Religious Right Both an Asset, Threat for Bush

It was scarcely past daybreak, but as they gathered in a hotel ballroom to talk strategy Monday, Louisiana’s 38 delegates to the Republican National Convention were not the least bit bleary-eyed. Chatting excitedly between nibbles on their fruit-filled pastries, the group behaved more like giddy schoolchildren than seasoned conventioneers.

They had good reason to be gleeful. Monday promised to be their moment of glory.

“All in all, we couldn’t ask for much more,” Floyd Gonzalez, a delegate from Baton Rouge, gushed as he sold a “Keep the Party Pro-Life” button to a friend. “We got this great, great platform, and it seems like George Bush and the whole Republican Party are starting to respect the beliefs of good Christian Americans.”

For President Bush, conservatives like Gonzalez and his colleagues in the Louisiana delegation are both an asset and a threat.

Bush needs the religious right and the votes its tireless soldiers can be counted on to deliver. But at the same time, their evangelical zeal and rightist positions on such highly personal issues as abortion and gay rights do not sit well with more moderate Republicans--nor with many of the millions of independent swing voters who will decide the election.

The delicate task for Bush and his strategists is to keep the right-wing fired up and happy without letting them become so prominent in his coming campaign that other voters are turned off.

The dilemma, one scholar of politics observed, is a daunting one--and a somewhat desperate one, given Bush’s current standing in the polls.

“It’s a sign that as he has gone down in general popularity and as he has lost points with voters on the economy . . . this other group may (become) even more important to him,” said Merle Black, a professor of politics at Emory University.

The religious right, Black added, is “too large a group to ignore.” More important, he said, they “may be one of the few props still holding him up.”

And so it was that the convention’s opening session Monday could have been dubbed Conservatives’ Day here. Two of the far-right’s ideological heroes, Ronald Reagan and Patrick J. Buchanan, delivered prime-time speeches from the convention podium and a rigidly conservative GOP platform endorsing school prayer and a constitutional ban on abortions was adopted in the extravaganza’s opening hours.

The day also served up some extracurricular excitement: a star-spangled “God and Country Rally” featuring religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and singer Pat Boone.

Those on the far right stand out in the crowd here. They wear red straw cowboy hats--distributed courtesy of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum--and “pro-family” buttons crowd their lapels. While other delegates swap laments about the ailing economy, the conservatives talk feverishly of other things: home schooling, the need to clean up American culture, protecting the rights of the unborn.

Television character Murphy Brown, whom Vice President Dan Quayle said had corrupted the nation’s morals by having a baby out of wedlock, is their common villain. One particularly popular button says it all: “Dan Was Right,” it reads, “Murphy’s a Tramp.”

These are the people George Bush can depend on, a bloc of true supporters for a President whose popularity has been buffeted. And don’t think they don’t know it.

“That’s right,” said Cindy Gustafson, a Bush delegate from Colorado and director of the Christian Coalition in the Rocky Mountain state. “And we will help him remember that.”

Gustafson joined about 2,000 conservatives at Monday’s “God and Country” celebration across the street from the festivities at the Astrodome.

“For too long we’ve stayed away and allowed a few people to set our goals,” Gustafson said. “People can argue about the religious right and us being zealots . . . but the morals and the values we stand for--especially the people in this room today--worked. And when they stopped being paid attention to, the country began to decline morally.”

The rally was one of the largest so far at the convention. The most rapturous reception was reserved for Quayle, who told the crowd, after reciting a litany of criticism leveled at him, “It wasn’t just me they were laughing at. It was you. It was your family. It was your values.”

Robertson, a cool smile fixed on his face, took up the cry and issued a warning of sorts to the other factions of the Republican Party.

“In 1988, they said the Christian conservative movement was dead,” he said. “This is a resurrection here today. If they think we’re dead, they got another think coming.”

Greg Mead, a 32-year-old Houstonian who attended the rally with his wife, Karen, and two of his five young children, loved every minute of it. “It’s kind of a home school project for the kids,” said Mead, who teaches his children at home because of his disdain for the public school system.

Once a Buchanan supporter, he is now in the President’s corner: “Bush is the only one who believes in the sanctity of life.”

The mood at the rally was undeniably ebullient, the grins a mile wide. But elsewhere in Houston, there was distress. In wooing the religious right, it was clear that Bush had jilted others.

Dorene Whitney is a self-described die-hard Republican--the sort of person who believes deeply in the ideals of the GOP and backs up her beliefs with dollars. Whitney, who lives in La Jolla, Calif., is an Eagle, which is a party member who gave more than $15,000 to the GOP cause this year.

But for the first time in many years, she is worried that “the extremist, far-right crazies seem to be taking over my party.” As she chatted with friends outside a swank Eagles party at Houston’s Museum of Modern Art, Whitney was visibly upset. In a quavering voice, she confided that she may do the unthinkable in November: withhold her vote from George Bush.

“I am offended, as a woman and a Republican, that Bush could let these fundamentalist Christian crazies become so prominent in our party,” Whitney said as her friends, all draped in shimmering jewels and elegant gowns, solemnly nodded their support.

Rep. Bill Green (R-N.Y.) spoke his mind at a crowded news conference sponsored by a coalition of national gay and lesbian groups. Green, a leading GOP moderate, called the platform “a tragic mistake for the Republican Party” that “is bad politics for 1992 and . . . bad politics for the future.”

Gradually, Bush strategists expect, such anger will recede and all Republicans will unite behind a common goal: defeating the Democrats in November.

Torie Clarke, the campaign press secretary, already sees evidence of this trend. When abortion-rights activists abandoned their fight over the platform’s strict abortion ban Monday, she saw it as a sign that Republicans were choosing pragmatism over ideology.

“These people have said that what’s really at stake is reelecting the President,” said Clarke. “If being . . . down in the polls is good for anything, it’s good for rallying the troops and making them understand what’s really at stake here.”