THE SAVAGE STRUGGLE FOR POWER / SPECIAL REPORT: CAMPAIGN ’92 : Class Warfare Brings Disarray to GOP Coalition

Class warfare in the Republican Party is a blueprint for disaster. It has happened before and it’s happening now in the middle-class tax debate and in attacks leveled by GOP presidential challengers Patrick J. Buchanan and David Duke at “Ivy League globalists,” country clubbers and overpaid corporate executives. In hard times, when populist Republicans start sounding like Democrats, it’s often a sign that divisions within the GOP are deepening and forces are uniting the Democratic Party.

None of this is good for George Bush as he prepares to deliver a high-stakes State of the Union message heavy with upper-bracket symbolism--from another proposed reduction in capital-gains taxes to investment incentives for the real-estate industry. Trickle-down is the old GOP image problem, but it’s closely linked to an old GOP constituency division: Main Street vs. Wall Street, borrowers vs. bankers, production lines vs. speculators. When the GOP puts the top 1% of America ahead of Middle America, the Republican coalition shudders.

Right after the 1988 election, Bush’s campaign manager, the late Lee Atwater, called this the ultimate GOP Achilles’ heel: “The way to win a presidential race against the Republicans is to develop the class-warfare issue, as Dukakis did at the end. To divide up the haves and have-nots . . . and attack.” What the White House never counted on, of course, was that rival 1992 Republican nomination-seekers would join the attack. But there are ways in which Bush has been his own worst enemy.

Throughout American history, eras of GOP presidential control have always started with a broad middle-class appeal, but eventually they tilt toward the economic elite. This was evident in the 1980s, especially after the election of Bush, who became almost a caricature of an upper-class politician raised in the best neighborhoods, schools and clubs.

Bush’s father and grandfather were rich investment bankers and, in 1988, Burke’s Peerage--the London-based publication that catalogues British nobility--announced that an extraordinary investigation had revealed Bush as the “most royal” of U.S. Presidents, related to Queen Elizabeth and to most of Britain’s 28 dukes. Polls show that, while President Bush has intensified his own--and the GOP’s--image of being for the rich. Such policies as incessant drum-beating for capital-gains-tax reduction and his nonchalance about unemployment only drive this home.

In the previous periods when GOP White Houses displayed such biases, the party was split by insurgencies--including the Greenback, Granger and Populist splinter-party presidential candidates of the late 19th Century and maverick GOP Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, running for the presidency in 1924 on a third-party Progressive ticket.

For a while, the Bush Administration looked like it had avoided this fragmentation. As the economy worsened, to be sure, polls showed a huge gap between the opinions of the Bush White House and those of rank-and-file GOP voters, many of them moderates or populists. The President opposed a federal surtax on millionaires; 80% of GOP voters favored it. The President opposed a new national health-insurance program; a majority of rank-and-file Republicans backed one. The President opposed get-tough trade policies with Japan; a majority of grass-roots Republicans endorsed the idea. By late 1991, polls showed 40%-50% of Republicans disapproving White House economic policy, criticizing the President for spending too much time on foreign policy and worrying that the country was “seriously on the wrong track.”

Through 1990 and most of 1991, few GOP officeholders paid any real attention to rank-and-file dissent, partly because of hierarchical loyalty, partly because of Bush’s Gulf War success. But then, as the President’s ratings sank with the economy and populist campaigns scored election surprises in Louisiana and Pennsylvania, two primary challengers suddenly emerged. Buchanan, the conservative columnist and former Reagan White House communications director, announced he would tackle Bush in New Hampshire. Duke, the ex-klansman who had beaten Louisiana’s sitting Republican governor in an open primary before losing the general election, announced he would oppose Bush in GOP primaries--principally in Southern states that had supported George C. Wallace two decades earlier. Class warfare was about to begin.

At first this was not apparent. In Louisiana’s gubernatorial race, Duke had won 60% of the white middle-class vote by mixing economic-frustration themes with attacks on crime and welfare that had thinly veiled racial messages. He did not attack the Bush Administration. And Buchanan was widely viewed as an ultraconservative, given to hard-line opinions on social policy as well as “America First” views on foreign policy.

But it was soon clear that they had been drawn into the race by other psychologies: populism and alienation. Buchanan’s newspaper columns were laced with references to “the folks” and the “hard-working middle class.” He delighted in attacking New York banks, Wall Street speculators and Ivy League clubmen--like Bush who belonged to Skull and Bones at Yale. Duke, in turn, before donning his GOP camouflage of the last few years, had earlier run for President as nominee of the “Populist Party”--appearing on the ballot in just 12 states, but bashing giant banks and multinational corporations as well as welfare mothers and furloughed rapists.

Buchanan--now up to 30% in some New Hampshire polls--gets angrier with each week he walks the streets in that economically stricken state. Instead of being a “big tent,” says Buchanan, the GOP is a “big pagoda,” because so many of its movers and shakers are Washington lobbyists for Japanese interests. William Jennings Bryan, call your office.

Buchanan says he’s changed since he started going to New Hampshire and talking to engineers who’ve lost their jobs and mothers who can’t feed their children, which appears to be true. Surprised journalists are reporting that on trade, unemployment and recession themes, the populist conservative is starting to sound like . . . a Democrat.

Duke, meanwhile, is being overshadowed. His attempts to get on GOP primary ballots in different states aren’t half as newsworthy as Buchanan’s battling. With Buchanan grabbing the lead role in opposing Bush, Duke is likely to find GOP primaries a trap--especially South Carolina’s March 3 primary, where the Bush Administration is laying an ambush for him. Where Duke could seriously threaten Bush and the GOP coalition, however, is in the general election, if he mounts a third-party challenge that gets 4%-8% of the total vote.

The supply-side architects of 1980s tax-preference for rich are beside themselves. Jack Kemp, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the philosopher-in-chief of trickle-down, has come out against a tax cut for the squeezed middle class because: “It splits us from each other. We don’t want to talk about class envy or class warfare or class division.”

In the end, this could be the Republican danger: that the overtones of class warfare coming from the Buchanan and Duke campaigns could loosen the bonds of many populist-minded Republicans, as well as the independents and Democrats who supported the GOP in the last three presidential elections. The White House’s failure to favor the average American family in the coming tax debate could add to the problem. Recent surveys have shown important elements of the GOP presidential coalition wavering because the White House no longer speaks to their sensitivities on trade, tax and fairness.

It is a real threat. If the Democrats can ever get their act together, this rising class warfare in the GOP could give the opposing party a chance to be what it once was--the party of the average American family. Bush has to start taking Middle America seriously--or he might just lose it.