Right-to-work has become critical issue in one of the two gubernatorial races this year. In Virginia, Republican candidate Marshall Coleman is challenging Democrat Douglas Wilder on the issue. Coleman supported Democratic Gov. Gerald Baliles’s decision to call out the troops in a coal-field disturbance; Wilder skirted the issue. . . . Coleman—who led 43 to 39 per cent in most recent Mason-Dixon poll—will get assist from Ronald Reagan next month. Reagan is scheduled to campaign both for Coleman in Virginia and for Rep. Jim Courter in New Jersey. Courter trails Democratic Rep. Jim Florio in battle to replace retiring Republican Gov. Tom Kean. Abortion and HUD are major issues in New Jersey, with Courter backing away from his right-to-life stance since the Webster decision. Florio leads Courter in the polls. . . . Republican Bob Lanier ran first in special election for Jim Wright’s seat in Texas, with 39.4 per cent of the vote to 31.8 per cent for Democrat Pete Geren. But there’ll be a runoff Sept. 12, and the odds are with Geren in Wright’s heavily Democratic district. . . . Looking to next year, Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin could be in bad trouble with his black Alabama constituents for voting against Bush appointee William Lucas, a black attorney, in recent Judiciary Committee hearings. Heflin’s vote prevented Lucas’s name from going to Senate floor. Back home in Alabama he is being blasted by powerful local black civil-rights leaders, Montgomery City Council member Joe L. Reed and State Rep. Alvin Holmes. Said Holmes of Heflin: “He doesn’t think Bill Lucas is qualified to be assistant attorney general, and I don’t think he’s qualified to be U.S. senator.” And in answer to charge that Lucas was too inexperienced to hold office, he added: “Martin Luther King didn’t have a black belt in civil rights when he desegregated the Montgomery bus system a generation ago.” Heflin, incidentally, was key to the switch of Southern senators away from Robert Bork in his confirmation hearings. . . . Polls show that if former Washington, D.C., police chief Maurice Turner, another Democrat-turned-Republican, runs against Mayor Marion Barry next year, he could beat him. . . . In 1990 senatorial races, Fritz Mondale has bowed out in Minnesota, and former Gov. Jim Hunt in North Carolina, clearing the way for easier campaigns by Republican Sens. Rudy Boschwitz and Jesse Helms.
It’s not been all beer and skittles for Hard Left recently. First there was IPS’s Saul Landau emitting a blast at his old pal Fidel Castro. . . . Now Marc Cooper is questioning the future of the Sandinistas in pages of super-liberal Village Voice. Nicaragua’s economic collapse, he says, “has brought into question not only the political future of Nicaragua, but also the direction, values, and foundations of the revolution.” … A group of foreign economists, surveying the situation in Nicaragua at the request of the government, found that consumption of goods and services has fallen 70 per cent in the ten years of Sandinista rule. . . . Cuban sources in Miami say the reason Fidel passed up Danny Ortega’s tenth-anniversary party was that he feared a military coup in his absence. . . . Outgoing U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab—a man who does not mince words—believes Castro himself was deeply involved in drug trade for which Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez and three aides were recently executed. Castro, he told a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “is another piece of narco trash floating in the Caribbean. He has turned to the United States for a life preserver. I feel we should throw him an anchor.” . . . On another Left front, NOW president Molly Yard has come out in favor of Red China’s population-control methods, which include forced abortions. “I consider the Chinese government’s policy among the most intelligent in the world.”
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