1988 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION : GOP Hopes to Keep Its ‘Borrowed’ Voters : But Reagan Successes Rob Party of Issues That Led Democrats to Vote Republican

As George Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, looks ahead to the presidential campaign, he worries that Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis might find a way to “kind of belly up” to Bush and suggest there is not much difference between them.

“If you get the Reagan Democrats to think there’s not that much difference between these candidates, they’ll say: ‘Gosh, I can go be a Democrat again,’ ” Atwater frets.

Some GOP tacticians suggest that Bush’s aggressively conservative running mate, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle, might help draw distinctions between Dukakis and Bush, but Atwater’s concern reflects a fundamental fact that haunts all Republicans in 1988: The triumphs of the Reagan era were built on borrowed votes.

Borrowed Democratic votes.

And, for a host of reasons, Republican strategists concede, Bush and Quayle will find it harder to borrow those votes than Ronald Reagan did.

Hurt by Reagan Successes

The Republicans are losing Reagan’s special brand of personal political charm, of course. Far more important, Reagan’s successes have robbed the GOP of many of the issues he rode to victory on. The double-digit inflation and high interest rates of Jimmy Carter’s presidency are distant memories now, along with the sense of military weakness.

As the Democrats discovered, after they led the nation out of the Great Depression and on to victory in World War II, voters do not stay grateful very long. In effect, political professionals say, voters are now asking Republicans not just, “What have you done for us lately?” but also, “What can you do for us next?”

In that regard, Reagan has left his party short on the kinds of new issues and compelling ideas that would help it hold on to the Reagan Democrats.

“We lit a prairie fire a few years back,” Reagan declared in his valedictory speech here Monday night. Yet, for all of his personal successes, Reagan did not create any coherent framework of ideas to help his party keep the blaze alive in the changing political environment the next President must face.

“There is no agenda,” laments Patrick J. Buchanan, a key aide in both the Richard M. Nixon and Reagan White Houses.

Other Concerns

“I don’t think there is any question that Ronald Reagan has done a tremendous amount of good for the Republican Party,” Democratic pollster Paul Maslin says. But, by establishing prosperity, Maslin argues, Reagan “has removed the Republican advantage from the table. And the American people are saying, ‘OK, now we’re concerned about these other things,’ ” which include the environment and such so-called family issues as child care and health care.

Opinion surveys of which party voters identify with provide one measure of the difficult task facing Republicans even after eight years of controlling the White House. Despite all the talk of a party realignment based on Reagan’s conservative creed and his two smashing victories, Republicans are still in second place to the Democrats. They trail in party loyalty by 16 percentage points, as measured in a poll by the Gallup Organization last June.

That represents a narrowing of the 24-point Democratic advantage Gallup recorded eight years ago, before Reagan took over the White House. But it is a decline from the near parity with the Democrats that the Republicans achieved in the first flush of Reagan’s 1984 landslide.

Given this partisan disadvantage going into the 1988 campaign, some Republican strategists contend that the choice of Quayle as running mate will help. His overall record of steadfast support for right-wing causes will underline the conservative bent of the GOP ticket, those strategists say, and enhance its appeal among Democrats who find Dukakis too liberal.

Democrats challenge this contention.

‘Swing Democrats’ Surveyed

They point to a survey taken by Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman of so-called “swing Democrats,” two-thirds of whom voted for Reagan in 1984. The poll indicates that those voters are mainly concerned with the national economy and other domestic issues unrelated to the national security issues that are said to be Quayle’s strong suit in the Senate.

Some GOP activists argue that, for the Republicans to win this election and narrow the party identification gap with the Democrats, they must show middle-class voters that they can deal with the newly emerging domestic issues that concern such voters.

But those are the sorts of concerns that Democrats are traditionally quicker to tackle than Republicans. And, where Reagan fell short, as many Republicans privately acknowledge, was in failing to find a way for conservative Republicans to overcome their suspicion of government and use its powers to help solve such problems.

For example, as far back as the 1980 campaign, Reagan recognized the potential appeal of family concerns, now one of the hottest items on the campaign agendas of both parties. But his approach, Joseph Piccione, a policy analyst for the National Forum Foundation, contends, was limited to providing “a few bully pulpits” for invoking “traditional values, old-fashioned alternatives and Main Street Americanism.”

Reagan did not develop “significant and sustained” policy proposals on family issues, he said.

Thus, Reagan made it difficult for Bush to make credible such family-oriented proposals as his tax credit plan for day care, Piccione believes. “He’s going to have to work hard to convince young families that he’s not just echoing Reagan’s rhetoric, or offering just a cheap version of the Democratic day care proposal,” Piccione said.

