Struggling for a Party's Soul

By Evan Thomas

G.O. P. factions jockey for 1988, and beyond

Wrapped in Ronald Reagan's genial embrace, the Republicans seem to be one big happy family, basking in the reflected glow of the President's popularity. Without him, however, the G.O.P. may again be riven by factions that not only disagree on issues but harbor a distrust and even a thorough dislike of one another.

Those discordant strains could be heard beneath the harmony of last week's carefully scripted convention. Whether or not Reagan wins a second term in November, the race to succeed him--and the struggle for the party's soul--has already begun. Says the President's campaign director Ed Rollins: "By Inauguration Day the camps will be divided. There is no question that we are going to have a primary season in 1988 that will make the Democratic race in 1984 look tame. The whole direction of the party, post the Reagan era, is up for grabs."

The party has for decades been fundamentally split. The division has been partly ideological, but to an even greater extent cultural, regional and social. One branch has been dominated by a right-wing populist strand, predominantly Western, rural and Main Street, whose antecedents stretch back to the isolationists and McCarthyites. This wing has often vehemently opposed the G.O.P.'s so-called Eastern Establishment, whose members are associated with Wall Street and country clubs; their views tend to be more sympathetic to Big Business, internationalism and political pragmatism. The bitterness peaked at the 1964 G.O.P. convention, when the conservative followers of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater tried to shout down his moderate rival, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, with a torrent of jeers and personal insults.

Reagan was able to smooth this over, but his would-be successors promise no such balancing act. One broad strain of pragmatists and moderates would consolidate Reagan's gains and repair his excesses. They would compromise to reduce the deficit, raising taxes if necessary. They would try harder to reach an arms-control agreement with the Soviets, sacrificing if necessary Reagan's proposed Star Wars weaponry. They would not try to legislate morality.

A rival wing of self-styled populist conservatives would press the Reagan Revolution to fulfillment. They would cut taxes even more, stressing economic growth and dismissing worries about red ink; escalate the attack on Big Government, cutting Government regulation to the bare essentials; use the power of the White House to bring antiabortion and school-prayer bills to the floor of Congress and keep them there until they passed; not stint on building up the military and show no sign of softening to the Soviets.

This profound struggle for the party's soul was on display last week in Dallas. A group of young Turk conservatives led by Congressmen Jack Kemp of New York and Newt Gingrich of Georgia took control of the party platform committee and installed some of the rightists' favorite planks. Even such respected G.O.P. Senate leaders as Robert Dole of Kansas and Howard Baker of Tennessee were shoved to the side and largely ignored. The two camps sniped at each other in interviews during the convention week, challenging each other's views of the party's future.

Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush, born in the mainstream camp but working hard to appeal to the populist Reaganites, was generally able to stay above the fray as he shared the appeal of the man who put him on the ticket. But New Right agitators continue to insist that the Vice President is at heart an unregenerate Eastern Establishment preppie. Bush, trying to sound like a true Texan, retorted that his antagonists were "all hat and no cattle."

Bush was among the half-dozen or so possible contenders for the party's nod in 1988 who raced from one state caucus to another, attempting to build support. DOLE IN '88 and KEMP IN '88 placards popped up on the convention floor. Kemp disclaimed any responsibility for the "spontaneous" demonstration but took along 5,000 copies of his book, The American Idea: Ending Limits to Growth, handing them out to delegates like campaign buttons. All the contenders hunted for TV cameras like addicts in search of a fix.

The maneuvering and backbiting revealed that the party is split not just along one ideological fault line but into a variety of cultural and political factions that sometimes cooperate and often compete. Most party members resist pigeonholing, and many try to keep footholds in more than one camp. Alliances shift and regroup; certain issues make for odd bedfellows. Herewith a guide through the often overlapping G.O.P. tribes:

PROGRESSIVES. As the party as a whole has moved to the right, the old liberal wing has crumbled. But a steadfast band hangs on, almost enjoying the loneliness of the vigil. Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker seemed to relish his outspoken assaults on the party platform the past few weeks as much as the filibusters he conducts on the Senate floor against New Right bills. Bearish and sweaty, he flaps about the Senate chamber invoking the Constitution and the Senate Rule Book to keep Jesse Helms & Co. at bay. Congressman Jim Leach, a rumpled, Princeton-educated lowan, has formed a Republican mainstream committee to revive the moderates. Yet he readily concedes, "The conservatives were the only group to put forward active ideas." Conservative Republicans contend that the liberals have not had a new thought since the 1960s.

