GOP Shows New Social Concerns --the Approved Antidote Is Capitalism

Over coffee in his office late last year, Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico held forth about the country’s economic problems. Domenici, as it happens, is one of the moderately conservative, balanced-budget and pro-business Republicans who were the party’s dominant force in the days before Ronald Reagan. What was on Domenici’s mind, however, was not balancing the budget: It was the impoverished underclass, drugs and undereducation among minorities.

The time has come, Domenici said, for Republicans to take their case to the inner city and its voters. “I think the Republicans ought to go after them,” he said. A rare opportunity is opening to the GOP: “We ought to put the best thinkers and bona fide concerned people to work on it.” Domenici is not talking about moral obligations or fairness, as liberals often do; he is talking about “socioeconomic drags,” as he calls them. Poverty, illiteracy, drugs and the rest, he said, “are very, very dangerous things for our economic productivity--they’re not just social issues.”

Something is up in Washington. After eight years in which Republicans gladly left traditionally Democratic constituencies and social issues to the Democrats, they are getting interested in them--and their interest is genuine. President Bush, with his talk of being haunted by the plight of inner-city children, is himself one sign of the ferment. Domenici is another, as is Republican Party Chairman Lee Atwater, with ambitious talk of what he calls “black outreach “ (the Florida state party has started an Operation Inclusion in the black community). In the Bush White House, one official said of social issues: “I think we’ll see an enhanced Republican commitment to these problems.”

There is nothing particularly new about Republicans being interested in social issues or minorities. This is, after all, the party of Lincoln. Jack Kemp, the supply-side movement’s political leader and Bush’s newly appointed secretary of housing and urban development, has been preaching for years that the Republican Party can and should offer hope and inclusion to minorities. Consistent with his rhetoric has been his refusal to position himself as an anti-government conservative. “You’re never, as a conservative, going to appeal to a black constituency in America if you say that government is the enemy,” he said in an interview in 1987, “because to them government got their little daughters and sons to be able to go to public schools with white folks and is the guarantor of civil liberties. It’s been the safety net. Government has an obligation to keep the safety net.” At HUD, Kemp is joyfully proclaiming a war on poverty, with “entrepreneurial capitalism” as its weapon.

During the Reagan years, Kemp’s inclusive rhetoric was on the fringes of today’s lily-white, anti-government Republican Party. By and large it still is--but less and less so. Mainstream Republicans like Bush and Domenici have had little use for Kemp; but they certainly have use for business, their core constituency. Alan H. Magazine, the president of the Washington-based Council on Competitiveness, said recently that by the year 2000 four out of five new entrants into the work force will be minorities and women. “And if our minority work force is in such trouble,” he said, “then American industry is in trouble.” And when business is unhappy, Republicans listen.

As school shortcomings, the costs of drugs and the unemployability of the underclass strain employers, more Republicans will speak, as Domenici does, of social problems as “productivity” (read Republican) issues rather than as “fairness” (read Democratic) issues. Yet something more than merely a Republican response to economic reality is going on; there’s an element of conviction at work. Republicans believe they have something to offer the poor that the Democrats no longer do: hope.

Democrats talk about using government to give people jobs and money so they won’t be poor. Republicans still frown on that sort of thing--”handouts.” But acceptance in the party has been growing for human-development programs of the kind that Democrats used to hold the patent on, especially education. The emerging Republican message is, “We’ll give you human capital, free markets will give you jobs and you’ll earn the money so you won’t be poor.” The Republicans have a potentially attractive formula: reaching and helping the underprivileged through economic development rather than through government-program development.

Of course an attractive formula is a far cry from reality. Republicans may do no better than Democrats against what are, in the final analysis, depressingly intractable problems. But Republicans are more and more impelled to try. Intellectuals and leaders within the party are both groping toward and recoiling from contact with the black underclass and the poor. They sense that the party will not attain majority status until it is seen as a tent, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, big enough to shelter all comers, rather than a club that welcomes only the favored. Yet the Republicans also know full well that a great many of their newest stalwarts, particularly among Southern conservatives, would not be comfortable in a party where poor blacks could feel at home.

Until recently, the latter concern has easily dominated, and may continue to. If the Republicans are serious about going after inner-city problems and votes, they have their work cut out for them, as is all too evident from the recent election of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to the Louisiana state Legislature as a Republican. Still, the convergence of a Domenici and a Kemp is not to be dismissed lightly. The political wind is changing, and sometimes new breezes augur gales.