The issues of family and traditional values are all the harder for Republicans to exploit this year because Dukakis and most other Democrats have embraced them with a vengeance.

That makes it difficult for the GOP to campaign against “San Francisco Democrats,” as it did in 1984. In addition, the Democrats’ new positioning shifts the issues away from the realm of abstract principle and into the sphere of concrete proposals.

Suspicion of Government

Of course, Republican suspicion of government long antedates the rise of Reagan and his pledge to voters to “get government off your backs.” This antipathy has been a hallmark of modern Republicanism.

“For Democrats, government is a way to solve the failures of the marketplace,” according to UCLA political scientist John Petrocik, a specialist in elections. “For Republicans, government has a much more limited role.”

This contrast puts Republicans at an inherent disadvantage most of the time, Petrocik contends. “On opinion surveys, it’s almost impossible to point to a problem that people don’t seem to feel government should play some role in solving. One reason the Republicans are still a minority party is that they are less inclined to use government to fix these problems.”

Some GOP leaders contend that one way for the party to reconcile what Reagan in his Monday night speech called its “healthy skepticism of government” with public demand for government action is to rely on the concept of federalism. That is, attack problems through state and local government, with which Republicans feel more comfortable, instead of the much-maligned federal bureaucracy in Washington.

Federal ‘Support Role’

“People like to have a very activist state and local government,” said South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr., but can be convinced that the federal government should play a more limited “support role.”

“We’ll be able to differentiate the type of activism the people are interested in,” Campbell said, from the federal type, which Republicans contend voters believe they can do without.

However, other Republican officeholders are unwilling to do without federal largess entirely. “It’s very, very important for Republicans to show that they have an urban agenda” for federal aid to cities, Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut III said.

And, although the idea of supporting action by states and localities because they are “close to the people” may sound good in theory, it may not hold up in emergencies, as Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad concedes. “Where there is a drought, there needs to be federal action,” he said.”

Reliance on federalism poses another problem for the GOP in 1988. Their candidate, Bush, has spent his entire political career as part of the national Establishment; Democrat Dukakis, on the other hand, is able to campaign with constant references to his experience as Massachusetts’ governor, and he promises to try to solve problems through federal-state “partnerships,” rather than by unilateral federal action.

For all these difficulties, calls for the GOP to find ways to use government consistent with its philosophy come even from some of its staunchest conservative bulwarks, including Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, founder of the Conservative Opportunity Society.

Gingrich said he and his right-wing House colleagues are developing a new concept called “governing conservatism,” which is designed to respond to the reality that “in this age of change, people want things to work, which means they want some help from government.”

Offer ‘Empowerment’

In meeting such needs, Gingrich contends, conservatives have a natural advantage over liberals. “The left tells people who want government help (that) we will raise your taxes and treat you as a client,” he said. By contrast, Gingrich said, conservatives offer “empowerment to individuals.”

As an example, Gingrich cited Bush’s child care proposal, which provides federal financial aid through tax credits rather than through a far-flung bureaucracy, which is the approach used in a competing Democratic legislative proposal.

Similarly, New York Rep. Jack Kemp, a Gingrich ally, promotes such ideas as urban enterprise zones, relying on tax credits to encourage investment in the inner city, and a proposal to foster tenant ownership by residents of public housing developments.

Such proposals, Kemp contends, will help Republicans broaden the party’s base and reach his objective of increasing the percentage of blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans in GOP ranks to 25% in four years.

Still and all, the hopes of Kemp and others to reach out to minorities run counter to what seems to be deep-rooted resistance to change among party regulars. This resistance was much in evidence last week during preconvention meetings.

A proposal to change the rules of the Republican National Committee and the national convention to give more proportional representation to larger states, and thus increase minority participation, was rejected by party leaders. They contended that the idea, backed by a group of mostly black Republicans, would not accomplish its objective and would create too much turmoil.

But Gingrich said in an interview: “I would have voted for the proposal. If you want to be a national party, you should represent the nation.”

Bias Suits Rejected

In another preconvention action, the platform committee rejected a proposal by conservative New Jersey Rep. Jim Courter for federal legislation to empower individuals who allegedly have been discriminated against to sue for damages.

The right to file such suits is now at issue before the Supreme Court, and the legislation backed by Courter would allow the suits regardless of how the court rules.

Platform committee members said Courter’s proposal was turned down because he did not lobby hard enough for it. Courter, who was called back to Washington in the midst of the committee’s deliberations, said he had earlier discussed his plan with Charles Black, one of the Bush aides who controlled the platform committee.

“I just assumed that George Bush and his people would have seen the political merits of the idea,” he said.

Staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.