s hazy about the status of abortion after that. Should it be banned? In a television spot, he says the Supreme Court ” has spoken. No one’s going to ban abortions.” But in the same ad he adds, “I won’t support late-term abortion.” He also opposes taxpayer-funded abortion and says, “I’ll make sure parents are involved whenever a minor child needs to face the terrible decision that abortion involves.”
This many-sided package roughly matches what polling data indicate is the view of most voters. So, logically, it should minimize criticism of Gilmore on abortion. It doesn’t. Rather, it has whetted the appetite of the Beyer campaign. Beyer’s TV spots concentrate on zinging Gilmore as a pro-life extremist, and Platt says abortion alone could swing the election to Beyer. Targeted are 60,000 women in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, mostly moderate Republicans and independents. They abandoned Coleman in 1989 and Ollie North in 1994, and Beyer needs most of them to defeat Gilmore. To win statewide, a Democratic candidate normally must get 55 percent in the D.C. suburbs, but Beyer has been running only even with or slightly behind Gilmore in the region. Gilmore’s strategists agree the 60,000 women are pivotal. And, in defiance of the Atwater rule, Gilmore is airing two TV ads to assuage their fears on abortion. However, the ads are reactive (“My opponent’s not being honest with you on the very personal matter of abortion”) , show Gilmore rather than a baby, and don’t come close to putting him on offense.
By hedging his position, Gilmore has caused himself more problems than he’s solved. If he had simply backed a ban on abortion except to save the life of the mother, as Ronald Reagan did, he could have avoided relentless probing of his position by the press. That, in turn, has kept abortion in the forefront of the campaign. I asked Gilmore whether he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s an obvious question, since Roe requires abortion to be legal at least until viability (22 to 26 weeks). Unless Roe were reversed, Gilmore wouldn’t be able to change Virginia law to restrict abortion to the first 8 to 12 weeks. So he wants Roe tossed out, right? He wouldn’t say.
He’s not always so reticent. Twice, Gilmore has created flaps by commenting on abortion-related issues. He told an interviewer he favored parental consent, not merely notification, for a minor to have an abortion. Were he on record backing an outright ban on abortion, this wouldn’t have come up. As it was, he spent several days explaining that consent has always been his position, though in his TV spots he advocates “parental involvement.” Later, a television reporter asked if he favors a law requiring a woman to notify her husband before having an abortion. Gilmore said the idea deserved ” serious consideration.” Four hours later, he issued a statement saying spousal notification was unconstitutional and thus he wouldn’t consider it. The next day, he went further in a debate with Beyer. Even if it were constitutional, he wouldn’t support spousal notification. The episode got major media play for two days.
The Washington Post, the dominant paper in Northern Virginia, deserves special mention on abortion. Its reporters have been obsessed with the issue. When Gilmore momentarily considered spousal notification, it got front-page treatment. The Post’s story on the debate the next day led with Beyer’s charge that Gilmore’s “initial support” for notification “amounted to an anachronistic insult to the state’s women.” On other issues, too, the Post has leaned in Beyer’s favor. After Gilmore denounced Beyer for giving regional authorities the power to tax, the Post published a story under this headline: “Beyer’s Position on Regional Taxes Has N.Va. Backers.”
Potentially more damaging to Gilmore was the Post’s coverage of Beyer’s accusation, in an October 6 debate, that Gilmore had approved 35 plea agreements with child molesters when he was a prosecutor in suburban Richmond. Child molesters let back on the street, Beyer said, “molest more children, they destroy more families. What were you thinking, Jim, when you did those 35 plea agreements with child sex molesters?” Gilmore, looking puzzled, responded in general terms about plea bargaining. The next day, Beyer backtracked, conceding there were only 9 such cases; in the others, prosecutors were free to seek tougher sentences. The Post didn’t get around to reporting Beyer’s egregious mistake until October 11 and then buried the story inside the local section. Had the roles been reversed — with Gilmore, the Republican, botching an explosive attack on Beyer, the Democrat — would the Post have waited so long to report the matter? Republicans doubt it, and so do I.
Despite the blunder, Beyer, 47, a Volvo dealer and lieutenant governor since 1989, is an artful campaigner. “The similarities with [President] Clinton are scary,” says a Gilmore adviser. Like Clinton, Beyer has adjusted his positions rightward to appeal to a conservative electorate. When Gilmore proposed to phase out the car tax, Beyer initially called it irresponsible. In July, though, he proposed his own cut in the personal-property tax. Beyer also insisted he played a large role in revoking parole in Virginia. Allen, who had campaigned on this issue in 1993, was awakened at 3 a.m. while on a trip to Japan and told of Beyer’s claim. He quickly released a statement disputing Beyer. Naturally, Gilmore accuses Beyer of flip-flops. And, to the Post’s credit, it explored this theme extensively in its page-one profile of Beyer, noting his friends “acknowledge that at times he can appear indecisive and too reliant on polls.”
Indecisive and poll-driven? Sounds like Clinton, who has raised clever political positioning to a high art. Beyer isn’t as adept at it. For one thing, he lacks Clinton’s warm ties with black voters. Former governor Wilder, the state’s most prominent black politician, has been standoffish toward Beyer and suggested Gilmore would be acceptable as governor. If Wilder fails to endorse Beyer, that is bound to suppress the black vote, says Sabato, the expert on Virginia voting patterns. And it would make a Gilmore victory all the more likely — that is, absent further complications for Gilmore on abortion.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
