Much Hinges on Running Mate : Rapport With New Right Knotty Problem for Bush

For the better part of a week in July, Atlanta buzzed with a single question: “What does Jesse want?” This week, in New Orleans, the parallel question will be: “Can Bush make it right?”

For just as Michael S. Dukakis had to worry about reaching voters in the political center without offending the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Democratic left wing, Vice President George Bush has been trying to move to the middle without alienating the Republican right. The task is not easy.

Much will hinge on Bush’s choice of a running mate later this week. But in his relations with the New Right--the assortment of groups and individuals that enlivened American political debate in the 1970s and helped set the national agenda in the 1980s--Bush has problems that go far deeper than campaign tactics.

Bush’s problems with conservative activists have more to do with culture and background than ideology and are, therefore, difficult for him to address. His problems also reflect divisions within the conservative movement itself--factional splits which underline one of the rules of American political life: for ideological movements, nothing fails like success. In the case of the New Right, the election of Ronald Reagan was a great triumph, but it also forced the movement into the inevitable compromises and frustrations of governing.

Like virtually all Republican leaders, Bush, himself, is conservative. “There is no liberal wing left in the Republican Party,” said Burton Pines of the conservative Heritage Foundation, “just a few feathers.”

But the power of the New Right has been the activism of a populist revolt against America’s Northeastern, Ivy League, WASP Establishment. While Bush is Ronald Reagan’s vice president, he is still Prescott Bush’s son, and the image of the late former patrician senator from Greenwich, Conn., is a lot for many conservatives to swallow.

Conservatives just have a problem “feeling comfortable” with Bush, said Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.), who is leading an effort to keep conservative pressure on Bush during the convention. “I can’t even explain it to myself,” he said.

In part because of that discomfort, in part because ideological activists usually are more comfortable as critics and outsiders than as insiders willing to compromise, the leaders of the right have been notably unenthusiastic about Bush’s candidacy.

Prominent conservatives like to be coy about Bush’s prospects, denying that they, themselves, would sit still for a Democratic victory this year but saying they have “heard (such sentiments) from friends.”

“You hear a lot of talk like: ‘If this is how Bush is going to treat us, let him get himself elected, and if he doesn’t, what’s the big deal?’ ” said conservative fund raiser Richard Viguerie. “I don’t share that view,” he hastily adds, but “a lot of people” do.

Is Winning Everything?

But despite the evasions, conservative publications and conversations this summer have been filled with talk about whether, this time, winning is everything. While the Democrats in Atlanta were willing to give up almost anything for a victory, at least some conservative leaders would, as 19th-Century Sen. Henry Clay once put it, “rather be right than President.”

In a few states, particularly Michigan, where the caucus fight between Bush and backers of New York Rep. Jack Kemp and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson was particularly fierce, some leading Robertson supporters have announced that they will bolt the Republicans this fall to support the presidential candidacy of Libertarian Ron Paul, who plans to be in New Orleans all week campaigning for conservative votes.

The Libertarian Party appeals to many conservatives because of its laissez-faire attitude toward the economy. But its similar free-wheeling view of civil liberties--and its lack of a chance actually to win an election--keep it from being a true refuge for most dissatisfied Republicans. Still, the threat by some to switch to the Libertarians highlights the ambivalence many conservatives feel about Bush.

Conservative doubts, said Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips, could hurt Bush doubly: by reducing the number of conservative activists available to work the field and by reinforcing Bush’s image as a country club elitist, thereby cutting him off from conservative ethnic and Southern “Reagan Democrats” key to a GOP victory.

“There’s a large element of the Republican Party who aren’t comfortable with anything as gray-flannel as Bush and his backers,” Phillips said. Bush appears to them as a person who “doesn’t want to sit next to someone in a double-knit suit.” And if that perception becomes a firm feeling among Republicans, Phillips said, it “reinforces what’s almost a noose” for Bush among people who support Democrats in local elections but voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

New to the Party

Libertarian Paul made a similar point in an interview Sunday with The Times. “The Robertson people aren’t Republicans first,” he said. “They’re new to the party.” Many of the conservative Christians who gave Reagan a major boost in Southern and border states simply find Bush unattractive, he said.

Already that culture clash--and Dukakis’ own carefully fostered image as the “son of immigrants”--has hurt Bush, and helped Dukakis, in the polls. Several recent polls have shown Dukakis drawing a third or more of the votes of self-described conservatives.

Disputes between the Bush camp and the conservatives cover the full range of strategic decisions a campaign must make:

--The running mate. Conservative leaders would like to see Kemp or Sen. William L. Armstrong of Colorado. They have turned thumbs down on potential candidates like Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson and Wyoming Sen. Alan K. Simpson, both of whom have since said they do not wish to be considered for the post. And Humphrey has threatened to use “parliamentary maneuvers” during the convention to keep pressure on Bush to find a properly conservative No. 2 man.

