First Daughter in GOP Spotlight

It’s clear that this week there are two important Reagans deeply immersed in Republican politics here. No, not Ron and Nancy--Ron and Maureen. Maureen Reagan. Newly named Republican National Committee Co-Chair Maureen Reagan.

What’s not clear is what part of the title carries the most weight: the designation RNC co-chair-- or the name Reagan. Also unclear is which of the seemingly hundreds of opinions about her ability and style will prove closest to the truth, as First Daughter Reagan finally gets her first public test as a national political operative.

Maureen Reagan, 46, has been a Republican for more than 26 years--that’s longer than her father, she’ll tell you. But the description the President’s daughter just doesn’t go away.

” . . . Ninety percent of what you read is because of something I did, not just because I was related to the President. . . . If my name was Sadie Glutz and I had all that ink about things that I did, they wouldn’t still be saying ‘Who’s her father?’

“I find it frustrating only because it seems to me that it is a much better compliment to the man who is my father that he has someone who listened at his knee, went out . . . and is making a difference.”

The eldest of Ronald Reagan’s four children, the daughter of actress Jane Wyman, wasn’t at his knee during the eight years he served as governor of California. But, through her political loyalty and activism--not counting her ill-fated ’82 California senatorial campaign--she’s managed to close that gap.

Now it’s family. She says she talks to her father every day she is in Washington. “I had dinner with him last night,” she said one day last week. But just that very closeness raises questions about exactly what gives Reagan her clout.

Reagan said she recently learned that when she first came to the RNC to set up her women’s networking project, one top staffer there had a rule: “99% of what the President knows about the RNC he learns over the dinner table. Never let her name cross your lips without a smile on your face.”

Reagan and her supporters see this new post as a chance for her to finally get the credit for the work she has done for the Republican Party during the last two decades. The announcement that the Republican National Committee was about to elect her set off a minor wave of comment--in some ways she was blamed for both fulfilling and not fulfilling the job requirements. She was criticized for her using the family name--and then questioned for being a political professional, being paid for her expertise. For the last three years, she received $60,000 a year (including expenses) from the RNC as a special consultant on women’s campaign activities--working full time, she said, in a part-time slot.

Why is she being criticized for being a pro? “I don’t know. I would be much more criticized if I was starving to death--or somebody would be for not supporting me.”

It’s not new. “It started the minute I came here (as a consultant). The first question I was asked was how much are you going to make. And I told the woman who asked me, ‘It’s none of your business.’ ”

Which, given her reputation for a quick temper and a quick retort, is probably just what she said. Maureen Reagan is just as quick to criticize newsmen for criticizing her. She quotes an ABC newsman as saying she was wrong in her assessment that Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination would have no effect on the 1984 election. “I wasn’t wrong. But Sam Donaldson never has come back and explained why he said that.” Neither did Bob Novak have to retract his prediction that the “White House was going to stop me from being co-chair of the party. No one has ever asked Bob Novak to explain why he was wrong, and that the White House not only did not stop me, it was their idea that I do it.”

To say “the White House” in Washington conversations is like using the word heaven--it includes God, but doesn’t necessarily mean God. But in this case, it means God and heaven too since partisan protocol has always permitted an incumbent President to decide who should be the chair and co-chair of the national political party--and, in effect, he “nominates” his choices.

“I never discussed it with the President . . . He made that decision. And it was his decision to make . . .,” Maureen Reagan said.

“My first response was, when someone asked me about it, was that he must have remembered that I have been a Republican longer than he has. And nobody thought that was funny . . .” She is a sometimes unsettling mix of aggressiveness on the issues and of almost girlish behavior. A question about the difference in ages between Maureen Reagan and her younger husband, businessman Dennis Revell, 34, brings giggles and a quick phone call to the West Coast. They both laughed.The couple spend several days a month on the West Coast and a similar time here.

Her face, mirroring that of her actress mother, is almost too familiar, yet in its youthful prettiness curiously out of sync with the stout woman she has become.

Her political agenda is much easier to read. Political observers credit her with doing more to elect women to office than just about any person on the scene--certainly an established fact in her own party. She’s extended her feminism internationally--and can go on at length about projects involving women in Third World countries. Her selection as head of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Women’s Conference in Nairobi started with controversy and criticism--but, following, the 1984 meeting, there was no doubt that she knew what she was doing.

She is a feminist--and was a strong supporter of the equal rights amendment, opposing her father on the issue. Yet Maureen Reagan rarely manages to meet what her supporters say are the seemingly unrealistic expectations of activist women outside the GOP. At the same time, she’s been frequently under fire from the more conservative elements inside her party for her stands on women’s issues.

The $70,000-a-year job she took over last Friday (succeeding Betty Heitman as co-chair to Frank Fahrenkopf) was traditionally a woman’s job, but her goals go far beyond that. A major push is to restore the volunteer element that trademarked GOP campaigns in past decades--and has now been lost, she contends, in the great wash of money coming into Republican coffers and going out to paid political advisers and media consultants.

In an approach that may seem simplistic, she wants the Republican party to become the majority party by widening its appeal on ideological issues. “A party has to be able to include a variety of opinions,” she said. “I want everybody to become a Republican.”

The platform hearings at the 1988 New Orleans Republican Convention will not be the well-rehearsed scenario of the ’84 Dallas Convention. “There are going to be as many as eight candidates running for President. Delegates will have been selected in a variety of ways by each and every one of those people, so you would get a much different mix than if there was an incumbent presidency.”

It is only in a middle of a reasoned argument, explaining how she tried to get the ’84 platform to include “squishy” language that would have been acceptable to both sides of the ERA controversy, that she makes a jarring statement: “I know for a fact that at each and every one of the Democratic Conventions, their leadership goes around trying to find someone to make a speech against the ERA, just to prove they are as reactionary as everyone else.”

Won’t the abortion question be that kind of a inflammatory issue at both conventions in 1988? Reagan shakes her head vigorously--but makes no sound as the tape recorder whirls. Later, after saying that women candidates are asked about their stance on pro-choice more than their male counterparts, she said, “I don’t know that a party platform should even be dealing with that issue. I have a problem whether or not it should be in the political structure . . . it’s a moral issue.”

Her new job is going to give her more power in forming such stances--and perhaps turn around the critics’ opinion of her. “The problem is that a lot of people, not just in this place, have no respect for me as a person and have no concept of what I do. And so they use the fact that I am related to him (the President) to make me an intimidating factor rather than a part of the team.”

The “title” and the fact that it’s an established job should make her work life easier. And, “I just keep doing what I do and keep hoping that people will come around.”