Strife of the party

As Republican presidential candidates split on ideology, GOP moderates hope the party's right wing will behave

by Michael Crowley

TALKING POLITICS

With 10 months left until the New Hampshire primary, the leading Republican candidates for president are finally starting to wade into the murky swamp of ideology -- unsure whether they'll find their way out alive.

After an early GOP campaign filled with little more than symbolism and sloganeering, some serious issues have begun to emerge. War in Yugoslavia and new revelations of Chinese espionage have forced candidates to flesh out their foreign policy. And recently, the party's two most promising candidates finally explained their positions on the issue that has given the Republicans so much political grief: abortion.

The party's anointed savior, Texas governor George W. Bush, told reporters last month that he supports the religious conservatives' push for a constitutional ban on abortion. But, Bush said -- performing a treacherous political tap dance -- the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion "will not be overturned until hearts are changed. Until then, we should focus on ways to reduce abortion."

Last week, former Red Cross president Elizabeth Dole -- Bush's understudy in the role of marketable moderate -- followed his lead. In a position paper disguised as a folksy letter to an Arizona supporter, Dole said she backs a pro-life amendment, but regretfully concedes it won't happen. "We must recognize that good and honorable people disagree on the subject of abortion," she wrote in what sounded like a plea for mercy from the far right. "We should agree to respectfully disagree."

Now, there's a novel idea. The right wing of the GOP is famous for savaging party members who stray from conservative orthodoxy -- even, some Republicans think, at the cost of losing presidential elections. Many Republican moderates think that their party's religious conservatives, by forcing moderate nominees to kowtow, play right into the Democrats' hands.

In Dole and Bush, though, Republicans believe they've found star candidates with a legitimate chance of beating a wooden Al Gore in 2000. At the same time, the GOP's right wing has never looked more politically toxic. The religious right's moralizing during the Clinton impeachment scandal seemed only to alienate the public, and it probably cost the GOP several congressional seats during the 1998 elections.

For the 2000 campaign, then, the moderates have set out to shut the right wing up. They still blame conservative activists for damaging the party's last two nominees -- George Bush (the father) in 1992 and Bob Dole (the husband) in 1996. But the Christian soldiers will be marching onward in 2000 -- led by some half-dozen Republicans who have joined the race with fire-and-brimstone social platforms. As Bush and Dole chart moderate courses on foreign policy, trade, abortion, gay rights, and more, they must hope the disagreements will be as respectful as possible.

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The Republicans' dilemma isn't a new one -- Democrats went through the same thing in the 1980s. After their party lost five of six presidential elections, moderates founded the Democratic Leadership Council to move the Democrats toward the center and away from the far-left constituencies that seemed to be scaring voters away.

Now it's the Republicans who want to keep their extreme wing at bay, and leading the charge is the Republican Leadership Council (RLC). The RLC's core message is that economics, not morality, is the key to political success. RLC executive director Mark Miller says the embarrassment of the 1998 elections should be a lesson: "Any effort by the Republican party to dictate a specific moral agenda will turn voters off and lose elections."

Rockefeller Republicans like Miller have reasons to be optimistic. Clinton's survival of Lewinskygate has deflated some key religious-right leaders -- including Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Free Congress Foundation, who recently distributed a letter to his supporters suggesting that they simply give up on the political process.

But other conservatives, undaunted by Clinton's cockroach-like ability to survive, are determined to do something about the spiritual rot they see in fin de siècle America. "The reports of the religious right's demise are embellished," says one moderate Republican official. Miller says "hard right" conservatives make up between 12 and 20 percent of the party's voters. Just last month Pat Robertson announced the Christian Coalition's plans to raise $21 million and turn out 15 million voters for the 2000 election. And Christian Coalition executive director Randy Tate has said that "social conservatives are the largest and most important swing vote in America today."

At the moment, there's a scramble under way to win over the most devout of these social conservatives. The candidate of the far right was supposed to be Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, who was among Bill Clinton's most strident critics during the Lewinsky scandal. But Ashcroft backed out of a run earlier this year, leaving room for a throng of new suitors who include billionaire mogul Steve Forbes, moral crusader Gary Bauer, New Hampshire senator Bob Smith, former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes, and Pat Buchanan. The moderate camp, meanwhile, is made up of the likes of Bush, Dole, former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, Ohio representative John Kasich, and former vice president Dan Quayle. Each camp will undergo its own shakeout, says Miller: "There's a primary for the mainstream Republicans and a primary for the hard right."

