NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Having Success in Neutralizing ‘Values’ Issue

Before rain cleared the crowd from the courthouse square here Monday morning, Bill Clinton illustrated his strategy to win back the middle-class voters who have largely rejected the Democrats in national campaigns since 1968.

He tried to put himself squarely on the side of “good solid mainstream Americans” with a biting economic populism that accused President Bush of ignoring working Americans and favoring the rich. But just as important was his effort to identify with small-town values and the symbols of middle America, from Independence’s hometown hero, Harry S. Truman, to the Southern 500 stock car race, where Clinton appeared Sunday.

The goal is to neutralize divisive social issues that have favored the GOP in the past. Many analysts say this strategy appears to be blunting the attacks on questions of culture and values that Republicans have used to successfully woo middle-class voters since Richard M. Nixon’s appeals to “the silent majority.”

The furious attempt at the Republican Convention last month to portray Clinton as an enemy of traditional family values “is not working,” says Fred Siegel, an historian at The Cooper Union in New York who has studied the role of cultural issues in the decline of the Democratic presidential coalition. “The Republicans are in trouble.”

Republican strategists are still confident that doubts about Clinton’s character--particularly the continuing questions about his efforts to avoid serving in Vietnam--and his liberal positions on issues such as abortion and gay rights will cost him with socially conservative voters like those at Sunday’s race in Darlington, S.C. When Clinton stepped onto the track, intermittent shouts of “cheater” and “draft dodger” rang out from the beery, nearly all-white crowd in the grandstand.

But polls show Clinton running much better with Southern whites and Northern Catholics--the principal target for the GOP values offensive--than Michael S. Dukakis and Walter Mondale. Among all so-called Reagan Democrats, Clinton led Bush by nearly three-to-one in the last Times Poll.

Some GOP operatives now fear that the party’s efforts to peel away such groups with a harsh message on social issues is hurting it among young voters and women, particularly working women. Clinton himself said Monday that Republican criticism of Hillary Clinton was really aimed at all women “who make the tough choices” to balance parenthood and careers.

Since the Republican Convention--which rang with repeated attacks on homosexuals and efforts to portray Clinton as anti-family--both President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle have signaled their eagerness to tone down and redirect the family values debate.

In sharp contrast to the convention’s often slashing tone, Bush last Saturday in North Carolina discussed family values in language so bland that it could have been lifted from a Hallmark greeting card. In an interview on NBC Sunday night, Bush insisted that he was not trying to claim his family was superior to Clinton’s--and went out of his way to praise single mothers.

This Republican shift in course marks a milestone in the longstanding cultural battle between the parties.

One cornerstone of recent GOP success in presidential politics has been its ability to convince economically squeezed middle-class voters that Democrats disparaged their values on social and foreign policy issues. That process reached a crescendo in 1988 when Bush fatally portrayed Dukakis as a Harvard Yard elitist by highlighting his liberal social views--symbolized by the furlough of convicted Massachusetts murderer Willie Horton, who raped a woman after his release.

But in this year’s campaign, virtually all of the leading “wedge” issues employed by Republicans over the last two decades have faded. The end of the Cold War has eliminated anti-communism as a concern. By signing a civil rights bill that he had earlier condemned as quota legislation, Bush removed affirmative action from the debate. And Clinton’s support of both the death penalty and mandatory work requirements for welfare recipients have effectively eliminated both of those issues.

As a result, the GOP has been forced to mount its new offensives behind issues like gay rights and attacks on the Hollywood cultural elite, where its political advantage is much less clear.

“These just aren’t the unifying themes they have struck in the past,” says independent pollster Andrew Kohut. “Lots of people are afraid of Willie Horton; not nearly as many people have the same view of Murphy Brown as Dan Quayle does.”

Issues such as the death penalty and affirmative action worked so well for Republicans in past national campaigns because they highlighted areas where liberal orthodoxy clashed with overwhelming majorities of public opinion. Nearly four-fifths of the public supports the death penalty and mandatory work requirements for welfare recipients; an equal number oppose racial hiring preferences.

But among the issues advanced under this year’s family values agenda, the GOP enjoys such an overwhelming advantage only on permitting school prayer--which Bush has touted infrequently. On the other issues Bush and Quayle have raised, opinion is closely divided--or the White House has tied itself to a minority position.

At least two-thirds of the public opposes the outright ban on abortion that Bush and Quayle support. In a recent New York Times/CBS survey, four-fifths of Americans said they opposed employment discrimination against homosexuals. Even on the most inflammatory case--allowing school boards to fire homosexual teachers--opinion is split roughly evenly. In Gallup surveys, pluralities have indicated support for allowing schools to distribute condoms to students, even without parental permission.

A majority of Americans support granting parents government vouchers to help send their children to private schools--as Bush has proposed--but even Republicans acknowledge that support is soft. Says Fred Steeper, Bush’s pollster: “Voters worry everyone will go to private schools, and the public schools will be empty, and they don’t want that.”

Perhaps sensing that the party’s current cultural agenda lacks the punch of its predecessors, the White House has strained to shoehorn some of the older issues back into the race.

Though the Arkansas governor has presided over four executions, Quayle recently maintained that Clinton could not be trusted to support capital punishment because he has indicated he might appoint New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a death penalty opponent, to the Supreme Court. Bush has alleged that Clinton’s proposal to require welfare recipients to work after two years on the rolls would breed dependency because it would establish government jobs for those who cannot find private employment.

None of these arguments, though, has caught fire the way Bush’s attacks on Dukakis did four years ago.

Some Democrats caution that Clinton could still stumble in these cultural divides, particularly in parts of the South, Pennsylvania and Michigan--battleground states with politically active anti-abortion movements.

More ominously, some Democratic insiders fear that continuing questions about Clinton’s efforts to avoid service in Vietnam could evolve into a larger GOP attack on his patriotism and veracity, particularly in the South. The cries of “draft dodger” drifting from the grandstand in South Carolina Sunday represented their worst fears; on the other hand, interviews with a dozen fans at Sunday’s race--including several planning to vote for Bush--found several leaning toward Clinton and little concern about the draft issue.

“What people did in the past ain’t got nothing to do with the future,” shrugged Ricky Price, a textile worker from Jefferson, South Carolina.

Even as they pursue these attacks against Clinton, there are indications that the GOP, for the first time in years, is worried that its own ticket may be stamped as extremist on cultural issues.

In a speech last week, Quayle tried to redefine the family issue away from lifestyle questions, such as single motherhood, toward more conventional matters of public policy, such as educational choice and taxes. Bush followed that approach on NBC Sunday. “Quayle’s speech was an attempt to get the family values issue back on track,” said one senior Administration official. “It was handled a little ham-handedly at the convention and after the convention.”

In the end, most analysts in both parties believe none of the social issues still dividing the two candidates are compelling enough to break through the voters’ overwhelming focus on the economy.

To bring up family values in the midst of such economic anxiety “is almost like saying we have no clothes on the other issue so we have to change the subject,” worries David B. Hill, a Houston-based Republican pollster.

Ultimately, this may suit both campaigns just fine. With so many social issues neutered, many Republican strategists believe their best chance of catching Clinton is to tag him as a tax-and-spend liberal whose economic plan will only make things worse--a theme that has emerged as Bush’s central argument.

Likewise, Democratic strategists want only to neutralize social issues so they can make the race a referendum on the simple, lacerating question that Clinton summoned in his speech here Monday: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?