PULPIT BULLIES : When the Big Tent Becomes a Revival Meeting

Now that Labor Day is upon us, with the economy in the first triple-dip downturn since the 1930s, George Bush and his aides confront a stark reality: Summer was a mess, the GOP convention was a debacle and the odds on retaining the White House seem to be souring.

Not only did the “family-values” convention fail to divert voters from the soft economy, it created a new Republican Achilles’ heel--the extent that family values have become intertwined with the Religious Right’s growing influence within the GOP. Embarrassed, the Bush campaign has backpedaled to a familiar technique of spreading fear about the opposition.

So far, it hasn’t worked. But it still might--especially if Bill Clinton continues to flounder over questions involving his attempts to avoid miliary service during the Vietnam War. If the same GOP attack skills and communications technology had existed in 1932, even Depression-saddled Herbert Hoover might have had a shot at defeating Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt as a secret cripple, a proponent of legalized liquor and an immoral philanderer. Stuff like this does work.

For now, however, negative public reaction to the farthest-right GOP convention since 1964--with its vista of cultural civil war, gimmick-level economics and preachers reviewing the platform for unintended references to the Antichrist--has dealt Bush almost as big a blow as continuing economic weakness.

If the message of Houston lingers as an albatross, Bush may find that he made a fatal error in rallying the hard right at the expense of the center. He might have given Clinton an opportunity not just to win, but to reshape U.S. politics.

To begin with, the GOP’s pulpit-packaged morality doesn’t match ordinary “family values.” Besides confirming dissatisfaction with Houston’s omission of serious economic proposals, surveys showed voters favor reinforcing family values with increased spending on education, day care and health, not attacks on gays.

The renewed role of Religious Right leaders like televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell has the potential to create great political damage. At least 10 state delegations included large numbers of Religious Right supporters, as did the platform committee. In fact, Robertson’s allies succeeded in modifying reference to the “new world order” for fear of endorsing the work of the Antichrist.

Future historians will have a field day. Taken together with speeches by GOP presidential contender Patrick J. Buchanan and Vice President Dan Quayle all but calling for a cultural civil war, the Houston convention week may well mark the late 20th-Century heyday of Religious Right influence within a major political party. There’s been nothing comparable in the GOP since 1964--and perhaps not since the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan and the Anti-Saloon League in the 1920s.

By rights, Ivy Leaguer George Bush, who began his political career as a supporter of Planned Parenthood, civil rights and sedate Episcopal religion, should have been the last architect of such a deal. Yet, when Bush left Connecticut for Texas 40-odd years ago, he began a pattern of striking flexibility on cultural political issues. In a 1964 Senate race, for example, he opposed federal civil-rights legislation; by 1966, he favored it.

Nor has Bush’s high-church Episcopal religion kept him from pandering to fundamentalists. In 1987, briefly fearful that his imminent GOP presidential nomination bid would be undercut by Robertson supporters in a Florida GOP straw poll, he did something that would flabbergast the typical upper-crust New Englander: He made a half-hour television film about how he, George Herbert Walker Bush, had been born again!

Part of Bush’s opportunism reflected bad timing. Back in the late 1970s and in 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan made support for “born-again” politics pay at the polls, Bush had kept his distance. Only in the 1980s, when he emerged as Ronald Reagan’s heir, did Bush start allying himself with social-issue conservatives and the Religious Right.

Social-issue conservatives, however, wouldn’t trust Bush until he delivered constitutional amendment endorsements and platform commitments. Furthermore, while Reagan, an intuitive first-class politician, had struck his deal with the Religious Right when it was a rising force, Bush was forced to cement his alliance when his new friends were on the decline. By 1992, Falwell’s Moral Majority had dissolved; televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart had been hurt by scandals, and new Supreme Court decisions on abortion turned the tide against the Religious Right’s constitutional amendment.

By pushing “family values” to the fore, the GOP was, of course, trying to de-emphasize economics. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, the GOP platform had opened with a discussion of taxes, jobs and free enterprise. This time, given Bush’s broken pledge on taxes and the longest economic downturn of any Administration since Hoover’s, the platform took 29 pages to get to the economy.

But in economics, too, the GOP convention marked a little-understood shift to the right. As part of the party’s attempt to exonerate itself for the economic debacle, Houston orators tried to blame the Democrats because they would not pass Bush’s proposals to reduce capital-gains taxes. This cut, however, would chiefly benefit the upper brackets, a recurrent bias that produced Houston’s one economic constant. Bush’s proposal to let taxpayers earmark up to 10% of their income-tax payments for deficit reduction, which would then require linked federal spending cuts, had a similar thrust.

Consider: Because the share of total U.S. income going to the richest 1% of Americans jumped from 8% to 12% in the 1980s, their share of total income taxes paid also jumped, from 18% to 27%. So if each person in the top group earmarked 10% a year, they could force a major deficit reduction paid for by slashing programs for the poor and middle class.

Since the convention, voter dismay has been well catalogued. One poll showed only 3% of Americans felt family values should be the major campaign issue, while 2-1 majorities dismissed Bush’s economic proposals as mere “politics.” Still another survey showed a plurality of voters thought less of the GOP after the convention, and most polls show Clinton maintaining a double-digit lead.

As a result, the White House has backed away from August’s cultural warfare themes in favor of a more familiar approach: trying to make voters afraid of Clinton and the Democrats. But if the Democrats are smart--and if Clinton can ride out further controversy over his draft-board tactics and marital fidelity--the panicked GOP could be conceding them an important chance to build a new “vital center” in U.S. politics.