After Bush, the GOP’s Longer-Term Prospects Leave Party Faithful Cold : 1996: The next generation of Republican presidential hopefuls is hyper-ambitious, but they don’t measure up to their elders’ stature.

A generational shift is under way in Republican presidential politics, one that will have a fractious impact on the GOP when the 1992 election is over and the campaign for President, 1996, begins in earnest. This shift provided the political subtext of last month’s Republican National Convention.

Delegates who gathered in Houston to renominate George Bush for President were also bidding bon voyage to their last presidential nominee from the World War II generation. For many Republicans, Houston was bittersweet; the triumphant closing of the political case against communism they had made for nearly four decades, the end of a conservative era in which they dominated American politics at the national level, despite setbacks along the way. While most departed feeling reasonably confident the President would defeat Bill Clinton, there was considerably less optimism concerning the party’s longer-term prospects.

The front-runner for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, after all, is and will be Vice President Dan Quayle. Others of the next generation are, if anything, less experienced and considerably less flexible in their ideological positions. As one senior Republican operative put it, “(Patrick J.) Buchanan giving that speech after losing 33 primaries in a row is one kind of message. The press goes wild, but it’s basically: ‘So what, who cares, he’s a loser.’ Buchanan giving that speech and (hypothetically) controlling 20% of the delegates (in 1996) is another kind of message altogether .”

Republicans, while engaging in rough ideological battles over the last 30 years, have delayed generational conflict by relying on a dependable pool of older, experienced men who could be counted on at crunch time. In the furthest back rooms and at the top of the ticket, the players who counted were people like Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald R. Ford, Bush, Bob Dole, Howard H. Baker Jr. and James A. Baker III. Whatever their failings, these political veterans delivered for the GOP team. Republicans won five of the last six presidential elections.

Meanwhile, the next generation of Republican presidential hopefuls have been waiting, stacked up like airplanes over LAX on a busy night. They have changed the party’s ideological cast and have seized control of most of its apparatus and platform writings, but they have never really been in charge of the whole show. Indeed, it is somehow understood that the Jack Kemps, the William Bennetts, the Newt Gingrichs, the Pat Robertsons, the Vin Webers, the Buchanans and others are always more than welcome to join the discussion, but that final decisions--serious decisions--are made without them. The pool of elders meets alone, in that way-back room, and does the deal.

Which was fine, for a while. Republicans are nothing if not respectful of their elders. The 1996 candidates were careful to observe these rules of Republican etiquette at the convention, paying due deference to Presidents Bush and Reagan (Dad’s a great man! So’s Granddad.) and singing hymns to their achievements, real or imagined.

Deference, however, is not second nature to hyper-ambitious people trying to make up for lost time and delayed opportunity. The 1996 crowd had seen stars rise and fall and disappear altogether (remember Richard G. Lugar!) during the endless run of the elders at the Big Table. So when they got to Houston, the hopefuls were ready to get on with the real business of their convention--the kick-off of the 1996 campaign.

The jousting began early with the battle for the keynote-address slot, which Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) eventually landed. But the battle broke out in earnest on opening night with Buchanan’s scorching address to the convention hall and an amazed television audience.

Earlier this year, Buchanan, smelling opportunity in New Hampshire and needing to establish his credentials as a candidate, had challenged Bush, to no effect. His brief moment in the New Hampshire media sun was followed by an unbroken string of crushing defeats. From the process, he had emerged as a slightly ridiculous figure--seasoned politicians wondered if he could handle basic arithmetic.

If he had trouble grasping the concept of “number of delegates needed for nominations,” Buchanan had a genuine gift for crafting and delivering the rhetoric of right-wing resentment. On the first night of the convention, he put his fellow hopefuls on notice that no one, anywhere, ever, was getting to the right of Buchanan in 1996.

The effect of Buchanan’s oration was electric and immediate. It laid down a series of markers that proved daunting to his fellow aspirants. The others, no strangers to The Red Meat Diet for Right Wingers, were stunned by the force and clarity of his challenge. He had managed to set the terms of the debate despite the numbers that had been posted on the primary boards.

The Buchanan address cast a considerable shadow over the other Republican hopefuls, drawing as it did most of the media attention and the wrap-up commentary. Gramm’s keynote address bombed in Buchanan’s wake, as did Gingrich’s relatively tame assault on Godless Liberals and Liberal Democrats. Robertson, who came to Houston with the allegiance of roughly 15% of the delegates, pumped his folksy blend of religious fundamentalism and right-wing political rhetoric. While Buchanan touts his “brigades” at every available opportunity, it is Robertson’s army that continues to capture, precinct by precinct, control of local Republican organizations across the country.

Quayle gained some altitude at the convention, delivering a strong speech, reminding conservatives of his strong service to the cause and priming the pump for the President’s address. Quayle played his cards well in Houston and seemed far more relaxed and self-assured than four years ago.

Other hopefuls chose a different course. Jack Kemp was generous in his appeal, optimistic about the future and warmly received by those for whom Buchanan straight-up is too strong by half. Kemp’s speech was one of the few that worked both in the convention hall and on television. He played off the hard edges of Buchanan with confidence and grace. And in case anyone missed the point, he used television interviews to make it clear that he did not share Buchanan’s apocalyptic world-view.

Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld used the issue of choice on abortion to separate himself from the pack. California Gov. Pete Wilson beamed in by satellite, the chief executive dealing with the budget nightmare leading the local news every night. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney hunkered down at the Pentagon, taking care of business. Baker kept a low profile at the Houstonian Hotel, attending to the White House purge and the Bush reelection effort. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was out of the mix. The agenda was thus filled up by the next generation’s right wing.

Republicans are right to worry about their national prospects after Bush. Left to their own devices, the new guard seems to lack a world view of sufficient scope and imagination to match the moment. The elders, at least, had a world view that connected the dots. They had made it their mission to win the Cold War. They generously empowered the awesome American economic machine. They stared down social disorder. They explored the heavens. And they made their points about the decline of civilized behavior and the emptiness of “moral equivalence.” If they were not always successful or coherent, they addressed the large issues in a big way.

What was disconcerting in Houston was the narrow appeal of those who dominated the kick-off of the 1996 Republican campaign. That narrow appeal was codified in the party’s platform. The platform language on immigration so angered the President’s grandson, George P. Bush, whose mother is Mexican, that he closed his speech to the convention with clenched fist and two words: “Viva Bush!” He was talking about his grandfather, but he was also addressing a larger concern. At the beginning of the 1996 GOP presidential campaign, the candidates seem to have largely forgotten what made their elders so successful. The next generation will be required to confront Buchanan’s challenge, lest they be consumed by it. They might listen to George P. Bush. His world is bigger, and eventually, better, than the narrow one their rhetoric inhabited in Houston.