A New Generation Gap Widens Within the GOP

It’s been a long time since a Republican presidential nomination pivoted on a clear generational conflict, but that seems to be developing between Vice President George Bush and Senate GOP leader Bob Dole of Kansas. And much significance lies in the fact that the divisions do not reflect such generational issues as Social Security or the 21st-Century burden of our record deficits. Instead, they go to the heart of the incipient great debate on current U.S. economics and politics: the growing national tension between optimism and skepticism, between romanticism and Realpolitik.

By these eternal generational yardsticks, today’s split makes sense. By strict ideology, though, it marks a reversal of what prevailed two decades ago, when the conservative tide first began to roll over the naive idealism and youth-oriented culture of the 1960s. There’s no small irony in how many “experts” believe that the politics of youth are the politics of the future. If anything, the opposite is true.

Today’s revealing context is the sharp, unprecedented division in age between voters supporting the two leading Republican presidential contenders--Bush and Dole. The coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 is dividing along what could be a critical fault line. Bush has overwhelming support among young people, brought under the Republican banner by the optimistic policies and style of the Reagan Administration. Backing for Dole, by contrast, rises steadily with age and experience. No previous parallel comes to mind, not even 1952’s intraparty division between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft. Youth preferred Eisenhower, the war hero, over the prim and fusty Taft, but not by the sort of lopsided majorities Bush now enjoys.

Striking numbers can be found in opinion surveys and none paints a more vivid picture than a March ABC News poll. Young 18-29-year-old Republicans split 46% for Bush, 16% for Dole and 9% for Rep. Jack Kemp of New York. For those between the ages of 31 and 44, Bush’s lead shrinks to just six points. Above age 45, it’s a Dole electorate. Republicans aged 45-60 give the Kansas senator a slim three-point edge, but those 60 or above split decisively--Dole 43%, Bush 27% and Kemp 5%. Similar patterns can be found in the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll and Boston Globe New Hampshire Poll. Bush is strongest among the young. Dole does best with older voters. And Kemp is a weak third.

On the surface, there’s no great logic in these divisions. All three of the GOP contenders are well-known. Bush’s name recognition level is over 90% and Dole’s is just a bit behind. As for demeanor, the vice president does have a certain Yalie gosh-golly youthfulness, but, like Dole, he’s in his early 60s. If anything, Dole’s acerbic wit and flippant style would seem more likely to appeal to younger voters. What’s extraordinary is Bush’s 5-1 lead over Kemp among young Americans--even though Kemp, a still boyish-looking 51-year-old former football player, has tailored much of his campaign and “opportunity” rhetoric to voters under 30.

With Bush so unlikely a candidate to command stong youth support in his own right, the explanation must lie elsewhere--probably that Bush, as Reagan’s vice president, can tap the large following the Reagan Administration managed to build among young people. Surveys have shown Americans who came of age in the 1980s are strongly pro-Reagan and, by derivation, more conservative and more Republican than their elders.

As of 1987, though, it’s a tricky set of allegiances for conservatism, the GOP and Bush himself. For the vice president, support from youth underscores the importance of his Reagan connection--which in turn underscores his vulnerability should Reaganism implode before the 1988 election or some other Republican contender displace Bush’s claim to be the President’s heir. Kemp hasn’t managed that, but another potential entrant, former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, is Reagan’s best friend. He might finesse it. And it’s possible that Dole’s humor could begin to woo away younger Republicans.

For the conservative movement and the Republican Party, however, the challenge is on a grander scale. To many strategists, baby-boom loyalty is the key to a party and ideological majority. Before the Iran- contra affair, there was even talk about a hegemony reaching into the next century. That seems a little unrealistic today. But the underlying hope remains.

History, however, suggests caution. Baby-boom-focused GOP strategists would do well to remember that if post-adolescent loyalties were the key to the electoral future, the success of George McGovern-era liberalism would have been assured. Colleges pulsed to the beat of demonstrations against the Vietnam War and conservative politicians were reviled. But the older voters turning to the right foreshadowed the emerging shift of the 1970s and 1980s--not the kids.

Today’s youthful enthusiasm for Reagan, Bush and the GOP may be no more barometric or enduring. Occasionally, younger voters may flow with a strong new national tide, as in the 1930s. More often, though--because they lack the ingrained attitudes and historical experience of their elders--they’re especially open to a shallow politics of easy answers. Thus, in the 1920s, young people credited the Republicans for Coolidge prosperity, or, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, young people flocked to a fashionable liberalism that demonstrated against injustice and against the war in Vietnam, where most of them didn’t want to fight. Support for the Reagan conservatism of the 1980s may not be much deeper. First and foremost, it’s a politics of easy, feel-good victories--from Grenada to Tripoli--and an economics of free lunches. In Reaganology, budget deficits don’t get in the way of tax cuts, trade deficits do not call for cutting back on imported automobiles and espresso machines. “Opportunity” has been the watchword, not “sacrifice.” Older voters, with memories reaching back to 5-cent Cokes and Korean War amphibious landings, look at America’s accumulating burdens and wonder: Can it be so easy? But young people with no memory of any pre-Reagan President except Jimmy Carter find it not only believable but appealing.

Arguably, this is part of the intra-GOP cleavage line that’s emerging between supporters of Bush and Dole. Partly because he’s voiced so few opinions of his own over the last seven years, Bush is the representative of Reagan, his policies, optimism and unquenchable belief that everything will work out. Dole, by contrast, is more of a pessimist. Back in 1982 and 1984, he made his name as Senate Finance Committee chairman by helping force the Reagan White House to accept a tax increase, and so kept the budget deficit from running even more amok than it did. Dole’s rhetoric expresses recurring concern about problems that the Reagan-Bush Administration created or tolerated: the budget deficit, the trade deficit, the crises on farms and in the energy industry. Dole has scoffed at the idea of painless economic solutions. He has even proposed budget deficit reduction compromises that would have curbed Social Security increases. And, as a man who spent three years in a government hospital recuperating from wounds received in World War II, he’s been an intermittent critic of Reagan’s foreign-policy approaches--like the Iran- contra affair--that seem to have been lifted from Sylvester Stallone or Errol Flynn movies.

There seems no precedent for the Republican electorate’s current division along age lines between Bush and Dole. Nor is there any previous era in which a Republican Administration (at least since the Roaring ‘20s) has been so wedded to optimism and so willing to ignore problems that gainsay that optimism. It’s not surprising that the party’s new younger voters opt for a politics of buoyancy and idealism while a large number of older and more traditional Republicans prefer to line up behind a candidate who shares their skepticism about easy answers to hard problems. The pitfall is when majority coalitions break along these lines, it’s hard to put the whole thing back together again. Any Republicans who’ve forgotten need only look back to the late 1960s generational disarray of the Democrats.