The fight at Food Town is just the latest in the country’s most vicious Senate race. Everything Americans hate about politics–name-calling, big money, negative ads–has found its way into the New Jersey campaign. It’s more extreme here because the candidates, little known statewide, are in a rush to win name identification–at the other guy’s expense. And because New Jersey is the only major state without its own media market, Zimmer and Torricelli must spend extraordinary sums on New York and Philadelphia television to get their messages out. The result: Torricelli seems to hold a slight edge. But an unusually large number of voters are undecided–perhaps as much as 40 percent. The election could go either way. Many voters, though, would rather it just go away.
Ironically, Torricelli and Zimmer were both considered thoughtful congressmen before they began competing for the seat being vacated by Sen. Bill Bradley. Zimmer was an unusual Republican: a former head of New Jersey’s chapter of Common Cause, he was pro-choice and known for his environmental record. Torricelli worked to help George Bush win congressional approval for the gulf war. But now each candidate is demonizing the other as a ““liberal’’ or as a Gingrichite ““extremist.''
This banal barrage is mostly taking place over the airwaves. Torricelli ads blast Zimmer for voting against college loans and Medicare coverage of mammograms–even though Zimmer opposed the Medicare proposal sponsored by Gingrich. For his part, Zimmer is campaigning under the tutelage of GOP guru Arthur Finkelstein, the hardball consultant. The Finkelstein-Zimmer duo has produced ads lampooning Torricelli as ““foolishly liberal.’’ Zimmer is also trying to capitalize on several Torricelli imbroglios by using a TV ad designed to look like a legitimate news broadcast. The ad tars Torricelli with sundry allegations, including being in cahoots with shady Korean businessmen. Torricelli denies the charges and flings others back at Zimmer–chiefly that Zimmer is in the pocket of big tobacco and the NRA.
Like most Senate races, New Jersey’s is guided in part by the presidential campaign. Bill Clinton has a commanding lead in the state, and Bob Dole has already withdrawn from the New York and Philadelphia markets, effectively abandoning the Garden State. If Dole had kept up his campaign in New Jersey, he probably would have helped Zimmer by driving up negatives on all Democrats, including Torricelli. Most voters, though, aren’t exactly distraught over the lack of Dole ads. As Zimmer worked the Food Town, shoppers were less than entranced. Howard Bowers, an 82-year-old, is a Republican who finds both Senate candidates ““mediocre.’’ While Zimmer addressed reporters in the store, the old man kept rolling his cart down the aisle.
IT’S TAKEN TWO YEARS, but Helen Chenoweth is finally trying to keep her mouth shut. These days, you won’t hear the 58-year-old Idaho Republican going on about how the state’s sockeye salmon isn’t really an endangered species, since ““you can buy it in a can’’ at the supermarket. Or how America’s true endangered creature is the ““white Anglo-Saxon male.’’ Or how the government may use ““black helicopters’’ to spook private citizens.
That kind of rhetoric made the ex-timber and mining lobbyist one of the most visible freshmen in Newt’s House, but among moderates back home, Chenoweth’s weird public musings (the Oklahoma City bombing, she suggested, was the result of the government ““pushing people too far’’) didn’t help her. And she knows it. She now avoids reporters and tries to stick to issues like crime and taxes, painting her opponent, Yale graduate Dan Williams, as a liberal Boise lawyer.
Lavishly backed by the AFL-CIO, Williams is blitzing TV and radio with ads trying to convince voters Chenoweth is an embarrassment. One video spot features a group of anglers, rods in hand, reeling in cans of salmon. Though nothing has done much to undercut Chenoweth’s support among rural conservatives, she does have a way of going off message. At a recent debate she was asked about Native Americans, and complained they need to choose whose side they’re on. ““Are they a sovereign nation,’’ Chenoweth demanded, ““or are they citizens of the United States of America?’’ Even in live-and-let-live Idaho, patience with that kind of political incorrectness could wear thin.
WHOEVER WINS LOUISIANA’S tight Senate race next week makes history. Democrat Mary Landrieu, the former state treasurer and daughter of legendary New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu, would become Louisiana’s first female senator. Her rival, Republican Louis Elwood (Woody) Jenkins Jr., a rich Baton Rouge TV-station owner and state lawmaker, would be the first Louisiana Republican in the Senate since the mid-19th century. It is a campaign to see whether Democrats can withstand the old Confederacy’s prevailing GOP tide.