PREPPIES. The Eastern Establishment is still an important force in the G.O.P., though its members wince at being identified as such. For example, Delaware Governor Pierre du Pont IV, one of many prospects for the presidential nomination in 1988, prefers to be called a conservative and claims that he has already done in Delaware what Kemp and Gingrich want to do for the nation: promote growth by cutting taxes. But with his resounding name, horn-rimmed glasses and Exeter-Princeton education, du Pont does not exactly come across as just one of the down-home folks.

Vice President Bush, the putative front runner for 1988, has tried to become a born-anew Reaganite, religiously defending the fiscal creed he once called "voodoo economics." Nevada Senator and Reagan Friend Paul Laxalt gives him credit for "making significant progress as the ultimate consummate good soldier." But even though Bush has lived in Texas far longer than in his native Connecticut, he cannot escape his Andover-Yale-Skull-and-Bones heritage, nor can he hide his gee-whiz preppie manner. As Laxalt says, "Many conservatives feel that anyone who has been near an Ivy League school is suspect."

A former CIA director and envoy to Peking, Bush fulfilled the Eastern Establishment tradition of public service in foreign policy. To many Western and populist conservatives, the old foreign policy elite is the same bunch that sold out to Stalin at Yalta, "lost China" and naively adopted Henry Kissinger's vision of detente. Bush was even once a member of the Trilateral Commission, an Establishment foreign policy organization regarded with deep suspicion by the conspiracy theorists of the far right. Another leading exemplar of the "preppie" group is Rhode Island Senator John Chafee, a former Secretary of the Navy.

PRAGMATISTS. When they won control of the Senate in 1980, after nearly three decades in opposition, the Republicans discovered some of the burdens of governing. No longer could they snipe from the sidelines; they had to learn to make compromises and lubricate the legislative wheels. The experience has been sobering. Majority Leader Baker, the son-in-law and political heir of Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, warned at the outset that supply-side economics would be a "riverboat gamble"; now he worries about how to cut the resulting federal deficits ($195 billion last year). State Governors, of course, have long since struggled to balance budgets. The pragmatist wing of the party includes Illinois Governor James Thompson and Vermont's Richard Snelling.

Widely regarded as a conservative hatchet man when he ran for Vice President on Gerald Ford's ticket in 1976, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas has become less acid and more open to compromise; he also has the ability, unique in Washington, to stand up to lobbyists seeking tax loopholes. Yet Baker and Dole seem to lack passion and vision. Dole joshes that his wife Elizabeth, who is Reagan's Secretary of Transportation, would make an equally strong candidate. Dole buttons featuring pictures of both were seen on the convention floor. Their room number in Loews Anatole Hotel in Dallas was 1988.

Baker has become the most effective majority leader since Lyndon Johnson. With a polemical convention speech last week, he set out to prove that he had the requisite "fire in the belly" to run for national office and stir crowds. He is quitting the Senate this year to get away from the Washington grind and, as he put it, "reestablish a more distant and civilian perspective." Dole hopes to succeed Baker as majority leader. Their candidacies in 1988 could test whether an effective legislator can also be a popular vote getter.

POP-CONS. In contrast to the weary pragmatists of the Senate, the young Turks of the House, such as Gingrich, Kemp and Platform Committee Chairman Trent Lott of Mississippi, have the clear-eyed look of true believers. No wilted shirt collars in this group. With hair carefully styled and blow-dried, they look like local-news anchormen. Television is, in fact, their medium. Its cameras are permitted in the House (unlike the stodgier Senate), and the young Turks unabashedly perform for the C-SPAN telecasts of floor debates. A Democratic majority still runs the House, so the Republicans are freer to posture.

More than any other wing of the party, the young Turks have come up with new ideas, including the fervently advocated Kemp-proposed tax cut that Reagan pushed through in 1981. They are often called "populist conservatives" (pop-cons, for short) and argue that rich and poor alike would benefit from their economic programs. Not all the ideas are universally admired, to be sure. A modified "flat tax" on personal income, endorsed by the platform as "a most promising approach," would eliminate loopholes that allow many of the rich to evade taxes, and it would set a single rate of approximately 15% for all taxpayers. But it would undercut the premise of a progressive tax system, namely that citizens should pay taxes according to their ability to afford them.

Most economists recoil at Kemp's proposal that the U.S. tie its currency to a gold standard; that could leave the nation's money vulnerable to actions by the world's two largest gold producers, the a Soviet Union and South Africa. A return to the gold standard, warn some monetarists, could limit the Government's ability to control the money supply and trigger a deflation as crippling as that suffered in the Great Depression.

