70-Year-Old Group Hurt by Debate Dispute : League of Women Voters Cuts Expenses, Narrows Its Agenda of Issues

Back in the 1920s, the leaders of the fledgling League of Women Voters raised cash by hocking their rings and pearls at a friendly Washington pawn shop.

The shop’s operator held the goods until the organization was on its feet and the league members had the cash to redeem their valuables. Or so goes the story, often told by officers of today’s League of Women Voters.

After 70 years, the league finds the solutions to its problems more difficult to come by.

The nonpartisan league, dedicated still to promoting political and civic activism, is working to reverse a decline in membership and end a financial squeeze that has forced it to draw from its endowment to pay operating losses.

It has cut expenses, laid off staff, reduced its lobbying efforts and de-emphasized a range of issues it was active in but distracted by.

Losses From Debate

The deficit was aggravated by the presidential-debate debacle last fall. The league angrily withdrew its sponsorship of the final debate between George Bush and Michael Dukakis in a dispute over format and details.

That move generated much sympathy around the country but also renewed and intensified hostility toward the league among partisans of both parties.

But the troubles the League of Women Voters faces run deeper.

The organization is, in some ways, a victim of the success and achievements of a generation of active, educated and assertive women--such as those who hocked their jewels to pay the bills--and of the social change that has moved women away from volunteer work and into jobs that pay.

“The woman who was the heart and soul of the league volunteer is now an investment banker,” Grant P. Thompson, the league’s first male executive director, said.

To meet the changing social and financial demands, the organization’s board of trustees agreed in January to a long-term refocusing of the league’s efforts. Its top priorities now are public financing of election campaigns and “Advocate for the Voter,” a project aimed at increasing registration and turnout at the polls.

Back to the Basics

Essentially, it is a return to the sort of issues that concerned the league when it sprang from the women’s suffrage movement in 1919.

“Our goals are the same, but the strategies to reach them are going to have to change,” said Nancy M. Neuman, the league’s national president. “We’ve got to accommodate people who have very busy and complicated lives, but who still want to be active and try to change things.”

The league’s strength is 1,150 local organizations in communities in every state, where members monitor obscure government proceedings, promote voter registration and push league positions on a plethora of concerns.

Some have seen that wide range of issues as a problem in itself.

“A blue million of ‘em,” former league president Dorothy Ridings said. She mentioned arms control, abortion laws, clean water, military spending, child care, housing and tax reform, to name a few.

“Over the years, we’ve simply tried to become all things to all people--with the best of intentions, but it’s stretched us thinner and thinner,” said Ridings, now publisher of the Bradenton (Fla.) Herald.

Viewed as ‘Liberal’

The league describes its own positions as progressive. Some say they are liberal.

“While they say they’re nonpartisan, they tend to support positions that most clearly follow Democratic lines,” said Frank Fahrenkopf, the former Republican national chairman who tangled with the league over the debates. “They’re basically liberal.”

The league is strictly bound to its grass-roots orientation--so much so that it didn’t even have a national membership roster when Thompson was hired four years ago.

Since then, the league has spent heavily on modernization, brought computers into the operation and installed its first modern financial system.

The financial problems are real. Budgets for the league and its educational fund have shrunk over the last decade. Corporate donations are down and the league has spent $1 million over the last several years from its reserves, now at about $1.5 million.

Thompson says last year’s losses, including those from the debate fiasco, will hit about $800,000. With cost controls, he hopes the league will end its fiscal year with a deficit of $200,000 to $400,000 on an operating budget of $6.8 million.

To control costs, the league in January dismissed two workers, one a lobbyist on Capitol Hill; left vacancies unfilled and cut back on publications.

Tensions in Chapters

Officials acknowledge that the changes, particularly the de-emphasizing of selected issues, have created tensions between headquarters and members.

Declining membership--although men have been accepted as members since 1974--is another problem.

Membership grew 10% last year, reversing a decade of decline, due primarily to a new but costly direct-mail campaign. Thompson says the mailings cost as much as the dues they brought in; the payoff will come only if those members renew.

Membership in the still-predominately female organization reached a peak of about 150,000 in the mid-1970s and is now about 107,000.

Of all its problems and controversies, the biggest controversy by far was that of the debates.

The league has sponsored presidential debates since 1976. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were happy with the way the debates had been run, and before the 1988 campaign, they formed the Commission on Presidential Debates to serve as a rival sponsor.

The league sponsored two debates during the primary season, but two more fell through when candidates backed out. The campaigns agreed to let the league sponsor one of two presidential debates in the fall, but Neuman angrily withdrew the organization’s sponsorship 11 days before the event, saying that both Bush and Dukakis were trying to stifle spontaneity.

Bitter Debate Fight

The dispute turned bitter.

The league said it would turn over the debate site, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, to the new sponsors for $90,000--twice the amount it had put down. Then, the party commission charged the league hadn’t made a deposit on the location until it announced plans to withdraw.

The commission said that amounted to holding the auditorium “hostage.” The new sponsors found a new--and rent-free--site.

“A lot of the people on both the Republican and Democrat(ic) sides who had to work with the league in past debates found them very, very difficult to work with,” Fahrenkopf said.

“The league spent all its time hustling money and using it for their fund-raising. It almost became (that) the only thing the league existed for anymore was to hold the debates,” Fahrenkopf charged.

League officials say they asked for the extra money to cover contracts for sets and lighting, and said it paid more to withdraw from the debates than it would have to let them proceed.

The debate issue hangs over the league still, as it looks to what Neuman sees as a bright future. It will continue to sponsor local debates in 1990, and Neuman says the league will propose presidential debates in 1992.

“Until then,” she said, “we will be working to ensure that the American public is never again force-fed a campaign as mediocre and as patronizing as this one.”