Don't expect one of the right-wingers to take the GOP nomination. All but Buchanan lack charisma, and all but Forbes lack big money. But if conservative support were to coalesce around one of these Republicans, even a candidate bound to lose could have a real impact. A vigorous conservative like Buchanan attacking a moderate front-runner like Bush with a well-crafted message can shape the campaign debate.

"That kind of ideological pressure helps set the agenda for the general election campaign," says Clark Hubbard, an assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. "A candidate like Gary Bauer, for example, doesn't really think he's going to win the nomination. What he's trying to do is use the nominating process as a kind of pulpit for forcing certain issues onto the campaign agenda."

"While candidates aren't going to turn around and broadly embrace the extremes of their party," Hubbard adds, "what they are going to do is be forced to discuss the issues that are important to the extremes for the rest of the election."

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The bombing of Yugoslavia is providing an early example of how that might happen. The party's moderates -- Bush, Dole, Alexander, Quayle -- all support some kind of US intervention in Kosovo. They are all internationalists who believe that the United States needs to be economically and politically engaged with the rest of the world.

The most extreme example is Arizona senator John McCain, who has called for ground troops in Kosovo (a courageous position that also happens to be good for his profile: in one 24-hour stretch last week, McCain appeared on Larry King Live, Fox News, MSNBC, Charlie Rose, Nightline, and Imus in the Morning.

But emerging at the other extreme are the isolationists of the far right, whose champions have only been energized by NATO air strikes. Bob Smith says he wants to "get the US out of the UN." And Pat Buchanan says that Clinton is waging "an illegal, presidential war" and that America has "no vital interest" at stake in Kosovo. Buchanan, who tormented George Bush by mounting a protest candidacy against him in 1992, now says that Bush's son is following in the former president's flawed footsteps. On C-SPAN last week, Buchanan described the new foreign-policy debate as "America First versus a New World Order which [George W. Bush's] father enunciated."

The isolationists would withdraw from more than just peacekeeping missions, the UN, and military alliances such as NATO. Buchanan is already talking again about "economic patriotism" and the loss of manufacturing jobs. And he, Bauer, and Smith are all vehement opponents of trade pacts such as NAFTA and GATT -- which are wholeheartedly supported by free-traders such as Bush, Quayle, and Alexander.

The nationalists also challenge America's relationship with China in light of that country's nuclear espionage and curious campaign-finance stratagems. Their rationales vary: Bauer opposes economic ties to China on human-rights grounds. Buchanan simply seems to have found a new Yellow Peril.

Of course, a moderate like Bush won't mind talking about Johnny Chung and Clinton fundraising scandals. But he'd just as soon ignore the protectionists and isolationists in his party. If only he could.

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No one's sure how much grief the Pat Buchanans will cause for the front-runners. But the good news for the moderates is that even some leaders of the conservative right seem prepared to call off their pit bulls.

With Bush in particular looking so viable against the Democrats, for example, some crucial conservatives are covering his flank on the abortion issue. Christian Coalition chairman Pat Robertson has said that he has no objection to Bush's position, arguing that conservatives "might as well take the incremental approach." Even the executive director of the National Right to Life Committee shrugged his shoulders at Bush's announcement.

Of course, this middle ground on abortion could end up pleasing no one. On the left, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) has already begun to air television ads taking Bush and Dole to task for their pro-life views. On the right, Bauer tells the Washington Post that "26 years of so-called incrementalism have given us 30 million unborn children who will never experience the American dream."

Yet for all the right wing's tart rhetoric, some party officials think that religious conservatives will ultimately make sacrifices in the name of victory. "There's nothing like being out of power for eight years to inject a healthy dose of pragmatism into any person's ideology," says New Hampshire GOP chairman Steve Duprey. "I sense that some of the Christian activists who have maybe demanded in the past that a candidate be right on every issue will say they'd rather have a candidate who's right on 70 percent of the issues, rather than have Vice President Gore."

Or, as New Jersey's centrist Republican governor, Christie Whitman, put it in a February speech to the Republican Leadership Council: "We have to get away from the perception that all we care about is whether or not the Teletubbies are gay."

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.