Unfriendly Skies

By GARRY WILLS HOUSTON

In this topsy-turvy political year, the Democrats were as smug as Republicans at their New York convention, and the Republicans seem fated to be as fratricidal as Democrats this month in Houston. There is an eerie symmetry at work. Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her book justifying the neoconservatives' abandonment of the Democratic Party, described the 1972 Democratic Convention as out of touch with ordinary Americans. The New Presidential Elite argued that Democrats under McGovern were more interested in ideological purity than in winning, more concerned with being "correct" than with being inclusive. It was a party of rectitude and litmus tests. By contrast, the Republicans spread a big tent: "Less intense, less holistic ideologically, and deeply attached to party, the cultural conservative focused more on building party unity and winning elections than on articulating correct issue positions -- not because he was uninterested in policy, but because he was also strongly attached to the party by fun, friends, and status satisfactions, and party loyalty as well as policy." The Republicans, she concluded, believe in the political market and in peddling a winning product there.

Few expect the Republicans to be guided, at this year's convention, by "fun, friends, and status satisfactions," though they have the prevalent product in a sitting President. All the tests of political correctness -- on abortion, on homosexuality, on not raising taxes, on control of the arts -- are matters of Republican concern this time. This is a party of purges, not inclusion: it cries for the heads of Richard Darman, Nicholas Brady, William Reilly, even of Dan Quayle, even of George Bush. The party is in so little inclusive a mood that it only grudgingly continues to include its own President.

The very issues that were emphasized in order to divide the Democrats have boomeranged, and are splitting the Republicans. Dinesh D'Souza, in his book on Jerry Falwell, Falwell: Before the Millennium, describes how the religious right planned to use abortion as a wedge issue. At sessions to form the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich said the movement should "focus attention on the abortion issue, because it would split the Democratic Party, while hardly affecting the Republican vote." Paradoxically, the very decision they hated -- Roe v. Wade -- gave these political operatives the cover they needed: so long as that ruling was in effect, Republicans could give lip service to a "right to life" without facing immediate consequences. But with Roe endangered, the prospect of legislatures' having to debate the whole matter over again is daunting. The preference for choice, even among those opposed to abortion, is clear in the polls. Young Republicans do not have to be libertarians to want government kept out of the decisions women make about their pregnancies.

Abortion now plagues the Republicans far more than it ever did the Democrats. So do most of the social issues that Republicans stressed in the past and are still trying to use, in a more guarded way, when Dan Quayle speaks of family values. Homosexuality was a Republican issue when the party made fun of "San Francisco Democrats." But now, when almost everyone has known someone with AIDS, when people fear that they or their children may get it, the Republican position, dictated by the party's religious constituents, seems not only cruel but dangerous. The party opposes free distribution of condoms and clean drug needles. It still blocks sex education, family planning at home and abroad, and full-scale research expenditure on AIDS. Bob Hattoy, the AIDS-infected man who spoke at the Democratic Convention, gave a whole new meaning to "family values" when he reminded the President that "your family has AIDS" -- part of that large national family New York Governor Mario Cuomo described at the convention.

"Family values" takes on new meaning, as well, at a time when people are worried that they will not be able to educate their children, give medical aid to their parents or support themselves in retirement. The economy, which has devastated black families, threatens white ones too. The "no new taxes" cry was potent when enough of the electorate felt satisfied with what it had and wanted to give no more to the government. But when basic services are in question, people remember that the government is still good for something. That is a point the Republicans have been denying for over a decade. Ronald Reagan said the government could do nothing but fight communists -- a mission it lacks today -- and otherwise it should just be taken "off our backs."

Nothing could better demonstrate how former sources of strength have become signs of weakness than the scheduling of a convention speech by Ronald Reagan. That would until recently have been considered a surefire way of rallying the troops with memories of glory. But every reaffirmation of Reaganism traps Bush more helplessly in the real Reagan legacy -- the deficit that Reaganites are prevented from addressing. They cannot even admit it is a problem without being called defectors from the great man's cause. Reagan will come to forgive George Bush for raising taxes -- and to make sure he never does it again. Which means that Bush will be as weak in a second term as in the first. Realists, of course, see this ghost from the past as an incubus.

Conventions for the incumbent are supposed to be ceremonial reaffirmations of the regnant leader. This one is flirting with thoughts of regicide. The Republicans are acting less like Democrats than like the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, busily excommunicating each other, thundering mutual anathemas.