Unfazed by such criticism, the young Turks are willing to take chances. Gingrich, who calls himself a "visionary conservative," wants a re-elected Reagan to launch a "dynamic, audacious first 100 days reminiscent of Roosevelt's first term." Their biggest gamble would be to ignore the pleas of the pragmatists, who insist that a tax hike is necessary to reduce the deficit. Supply-Side Apostles Kemp and Gingrich not only oppose a tax increase but would cut taxes even more. The reward, they insist, would be unprecedented economic growth. The deficit would diminish as increased revenues poured in, without the sacrifice of higher tax rates. Lewis Lehrman, a New York drug-store magnate who lost the 1982 New York gubernatorial race to Mario Cuomo, is a rising Republican figure who has become an intellectual mentor of Kemp's, and who harbors his own national political ambitions. He has become a leading advocate of "unapologetic free-enterprise policies." Says he: "We believe in the unlimited possibilities of the American dream."

Pop-cons are opponents of big--Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor. This is populism with a twist: the original agrarian populists of the late 19th century wanted Government to protect them from the railroads and the bankers of Wall Street. To the pop-cons, Big Government is the principal enemy.

They believe that they are fishing in a huge and untapped reservoir of potential Republicans, and that the G.O.P. can become the majority party by expanding its natural base to include ethnic and blue-collar Democrats who worry about high taxes and crime. Kemp, one of the few prominent Republicans to attend the National Urban League convention in July, said last week: "We cannot move our party ahead by leaving anyone on the sidelines. That requires reaching out to labor, reaching out to minorities, particularly blacks." Not coincidentally, the leading young Turks, New York's Kemp and Georgia's Gingrich, come from historically Democratic districts.

Kemp assiduously avoids labels. Is he conservative, moderate, right of center? "All of the above," he answers. "I think the worst thing in politics is to be taken for granted, to be predictable, to allow people to put you in a box." To keep the pundits guessing, he calls himself a "bleeding-heart conservative" and a "small l, small d liberal democrat." With a John F. Kennedy haircut and a surfeit of vigor, Kemp is the only member of the House who has built a truly national following. No one, however, has been elected directly from the House to the presidency since James Garfield in 1880.

PREACHERS. The young Turks have formed a wary alliance with the crusaders and polemicists of the New Right. These include Richard Viguerie, the guru of direct-mail fund raising and publisher of Conservative Digest, Paul Weyrich of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Their avatar is Senator Helms of North Carolina. But one of the New Right leaders concedes, "We could go with Jack Kemp. We like him. But we still have to see whether he has the guts."

The preachers of the New Right strongly emphasize social issues and a rock-ribbed antiCommunism. They are willing to challenge Reagan whenever he shows signs of drifting toward pragmatism on these issues; Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus has even likened Reagan to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who tried to appease Hitler in 1938, for Reagan's willingness to appease pragmatists on the deficit. The New Right's special targets are the preppies and pragmatists; George Bush has been the subject of some of the bitterest stories in Conservative Digest.

What the New Right fears is that the Eastern Establishment will steal back the party's soul. Viguerie and his allies persistently threaten to form a new, pure conservative party. (So far it is nameless. Viguerie whimsically suggests calling it the No Place to Go Party, since White House operatives are always saying the New Right has nowhere to go but the G.O.P.)

The steadiest and most faithful contributors to the New Right causes are religious fundamentalists. In 1980 many observers thought that the Moral Majority and other born-again groups with political ambitions Shad amassed enough power to enact their moral agenda. But their legislating crusade was thwarted by filibusters by Weicker and Oregon Senator Bob Packwood, the Administration's own emphasis on fiscal issues, and bickering among the various antiabortion advocates. While not a dominant force within the party, the fundamentalists are a strong pressure on its far-right flank.

The real battle for control of the Republican Party in 1988 will probably involve pragmatists, such as Baker and Dole, fighting against the pop-cons, possibly represented by Kemp, with Bush struggling to be viewed as a loyal Reaganaut but generally perceived as part of the pragmatist claque. Both wings will have to pitch themselves to a new generation of voters: the maturing baby boomers, who are not yet clearly identified as either Republican or Democrat.

Despite the ideological differences of Democrats and Republicans, the "new ideas" being bandied about in the two parties are strikingly similar. Younger leaders on both sides of the aisle stress economic growth, the need to cut back the federal bureaucracy, and tax reform to eliminate loopholes. Their means differ: Republicans, for instance, favor a flat tax, while Democrats would maintain some form of graduated rates. Even so, the new ideas germinating reflect the broad outlines of future national debates, which will be played out within the parties as well as between them. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Joseph N. Boyce/ Dallas

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Joseph N. Boyce/Dallas