GOP Puts Family Values in the Spotlight : Issues: Bush hopes to win back lost ground by appealing to conservative Americans. But the Democrats have presented a strikingly different version.

Home, marriage, kids, a dog or two--the hazy, feel-good terrain of family values--has emerged as a key theme at this week’s Republican National Convention, with Bush-Quayle campaign forces struggling to win back turf that Republicans controlled with ease in the 1980s.

President Bush had barely arrived here before declaring that families should be “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.” The President and Vice President Dan Quayle have missed few chances to appear with their wives and children before the cameras. Tonight, family issues will be spotlighted by such conservative true-believers as Pat Robertson and others, including Barbara Bush and Marilyn Quayle.

But in a noteworthy shift from previous years, the Republicans face competition for family-minded voters: Democrats, long quiet on the value-laden topic, have put forth their own, strikingly different vision of family in the 1990s. If the Republicans extol a sunny image of two parents and three children living behind a white-picket fence in suburbia, the Democrats place new emphasis on economic and social pressures affecting all kinds of households.

“Family values are one of the reasons that Democrats are in such very good shape across the country this year--which is not something one would ever have said in 1980,” maintained Sam Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego and an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

But what are these values? One study found that America’s core family values include being responsible for your own actions, having respect for others and establishing emotionally supportive relationships. Those surveyed also believed that, outside their own households, such values were sliding, according to the 1989 study by the Washington polling firm of Mellman & Lazarus.

In the political context, however, it all gets quite muddy. Ask a Democratic activist about family values and you may get answers like the need for government-assisted child care and tougher enforcement of child support laws. Ask a conservative Republican and you may hear about the right to life, sexual abstinence by teen-agers, the need to discipline children and the importance of religion.

“What the Republicans mean by family values is instilling Judeo-Christian values in their children and love of the country, the flag, all that good stuff,” said Ron Carey, a Minnesota delegate who on Tuesday attended a celebration of conservative values hosted by Phyllis Schlafly, the Illinois Republican who crusaded against the equal rights amendment.

“Democrats are talking family values,” the computer software salesman continued, “but what they mean is special rights and privileges for the gay and lesbian community.”

The misty phrase of family values can evoke a 1950s Ozzie and Harriet-type world in the imagination of many Americans, including some whose lives are a far cry from the old ideal. Indeed, half of all first marriages now end in divorce, the percentage of children in poverty has risen to more than 20%, according to the Children’s Defense Fund and, of course, mothers have flooded into the work force.

The weak economy, restiveness in the inner cities, the threat of violent crime and America’s changing role in the world all may contribute to nostalgia for a past ideal of family and community, some scholars said.

“People have the feeling that they’re living in a very fragile social order--and they’re right,” said Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “I think these (family) symbols that give a sense of stability and coherence, people are attracted to them.”

Symbols--from thoroughly modern Hillary Clinton to comforting and traditional Barbara Bush--can have great political significance.

A perception that the national Democratic Party had drifted from the nation’s cultural mainstream turned off key voting blocs of Southern Protestants and Northern Catholics who became “Reagan Republicans” in the 1980s, according to analysts. Republican strategists now are preparing to attack the Democrats again on such issues as gay rights.

“In the course of the campaign, if voters conclude that a candidate is hostile to these (traditional) values, it will influence their votes,” said Gary Bauer, a former White House domestic policy adviser who runs the Family Research Council in Washington.

In addition, Republican strategists hope to use the issue of family values to undermine the standing of Clinton, raising questions about his past conduct and the views held by the Arkansas governor and his wife.

“There have been serious questions raised about Clinton’s character, whether it was dodging the draft and lying about it or marital infidelity,” said Republican consultant Roger J. Stone. He added: “Clearly, the economy is more of a driving issue than family values in this election but voters also want to know about the moral character of the people they elect to office.”

Clinton spoke frequently about the importance of family at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton adviser Popkin said that a key to the Democrats’ approach has been to recognize the importance of gray, moral areas that they chose not to focus on before.

“Now you say abortions should be legal, safe and rare,” he said. “Or you say you’re pro-choice but not pro-abortion. You acknowledge that welfare should be temporary and not permanent--that it’s not a lifestyle.”

Yet if both parties seek to benefit from the wholesome glow of family values, some observers question how much of the verbiage is cynical.

“On the Republican side, I think it’s partly because they don’t want to talk about the economy and they haven’t had too much success talking about foreign affairs,” said Larry Bartels, a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. “On the Democratic side, I think it’s some kind of defensive urge not to be portrayed as weird or perverse in some way.”

Others maintain that social values are an important and perfectly appropriate subject for would-be leaders of the nation. But a lack of clarity about what the candidates mean--such as Bush’s attempt to distance himself from his own party’s platform on abortion--only obscure an already murky area.

“Family values is more than taking a picture with your kids around you--and usually a dog or two,” said Michael S. Josephson, president of the Marina Del Rey-based Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics. “It’s the responsibility of the politicians to be explicit and clear where they stand on each of these issues.”