There is no mushy middle in this race. A New Democrat, Landrieu is to the left of most Louisiana voters, especially with her support of gay rights (a fact the GOP happily tosses around in attack ads). Jenkins, meanwhile, is far to the right of much of the state, and proud of it. He’s crusaded against government regulations, including criminal background checks for nursing-home attendants. A staunch pro-lifer, he opposes the exception for rape victims, arguing that ““women will lie about being raped so they can get an abortion.''
Landrieu has successfully used Jenkins’s long public record to sketch him as an extremist, and polls show her just ahead; but then, Louisianians like to lie to pollsters–at least the voters who are paying attention do. Observers say voter turnout could dip to an all-time low. Why so much apathy in a state where politics rivals football as the most popular contact sport? Boredom. Neither candidate is particularly telegenic, let alone flamboyant (even the blunt Jenkins is no Kingfish). And in the Bayou, they want their politics peopled with polarizing, outsize personalities–a very non-1996 notion.
STATES DON’T GET much more Republican than Kansas. Bob Dole’s home hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since the 1930s, and yet the GOP Senate candidate is struggling there; the race to fill Dole’s old seat is tied. Even in the land of Dole, moderate voters are turning on unabashedly conservative politicians.
This summer, once freshman GOP Rep. Sam Brownback, a Newt Gingrich acolyte, won the primary, it looked as if he could coast until November. What Brownback didn’t count on was Democrat Jill Docking, a millionaire stockbroker who’s never been elected to any office. But she has deep Kansas political roots: she married into a political dynasty that’s produced two governors, and her own husband is a popular former lieutenant governor.
Brownback accuses Docking of being a softy liberal, constantly reminding audiences that she led Michael Dukakis’s 1988 campaign in Kansas. Describing her, he uses ““Ted Kennedy’’ as an adjective. And though Brownback has outspent Docking two to one, he still hasn’t managed to pull ahead. So far, his spots have been no match for Docking’s own gun-control ads in which she chillingly describes how a robber once put a gun to her daughter’s head at a Wichita restaurant. Brownback has his own gun problem with swing voters: he supports repealing the assault-weapons ban.
Brownback may just now be learning what Dole has known for years: Kansans don’t like their senators to be overly ideological. Already he’s eased off his staunch anti-abortion stand. But Brownback will have to do more than that to keep from losing one of the safest seats in the Senate.
Democrat Robert Torricelli faces the GOP’s Dick Zimmer
Republican Helen Chenoweth faces Democrat Dan Williams
Democrat Mary Landrieu faces Republican Woody Jenkins
Democrat Jill Docking faces the GOP’s Sam Brownback
title: “Hand To Hand Combat” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-21” author: “Peggy Fiene”
True enough, most technology investors applauded Benhamou’s move and presumably can’t wait for Palm’s stock offering, planned for early next year. Moreover, separating out Palm makes strategic sense: 3Com manufactures components for computer networks and that business has little to do with the mass-market consumer world of handheld machines. But industry insiders say that Palm has paid a price for remaining a part of 3Com for so long. Palm is the Sasquatch of handheld computers, but it could lose that dominance to a new rival, Handspring Inc., which plans to sell a similar device, dubbed Visor, at a lower price. No company can block competitors, but 3Com’s refusal to spin off Palm sooner in effect created the rival. Handspring was founded last year by the very creators of the Palm Pilot who quit 3Com after it wouldn’t give them their own corporate identity. “They should have listened to their executives and spun the company out when they wanted,” says Giga Information Analyst Rob Enderle. “The fact that they didn’t did a tremendous amount of damage.”
The defection of the highly regarded Palm founders, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins, was by far the worst of the damage. Palm Computing became a part of 3Com in 1997, as part of 3Com’s purchase of U.S. Robotics. Dubinsky and Hawkins wanted to sell inexpensive units and plunge the profits back into the division. But Benhamou needed those dollars to balance out the stagnant parts of 3Com’s business. The Palm founders repeatedly asked for their corporate freedom and left with dozens of other employees to start Handspring when the answer seemed a definitive “no.” Back at 3Com, which could offer no enticing stock-options bone, it took seven months to fill the top spot at Palm after Dubinsky left–and that per-son lasted only five months, fleeing for another start-up.
3Com veteran Kessler has now stepped in as Palm president. He says he will see the newly independent company through its search for a new CEO. He also disputes that the Palm spinoff was a defensive move, saying simply that the time was right. “It’s clearly an enormous market and [a Palm IPO] can derive a lot of shareholder value.” No doubt–the question, though, is whether Palm can continue to dominate the handheld market now that copycats are on the prowl.
