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‘92 REPUBLICAN CONVENTION : GOP Takes Politics of ’92 Race Personally : Strategy: Clinton, private citizens alike seem to be targets as debate moves into more intimate aspects of life.

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TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

This week’s Republican Convention has accelerated one of the most striking developments of the 1992 race: the expansion of the scope of political debate into ever more intimate aspects of private life. This year, perhaps more than ever, the personal is political.

Throughout the convention, Republican speakers have repeatedly suggested that voters should measure President Bush and Bill Clinton as much by their private behavior as their public record. In effect, they are arguing that Bush would be a better President than Clinton in part because he is a better man in the way he conducts his private life. As Labor Secretary Lynn Martin put it Wednesday night: “You can’t be one kind of man and another kind of President.”

Bush himself, in his acceptance speech Thursday, said voters face “a choice about the character of the man you want to lead the nation.”

But, just as strikingly, several convention speakers have seemed to be passing judgments on the way ordinary Americans conduct their private lives, observers say.

From Marilyn Quayle’s dismissal of women who “wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women,” to former Education Secretary William J. Bennett’s flat declaration that “we believe some ways of living are better than others,” the GOP this week seemed to be trying to polarize the electorate not only around traditional social issues such as abortion but also around their assessments of the proper living arrangements for American families.

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“The gap between us and our opponents is a cultural divide,” declared Dan Quayle Thursday night as he accepted renomination as vice president.

“The Republicans have zeroed in on this fundamental area of culture,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute of American Values, a New York-based think tank that studies family issues.

In political terms, this widening of the debate to such diverse issues as homosexual rights, the moral standing of single-parent families, the social costs of the 1960s and the reactions of Bush and Clinton to the wars that defined their generations carries risks for both parties. To the extent Republicans can shift the debate to the private behavior of the candidates, some strategists in both parties believe they can revive concerns about Clinton’s honesty and integrity that appear to have receded.

On the other hand, even some Republicans fear that encouraging political debate on such issues--although perhaps helpful in consolidating their support among culturally conservative white Southerners and Northern ethnics--risks projecting an intolerant and mean-spirited image of the party that could hurt among younger voters and women, especially those struggling to raise families alone.

“We have to be careful about seeming exclusionary,” one senior Bush campaign strategist acknowledged Thursday.

Quayle tried to soften that impression in his speech. Quayle, who had been accused of disparaging single mothers in a May address criticizing the television program “Murphy Brown,” said: “We have taught our children to respect single parents and their challenges.”

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Assessments of a candidate’s personal qualities have always been central to presidential campaigns. “I’ve always said that when you get to the very end of a campaign, the character issue is always the important issue,” says Robert M. Teeter, the Bush campaign’s chairman.

But this year, in their efforts to display--or disparage--character, both campaigns have moved to new heights--or lows--of self-revelation.

At the Democratic Convention, Clinton’s effort to ground himself in the ideological center relied as much on a detailed account of his life story as the listing of his policy positions. Declaring himself “a product of (the) middle class” and making more references in an acceptance speech to God and the Bible than any Democratic nominee in the past 20 years, Clinton tried to construct from his biography a barrier against GOP charges that he does not share middle-class values.

This week, Republicans have both tried to breach those cultural defenses--and use biography in their own defense. Quayle, for example, offered as supporting evidence in his claim of sympathy with single mothers the fact that his grandmother and sister found themselves in that condition.

Responding to Democratic efforts to paint the President as indifferent to the cares of ordinary Americans, Wednesday night’s appearance by Barbara Bush and other members of the First Family sought to present the President as a caring, sympathetic man who always has time for his grandchildren.

It’s not clear how relevant voters find such information. In 1980, analysts note, Americans still believed that Jimmy Carter was a good man; they just no longer believed that he was a good President. Bush now may face the same problem.

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“There are very few people who dislike George Bush personally,” says Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster. “They just think he didn’t use the power of his office to help America.”

If the Bush family testimonial Wednesday night represented the soft side of the politics of biography, the repeated jabs at Clinton’s personal behavior displayed the hard edge.

This offensive involved more than encouraging voters to question Clinton’s judgment and veracity. One of the GOP convention’s overriding goals was to challenge Clinton’s presentation of himself as a moderate. Much of that involved polarizing issues familiar from previous campaigns--such as taxes--and newer social issues that have not yet been debated in national politics, particularly gay rights.

But some speakers this week have also tried to turn the Democratic tactic on its head--and use Clinton’s life experiences to challenge his claim to the moral and political center.

The President himself alluded to Clinton’s admission that he smoked marijuana once while in college.

On Monday, Patrick J. Buchanan declared that Bush had more “moral authority to call on Americans to put their lives at risk” because he had served in battle while Clinton had tried to “dodge the draft.”

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Marilyn Quayle was even more biting in her speech, which attempted to lift Clinton out of the Democratic Convention’s Norman Rockwell vision of Hope, Ark., and deposit him in the psychedelic Haight Ashbury of what she termed the 1960s “counterculture.”

One Bush strategist said the campaign was not systematically attempting “to make Bill Clinton into a hippie.” But others saw that intent in Marilyn Quayle’s remark that not all baby boomers “demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution or dodged the draft.”

One friend of the Quayles said Thursday that both Quayles “felt the Clintons and the Gores have presented themselves as representatives of their generation. And they (the Quayles) felt there is a large part of the baby boom generation that are not simply older McGovernites or counterculturalists. . . . She wanted to stake a claim to at least coequal representation.”

But others worried that in attempting to link Clinton to the radicalism of the 1960s, Quayle had suggested disapproval of any baby boomer who had ever detoured off the road to midlife rectitude. “It was a mistake,” said Republican consultant David M. Carmen, a baby boomer himself. “The Republican Party is not saying that America is about . . . people who had never had sex with anyone, never gotten drunk or never missed church on Sunday.”

If Marilyn Quayle may have stepped over the line in her remarks, it may be because the nation has so few guideposts on how to publicly discuss such sensitive issues.

Even many of the post-liberal Democratic thinkers clustered around Clinton agree that government should acknowledge in its policy that research shows children typically thrive most in a two-parent family; the hard part is doing that without seeming to condemn other living arrangements.

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It’s also unclear how anxious voters are for guidance from public officials about issues they rarely discuss with anyone but their closest intimates. “People are much less interested in lectures about what their family should look like and much more in hearing what you’re going to do to improve the economy so your family can survive,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Despite such risks, Republican strategists insist they intend to press this debate through the fall. “In fact, society and public leaders can’t really be neutral on these issues,” says Bill Kristol, the vice president’s chief of staff. “Everything we do in public life is based explicitly or implicitly on judgments about what we think is appropriate.”

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