--Issues. Last week conservatives pushed successfully for strong platform planks against abortion and in favor of school prayer. But platforms are one thing, the candidate’s speeches are something else. The conservative weekly Human Events, for example, recently blasted Bush for giving a speech in which he praised anti-communist “freedom fighters” but did not specifically mention the anti-government Contras in Nicaragua.

--Tactics. Bush, in speeches to groups like the NAACP and in acts like his choice of New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean as convention keynote speaker, has tried to smooth over some of the rougher edges of Reaganism, particularly the Administration’s record of opposing strong federal civil rights intervention. Bush hopes that departure from Reagan policy will appeal to blacks and to moderate independent whites.

Called Self-Defeating

Conservatives like former Reagan aide Donald Devine, however, say that strategy is self-defeating. Devine argued in a recent Human Events article that to win Southern states, Bush will need 65% of the white vote, and “the only way to get that high a vote is to have a polarized, conservative” campaign in which “blacks cannot be targeted” as a voting bloc with particular interests.

Similarly, some Bush backers hope to capture Pennsylvania and Illinois, two large key swing states, by appealing in Philadelphia and Chicago to white erstwhile Democrats who have been alienated by black voter strength. Bush has campaigned with former Chicago Democratic leader Edward R. Vrdolyak and former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo as part of that effort.

Such disputes have been smoldering for months, both within the Bush organization and outside it. But when Bush last month picked Kean to keynote the convention, conservative leaders exploded. Kean, Humphrey said in an interview, was “an insult.” And in a letter to Bush he attacked Kean’s pro-choice stand on abortion, calling him “a prominent defender of the killing of prenatal infants.”

The abortion issue has become the litmus test for conservatives on a Bush running mate. Even Simpson, one of the Senate’s most conservative members and the deputy leader of its Republican minority, has been deemed unacceptable by conservative leaders because of his ambivalent position on the issue.

Abortion is also a symbol of conservative frustrations with the Reagan era. Four years ago, at the Republican convention in Dallas, conservatives were kings. Conservatives had supplied the shock troops who carried Ronald Reagan to victory in 1980, and in 1984, they were celebrating their power and the sense that they were on the verge of fundamentally reshaping American society.

“If they had allowed us to write it, we’d have had difficulty improving” the GOP platform, the Rev. Jerry Falwell crowed at the time.

But victory raised expectations that could not be met. On abortion, for example, eight years of Reagan have moved conservatives no closer to their goal of making the procedure once again a criminal offense. But having Reagan in the White House has removed the federal government as a lightning rod for right-to-life complaints, and the lack of prominent Democratic villains to target has led to dramatic drops in conservative fund raising.

“There aren’t a lot of issues that can get folks at the grass roots worked up” anymore, the Heritage Foundation’s Pines said.

In 1986, a host of Republican senators, including some of the country’s most vehement conservatives, were defeated. In 1987, conservatives suffered the overwhelming defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, loss of military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and White House adoption of arms control strategies and broader foreign policy perspectives toward the Soviet Union.

By the end of the year, conservative leaders were reduced to the uncomfortable posture of railing against Reagan, the most conservative President in half a century, for his willingness to sign an Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with the Soviets.

Unexpected Blows

But 1988 brought the sharpest, and to many conservatives the most unexpected, blows--the failure of self-identified conservative candidates in the Republican presidential race. Kemp, Robertson and former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. (Pete) Du Pont IV each sought the nomination on the theory that one of them would become the “conservative alternative” candidate who would eventually face off against either Bush or Kansas Sen. Bob Dole.

Despite talk of Robertson’s “invisible army” and Kemp’s appeal to blue-collar workers, the would-be alternatives vied only to see which one would drop out first. The failure of those candidates was a sharp contrast with the experience of the last several elections, when the right wing was the “nominating wing” of the party.

So while 1984 was a conservative celebration, 1988 could turn into a wake. Some prominent conservatives, like Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, do not plan even to attend this week’s convention. Others, like Humphrey, will be there hoping to keep pressure on Bush.

“We hope to exploit the news vacuum at the convention,” said Humphrey, who has formed an organization called the Coalition for a Winning Ticket and who has threatened to introduce an alterative vice presidential nominee should Bush’s choice prove unacceptable.

Sunday, Humphrey said that three state delegations had agreed to support him in submitting an alternative name should he decide to go ahead with that move. Under party rules, he would need support from five states to propose an alternative nominee. Humphrey declined to say which three states were supporting his effort. “Frankly, the Bush people would come down on them” if the names got out, he said.

Humphrey also vowed to lead a fight today against a tentatively adopted rule that would eliminate a roll call on the vice presidential nomination, replacing it with a voice vote. He said the change would “severely limit” delegates’ rights.

Should a conservative alternative be nominated, “obviously we wouldn’t win,” he said, “but it still would give us a chance to be heard.”