5 GOP Contenders Open ’88 Race by Wooing the Right

The opening gavel at the Republican National Convention will not bang down for nearly 30 months, but, for all practical purposes, the 1988 GOP presidential race got under way last week as Vice President George Bush and four other contenders for the nomination began competing for the hearts and minds of conservative activists.

“We are here to see who will draw the sword from the stone and be declared first, leader of the conservative movement, and then, after a struggle, leader of the free world,” New Right leader Howard Phillips told the 13th annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

His Arthurian allusion might have sounded a trifle grandiloquent to outsiders, but it seemed to match the intensity of the more than 800 conservative activists from all around the country who attended--and the intensity of the prospective Republican presidential candidates who came to bid for their support.

If the struggle is starting earlier than ever, it is not hard to see why. The dominant role of conservatives in the GOP has been generally acknowledged for years. But the approaching conclusion of the active political career of President Reagan, who addressed the convention’s opening night banquet Thursday, has introduced a new reality into calculations about conservatives for 1988.

Looking back on a chain of right-wing heroes beginning with Robert A. Taft and continuing with Barry Goldwater and then Reagan, Lee Atwater, a top strategist for Vice President Bush, pointed out: “For the first time in about 40 years the Republicans are facing a contest for the nomination without the conservatives having a single clear leader.”

But as the conference demonstrated, there is certainly no dearth of applications for that position. Just about every prominent Republican who is expected to seek the 1988 nomination--with the exception of former Tennessee Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr.--eagerly accepted an invitation to appear at the conference, sponsored by 55 conservative organizations.

None of the potential contenders who appeared--Bush, New York Rep. Jack Kemp, television evangelist Pat Robertson, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont scored a clear-cut triumph. But their respective performances, and the way they were received, pointed up the strengths and weaknesses of each of the prospects with the GOP’s ruling conservative constituency.

Early Front-Runner

For Bush, whom the polls show to be the early front-runner in the 1988 competition, the conference represented an important opportunity to continue his longstanding effort to make amends to conservatives for the harsh rhetoric he used in competing against Reagan for the 1980 GOP nomination. The vice president seemed to put his heart and soul into a 30-minute speech paying tribute to Reagan and to the conservative movement and reminding the audience that he himself had been a Goldwater delegate to the 1964 convention.

All this earned Bush polite applause--but not much more. And a supporter of one of Bush’s rivals contended that many in the audience who joined in the clapping were wearing the “Not Bush” buttons that were conspicuous at the conference.

A presidential preference poll of members of conservative organizations released at the conference showed Bush in first place with 36%, to 17% for Kemp, the runner-up. But a straw poll of conference attendees showed Kemp ahead by a huge margin, reflecting the more intensive conservatism of conference participants as compared with stay-at-homes.

As many expected, Kemp won an enthusiastic ovation with his own speech to the conference, in which he lambasted the State Department and “the Washington Establishment,” and declared: “We need not just to test, but to deploy the Strategic Defense Initiative.” And when he finished, his backers waved signs proclaiming “Kemp ’88.”

Remains to Be Proved

But when the cheering stopped, Kemp was left to face the reality that the claim put forward by some of his supporters that he is the logical inheritor of Reagan’s conservative support remains to be proved. And many GOP professionals believe that Kemp must get something close to the almost universal backing Reagan had from the right if he is to beat out Bush for the nomination.

Said one Republican analyst of Kemp’s prospects: “He has to blow everybody else out of the water with that group or he has real problems.”

Even as he battles to catch up with Bush, Kemp has to worry about potential new competition for the conservative cadres he would like to call his own in the person of Robertson. The television evangelist, who says he is awaiting heavenly guidance before deciding whether to enter the race, made points at the conference with a lengthy and impassioned address dealing with conservative concerns abroad and at home. He predicted that Afghanistan will turn out to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam and warned that for the United States “the greatest danger” is a decline in moral values.

Although Robertson showed himself to be a match for almost any other conservative rhetorician, some of his listeners questioned whether the ranks of political leaders needed to be swelled by a cleric. While he approved of Robertson’s views, Karl DeLoof of Grand Rapids, Mich., a political science sophomore at Hope College, said: “Americans have a strong tradition that religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed.”

A Political Veteran

If some think Robertson might suffer because of his inexperience in politics, no one believes that would be a difficulty for political veteran Bob Dole, who has been a senator since 1968, a member of the House for eight years before that, Gerald R. Ford’s vice presidential running mate in 1976 and a candidate for the presidency in 1980.

Dole presented himself to the conservatives not as an ideologue, but rather as a can-do legislator. “I know everybody is here to demonstrate how conservative they are,” he said. “I’m here to deliver votes.”

“Dole has been playing a very shrewd game,” by helping to raise funds and making other friendly gestures to conservatives, said Howard Phillips, president of the Conservative Caucus, a national grass-roots lobbying organization.

But Dole’s long legislative record could turn out to be more of a problem than an asset for him, particularly among conservatives who recall his role in engineering the 1982 tax increase. For his part, Dole tries to shrug off such criticism based on this and other alleged sins he committed as a senator. “I may not pass their litmus test every day,” he said of the conservatives. “But neither does Reagan.”

sh Du Pont Undaunted

Still another ’88 prospect, former Gov. Du Pont, whose term expired in 1984, claimed to be undaunted by the rigorous standards imposed by the conservatives. “I can pass all the litmus tests,” he said. “Or at least 90% of them.” In his address, Du Pont cited his faith in the economic marketplace rather than government intervention as evidence of his conservative credentials.

Many conservatives appear to welcome Du Pont as an attractive new face on the national political landscape. But many question whether in view of his family name and background he could fit the populist image now in favor among so-called neo-conservatives.

“There are a number of candidates who have a legitimate claim on conservative support,” David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union and co-chairman of the conference, said Saturday. “But no candidate can claim he has a lock on conservative support.”

Given that appraisal, and the value of conservative backing, the only safe prediction about conservative support for the Republican presidential nomination is that the struggle to win it seems certain to get hotter as 1988 gets closer.