‘Natural Suspicion’ : Tensions Rise in Coalition of GOP Factions

The Republican Party needs a new magician.

As it prepares for life without Ronald Reagan, the GOP faces an enormous task: How to keep together the coalition of conservatives and moderates that helped give Reagan resounding victories in 1980 and 1984 and seemed to foretell a rosy future for the Republican Party.

“Ronald Reagan’s magic welded together conservatives and moderates, but I think their natural suspicions of each other will come to the fore in 1988,” predicted Republican pollster Gary Lawrence.

Evidence of brewing tension within the GOP could be found in Iowa last week when religious broadcaster Pat Robertson startled party regulars by winning a presidential straw poll designed to show organizational strength for that state’s February, 1988, caucuses.

Robertson’s recent procedural victories in Michigan also put conservatives in firm control of the GOP in a state that has a long tradition of moderate Republicanism. And Robertson followers are also powerful in the South Carolina GOP.

Most analysts do not think Robertson can win the GOP nomination. But he worries moderates in the party because he has promised to make the Republican hierarchy take notice of his followers’ chief concerns, mainly their desire for a ban on abortions and for prayer in schools, which have proven to be highly divisive issues in the party.

Moderates could also defect from the Republican coalition if conservative jurist Robert H. Bork is confirmed to the U. S. Supreme Court and the court carries out the conservatives’ social agenda.

Although he refuses to say how he would vote if the abortion issue is taken up again by the court, Bork has said in the past that the court’s historic legalization of abortion in 1973 was unconstitutional.

Tension Submerged

“For some time now the tension between conservatives and moderates has been submerged, but the combat over Bork and the social issues are going to bring it out,” said Gail L. Slocum, a Los Angeles attorney who is active in the moderate wing of the GOP.

The 28-year-old Slocum falls into a crucial voting group, the 21-to-30-year-olds who overwhelmingly backed Reagan in 1984.

Polls show that many of these young people like Reagan because of his optimism and his handling of the economy but oppose the conservative agenda on social issues.

“I think the Republicans have real problems with this whole new constituency they have recruited since 1980, the younger people,” said Democratic political consultant Robert Shrum.

“Pat Robertson and the Religious Right, the anti-environmental policies of the Reagan Administration, its policy in Central America, all of this is going to drive these new Republican voters away from the party,” he said.

University of Massachusetts Prof. Ralph Whitehead, a leading observer of the voting patterns of “baby boomers,” said: “There is no question that Ronald Reagan had a surprisingly powerful appeal to younger white voters. . . . But they were voting the economic side of their life styles, not the social.

“They were never really convinced that Reagan bought his own social agenda. He was a Hollywood actor who had been divorced, he had one child who was a hippie and one who was a ballet dancer. So they took his own life story as a guide, not the 1984 Republican convention’s conservative platform.

‘Could Be Driven Away’

“But if these voters think that the 1988 Republican nominee is serious about the conservative social agenda, they could be driven away.”

Whitehead also saw signs of tension within the GOP during the Iran- contra hearings over the summer.

“You had Warren Rudman, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, taking on Oliver North, the hero of the conservatives. Right there you get the picture of the Republican Party’s potential problems in 1988.”

Noting that Secretary of State George P. Shultz was the hero of mainstream Republicans who opposed North’s use of arms sale profits to fund the contras, Whitehead said:

“Think of the guy who has to block out the victory tableau at the 1988 Republican convention. Who will be up there flanking the nominee? Do you put Ollie North at one elbow and George Shultz at the other? Reagan could pull that off but it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it.”

Shrum contended that “The coalition they have put together is as untenable as what the Democrats used to have--black people in the North and anti-civil rights people in the South. Eventually they find out about each other and the party has to make a choice. “

Some conservatives in the Republican Party find predictions of tension within the party a bit hard to take, however.

“It is almost comical how little tension there is,” said William A. Rusher, publisher of the National Review magazine. “There was a time when you’d hear the anybody-but-Jones talk in the (GOP) presidential primaries, but you’re not hearing that this time.”

The reason for this, Rusher argued, is that the conservative takeover of the GOP is virtually complete.

And, he warns, if the more Establishment Republicans try to ignore conservatives now, they will turn off the Southern whites and Northern ethnics who deserted the Democratic Party in the 1970s and formed a crucial element in the 1980 and 1984 Republican presidential victories.

“The Republican Party of the 1980s is not the party of Northern, white Protestants,” wrote UCLA Prof. John R. Petrocik in an assesment of political parties done for the Center for National Policy in Washington. “Once half the party, (the Northern white Protestants) now constitute only 40% of all Republican identifiers. White Southerners are almost as numerous.”

The two leading candidates for the Republican nomination--Vice President George Bush and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas--are part of the traditional wing of the party. Both are still trying to keep their lines in to the more pragmatic members of the GOP, including businessmen and the so-called “Country Clubbers,” who are concerned mostly with economic issues and rarely show enthusiasm for the conservative social agenda.

Both Moved to Right

But Bush and Dole have also moved to the right in recognition of the way the party has changed.

Bush, who has been extremely loyal to Reagan, has made major efforts to woo conservatives and has gotten the endorsement of religious broadcaster Jerry Falwell.

For his part, Dole won the praise of conservatives when he was Senate majority leader by taking their social agenda to the Senate floor. He did the same for a powerful conservative lobbying group, the National Right-to-Work Committee, which works against many union causes.

Three other candidates, New York Rep. Jack Kemp, former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont IV and former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., are all pitching hard to the party’s conservative wing, much as Robertson has.

But can any of the six keep the Reagan coalition together?

“No,” says another former Republican governor of Delaware, Russell W. Peterson.

“Reagan did it with his own personal attractiveness,” said Peterson, a GOP moderate. “It’s amazing. Even after the recent mistakes people still like him personally.”

Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, another moderate, said: “This a time of concern for Republicans. I am convinced that the moderate Republican constituency is substantial in this country. But the party’s activists are increasingly rightist.”

So, with Robertson flexing his muscle at the activist level, Leach said, “the key question now is will the party change its framework to accommodate a narrow group, or will it continue to provide a place for all Republicans?”