Some in GOP Can’t Read Lips--They Push for Taxes

Read their lips, President Bush.

Some Republicans are talking about raising taxes.

The dreaded “T word” was heard often at--of all forums--a gathering of some 800 Republican activists and office holders here in the South, that citadel of conservatism and the region that has become the GOP’s most dependable bulwark in presidential campaigns.

It was uttered first at the three-day, 13-state conclave that concluded Saturday by J. Brad Hays, a pollster and adviser to North Carolina Republican Gov. James G. Martin. Hays argued that if Republicans are to continue to gain strength in the South, they will have to face up to the burdens and responsibilities of governing that come with their recent successes in local elections.

Noting that poll results showed that voters’ concerns have shifted from resentment against big government and high taxes that prevailed a decade ago at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan era, Hays told the Southern Republican Leadership Conference’s opening session: “People are not saying taxes is the biggest problem that face this nation. They are saying the problems are drugs, education and other things that require money.

“This head-in-the-sand thing about taxes is part of our old Republicanism when we used to just sit in the back of the room and throw rocks,” Hays contended. “If it takes more money to fight drugs, then by God let’s raise taxes to fight drugs. . . . It’s not a sin.”

Hays’ argument got qualified support from Neil Newhouse, an associate of pollster Richard B. Wirthlin, a key adviser to Reagan during the years when the former President established tax cutting as the centerpiece of his political credo.

Newhouse told the conference session that voters are often skeptical that tax revenues will be used to accomplish the goals for which the money is ostensibly raised. “But if you can somehow educate voters that it (tax money) is earmarked specifically for education or roads, whatever it may be, then it’s more palatable.”

Talk about raising taxes is not just talk in North Carolina, where Gov. Martin pushed through a 5-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax increase last year to pay for highway improvements. “Nobody really likes the gas tax,” Martin said at a Friday luncheon session of the conference. “But they sure do want the four-lane highways that go somewhere.”

Moreover, Martin said: “If it can be shown that another tax increase will strengthen the economy, my instincts support it.”

The time-to-tax argument also found adherents among the local politicians attending the conference. State Rep. Larry Justus from Hendersonville, N.C., in the western part of the state, contended that in some ways it would be easier for Republicans to raise taxes than Democrats, because of the GOP’s reputation for frugality. “It’s like Nixon going to China,” he said.

When he meets with his constituents, Justus asks them how many feel that the state should have sufficient prison space to assure that convicted criminals serve out their full sentences. “One hundred percent of them raise their hands,” Justus told a reporter. “Then I ask how many are willing to pay more taxes to build more prisons, and at least 90% raise their hands.

“If you are going to stay in office at the local level, you have to give people the services they want.”

Earle Smith, a Republican Party functionary from Marietta, Ga., said the GOP in his state is promoting the idea of a lottery to raise funds to improve education. But he acknowledges the lottery might not raise enough money to do the job and he concedes that the interest among voters in better education is strong enough so that a tax increase for that purpose could be politically feasible, if it were properly presented.

“The voters could support it if they trusted the people who were going to administer the program,” he said.

Even celebrated tax-cutter and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp seemed to soften his normal denunciatory rhetoric on taxes when he arrived here to address the conference Friday.

“I am not in favor of abolishing taxes,” he told reporters. “A tax is a legitimate form of raising revenue for a needy social or public concern. I am for that. What I am not for is a tax that punishes the poor, punishes investment, punishes risk-taking.”

The willingness to consider the possibility of seeking revenue increases reflects an undercurrent of unease among the conference attendees who met here in dreary, drizzly weather.

As conference chairman Jack Laughery pointed out in his welcoming remarks Thursday night, Republicans have much to celebrate. In the last 15 years, since the Watergate scandal rolled back the progress made under former President Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Republican Party has gained by leaps and bounds in the states of the Old Confederacy, a region the Democrats once considered to be their Solid South.

During the 1980s, Republicans elected governors in three states--Alabama, South Carolina and Texas--for the first time since Reconstruction. In 1988, Bush carried Dixie with better than 57% of the vote, his highest share in any region in the country. And nearly every week the GOP issues a new list of Democratic office holders who have seen the light on the right and converted to Republicanism.

For all of that, Democrats still control the governorships of seven of the 13 states represented here, not to mention every chamber of every Legislature. And Republicans now worry that they may be losing momentum, unless they can find a new credo to replace the timeworn battle cries of the past decade.

Part of the trouble, some believe, is that the Republicans have seemed to solve the problems that Reagan was elected to deal with--reinvigorating the economy, and rebuilding the nation’s defenses. “We have now become victims of our own success,” pollster John McLaughlin told the conference. “We have won everything. Now we have to figure out what we are going to win next.”

But the next political battles to be fought here in the South and elsewhere will apparently be over what pollster Lance Tarrance called “life-space issues”--education, health care, environment and even the homeless.

In the past, Tarrance said, dealing with these issues has been the forte of the Democratic Party. But now, Tarrance said, if the Republicans are to fulfill their dream of becoming the nation’s majority party, they must learn to beat the Democrats at their own game of using government to solve problems.

“Ronald Reagan defined what government should not be, curtailing federal government excesses that had gone on for half a century,” Tarrance said. Now, with Bush in the White House, Tarrance said, the GOP needs “to complete that picture by defining what government should be.”