Bush Campaign Hits Gingrich on Allen Remarks

The Bush campaign on Wednesday repudiated the recent attempt by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich to link beleaguered filmmaker Woody Allen to the Democratic Party platform, again illustrating the sensitive and complex nature of the “family values” issue that has helped fuel the President’s reelection drive.

On one hand, Republican strategists say that hammering away at emotionally charged matters involving morality and personal behavior helps energize the GOP’s conservative base. It also may remind less ideologically committed voters of the character questions that have dogged Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.

On the other hand, if the thrust on values misses its mark--as many observers believe Gingrich’s remarks did--the issue can leave the Republicans vulnerable to charges of sleaze mongering.

“To associate Woody Allen with (Clinton) runs the risk of voters deciding that this steps over the line, because there is no public association between the two,” said University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Jamieson, author of the book, “Dirty Politics.”

It was to stave off such a voter backlash that prompted Charles Black, a senior adviser to the Bush campaign, to take the unusual step of sharply criticizing the comments Gingrich made Saturday in his home state of Georgia as he introduced the President at a campaign rally.

“In no way did he speak for the President,” Black told reporters at a breakfast in Washington Wednesday. “And we don’t approve of those remarks and that has been conveyed to him.”

Black added that he himself had spoken to Gingrich about the incident.

But Gingrich, who spoke at last week’s Republican National Convention and serves as honorary co-chair for the Bush campaign in Georgia, denied that he had heard from anyone in the Bush campaign on this subject.

“I am independently elected,” he said. “I am not on the campaign staff.”

Black, for his part, stuck to his story that he told Gingrich that his reference to a “Woody Allen plank” in the Democratic platform was “a bad example” to use against Clinton.

In his controversial remarks Saturday, Gingrich said, “Woody Allen having non-incest with a non-daughter to whom he was a non-father because they were a non-family fits the Democratic platform perfectly.”

Gingrich on Wednesday continued to claim that his comments about Allen--who recently acknowledged a romantic involvement with the adoptive daughter of his longtime lover, Mia Farrow--were intended to make the point that Democrats do not give sufficient recognition to the family as a social institution.

Gingrich maintained that instead of bolstering families, Democrats prefer to rely on bureaucracies to deal with social problems. “I think that’s a core difference between the parties,” he said.

Gingrich also said that one reason he referred to Allen was to show that the GOP emphasis on family values was not meant solely to disparage homosexuals, as has been charged. “Here is a person who is not a homosexual,” Gingrich said of Allen, “who is involved in a cluttered situation.”

On Saturday, White House officials did not move to distance themselves from Gingrich’s remarks. When asked about them, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said, “It’s a free country. He can say whatever he wants.”

Black’s disavowal of Gingrich’s remarks on Wednesday recalled previous Bush campaign reversals in recent weeks. In one case, the President himself criticized a top campaign aide, Mary Matalin, for issuing a press release that recycled attacks on Clinton’s character.

And First Lady Barbara Bush took exception when Republican National Chairman Richard N. Bond contended that Clinton’s wife, Hillary, had once “likened marriage and the family to slavery.”

This pattern has prompted some Democrats to accuse the Bush campaign of trying to have it both ways--allowing damaging charges to be aired without suffering the consequences of public disapproval. But it has left other Democrats just bemused.

“I go back and forth, in all honesty,” said Clinton adviser Sam Popkin, a political scientist at UC-San Diego. “Some days I think (the Republicans) are like an orchestra with a great conductor and a little heavy metal and a little sweetness-and-light. And other days I just think they’re totally out of control.”

Some analysts expressed little surprise that Republicans such as Gingrich were tempted by the example of Allen’s personal difficulties, saying it reinforces the criticisms Vice President Dan Quayle launched earlier this year against what he described as a “cultural elite.”

“It helps advance Quayle’s argument that the whole Hollywood community has values that it imposes through the mass culture on an unwilling electorate,” said Jamieson.

She added, “Woody Allen is the non-fictional version of Murphy Brown,” a reference to the television character that Quayle charged glorified single motherhood.

No sooner did the Allen/Farrow story make headlines than GOP operatives on the floor of last week’s convention devised a sign proclaiming: “Woody Allen is Bill Clinton’s family values adviser.”

But other Republicans believe that the party hardly needed Allen to promote the cause of traditional values at their convention. These GOP leaders say that no one was more deft at this than the President himself, who in his acceptance address recalled standing watch as a young naval aviator on the submarine that had rescued him from the Pacific Ocean after his plane had crashed.

“I would stand there,” Bush said, “and I would think about friends I lost, a country I loved and about a girl named Barbara.”

Even Democrats, who frequently have found themselves on the defensive in the values debate, concede that some form of discussion about these concerns is legitimate during the presidential campaign.

“There is a legitimate case to be made by a moderate Republican that there might be better ways to protect children from alcoholic and abusive parents than Hillary Clinton’s way, which is to emphasize legal rights,” said Popkin.

He also said discussion of the Democratic nominee’s character, as reflected by his values, met the natural need for voters to learn more about a politician who was little known nationally when he began seeking the presidency.

“It is not subversive of our democracy to talk about Clinton’s personal life,” Popkin said.

What Popkin and other Democrats do object to is what they consider the ham-handed style in which Gingrich and other Republicans have conducted the values debate. But Popkin contended that these tactics have caused more harm to the Republicans and Bush than to the Democrats and Clinton.

“This has been a plus for us,” said Popkin, asserting that the “mud wrestling” of the values debate has stained the “Rose Garden aura” of the presidency.