GOP Hopes Rise Amid Signs of Grand Old Comeback : Politics: Off-year contests could yield big gains. Sore points remain as party activists seek fresh approaches.

Suddenly there is new life in the Grand Old Party. Six months after the Democrats kicked the stuffing out of them and took away the White House, Republicans at every level are caught up in a burst of brainstorming. They are thrashing out disagreements over abortion and other old sore points and striving to draft fresh approaches to the conundrums of a new political age.

In part these efforts are being driven by President Clinton’s fitful start in the White House and what Republicans contend is his tilt toward his party’s traditional liberalism, despite his protestations that he is a “new kind of Democrat.” His performance has given them hope that their time wandering in the political wilderness may not last as long as many had feared.

“Bill Clinton is a godsend,” argued national party chairman Haley Barbour. “I’m not being facetious when I say that he has done more to unify us than anything I have done.”

To exploit this opportunity, Barbour is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious effort to create a national message for the party by bringing together local and national leaders at grass-roots issues conferences around the country.

“I want the average Republican in every state to have the opportunity to share ideas with Republican leaders about how we can better articulate what we believe in,” he said.

Already there are some signs pointing to a possible GOP comeback. In Texas, Republican state Treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison is favored to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Robert Krueger in a special election next month.

Recent polls also give the GOP an even-money chance of taking control of the nation’s two largest cities, both longtime Democratic strongholds--Los Angeles, where Republican businessman Richard Riordan is pitted against Democratic Councilman Michael Woo next month, and New York, where 1989 GOP mayoral candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani is challenging Democratic Mayor David N. Dinkins in November.

Whatever the outcome of these off-year contests, Republicans acknowledge the need to address fundamental changes in the political landscape. And arriving at some kind of consensus will be no simple task. Divisions over some of the party’s most basic positions--such as abortion--remain profound.

For more than two decades the GOP dominated the national agenda by persuading voters they were better than the Democrats at promoting growth at home and combatting communism abroad. But all that had ended by the 1992 election with the collapse of the “Red menace” and the souring of the economy.

“We are now post-Reagan-Bush,” said William J. Bennett, a 1996 presidential prospect who was drug czar in the George Bush Administration and education secretary in the Ronald Reagan Administration. “That era is over and a new era has begun, and we don’t yet know what it means.”

As a result, Bennett said, “What we’re getting is a political version of the Council of Trent,” referring to the historic 16th-Century conclave that reformed the Roman Catholic Church. “It’s a very doctrinal debate and it’s very vigorous.”

Not to be left out, Bennett, along with three other conservative GOP stalwarts--former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp and former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber--founded an organization called Empower America to generate grass-roots support for conservative causes.

Right now, the Washington-based advocacy group, which holds its first regional conference in Milwaukee next month, is using the mails to rally its 150,000 members around the country in opposition to Clinton’s tax proposals.

Although the new Republican blueprint will not be finally written until 1996, when the party nominates its presidential standard-bearer and drafts a new platform, the broad outlines of the GOP’s principal new objectives are already emerging. A quick survey of those objectives:

* Redefine the so-called values issues to make them more relevant and less divisive.

“Don’t reject social conservatism, but don’t package it like the Salem Witch Trials,” said media strategist Michael Murphy.

Many Republicans feel that President Bush’s error in the 1992 campaign was not in promoting traditional family values but in failing to articulate much of anything else.

The economy and related concerns must be at the core of any political message. “The trouble with the 1992 convention was that it allowed the peripheral part of the message, on values, to dominate,” said Dave Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “There was nothing wrong with the notes struck, except that there was nothing else there.”

One solution to the 1992 problem now being advanced is to combine economic issues with values. “My view is that it’s not just ‘the economy, stup” said conservative spokesman Paul M. Weyrich, referring to the celebrated slogan of the Clinton presidential campaign. “It’s also the culture.”

Weyrich’s answer, offered to about 300 activists who assembled this month in Louisville, Ky., under the aegis of an organization called the Exchange Foundation: “Economic issues ought to be discussed in a cultural context.” The key question that should be asked about an economic proposal, Weyrich said, is: “How does it affect families--not, am I going to get richer?”

* Tune in to voters’ concerns.

“There is a new agenda of quality of life issues like health care, education, the environment and personal safety,” said pollster Bill McInturff, who is measuring voter attitudes on health care for the Republican National Committee. “And on these issues, except for personal safety, the Republican Party is not even on the map.

“We need to come up with ideas about how to make those things better in people’s lives.”

“The American people don’t see the Republican Party as having come up with viable alternatives to Clinton programs,” warned Arizona Sen. John McCain at a televised hearing in Washington sponsored by a group called the Republican Majority Coalition, created this year to build “a broader and more inclusionary Republican Party.”

Similarly, Republicans discussing health care reform at the Louisville conference sponsored by the Exchange Foundation came away agreeing “that what we are going to have to do is not simply shoot holes in Hillary Clinton’s plan,” according to Marty Connors, executive director of the foundation. “We have to get one ourselves.”

One idea that stirred interest in Louisville is for a new form of individual retirement account to which both employers and workers would contribute. The combined annual contributions of up to $2,500 would go to cover costs of health insurance; anything left at year’s end could be rolled over for personal use.

* Get back to the local level.

For a Republican in Democrat-run Washington, “the only right vote right now is a ‘no’ vote,” said Lamar Alexander, Bush’s former education secretary. “If we are going to win back the country, we are going to have to do it neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Alexander told the Louisville meeting of the Exchange Foundation that localities often provide ideal laboratories for testing the Republican concept of privatizing government, particularly in education.

As examples, he cited Baltimore, where nine public schools teamed up to hire an outside custodial service to cut maintenance costs, and Murfreesboro, Tenn., where parents got together to arrange a child-care program in classrooms after regular school hours.

“People are increasingly aware that they can’t look to Washington for solutions like these,” said Alexander, who, like Bennett, is considering a run for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

Welfare is another area ripe for local and state reform, Republicans believe. Pollster McInturff points to a plan hatched by Ohio Republicans to give single mothers receiving benefits through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program $64 a month more if they finish high school.

To a large degree, “the missing link between where we were in 1992 and where we want to be positioned in 1996 has got to be provided by Republican mayors and governors who are doing things,” said McInturff. “So when our nominee runs in 1996 he or she can say, ‘What I want to do nationally is what Gov. (George V.) Voinovich is doing in Ohio.’ ”

But for all the efforts going forward, no one pretends that hammering out a new GOP vision will be easy. There are too many intraparty rifts.

On foreign policy, before the end of the Cold War, Republicans were almost monolithic in their willingness to act to curb the threat of communism. But now the party is more divided over what the U.S. role should be abroad, a division pointed up by the debate over whether to intervene in Bosnia.

“I think Bosnia is very tough,” said Bennett, who expresses a reluctance about U.S. intervention. “I’m impressed by the moral arguments, but I’m still looking for the national interest.”

Another division is over the role of government. Many Republicans maintain the traditional view of government as an adversary. But Kemp, another 1996 White House prospect, argues for a government that is both “downsized” and yet activist as a catalyst in helping achieve such objectives as enterprise zones and tenant ownership of public housing.

The saying that government is best which governs least “is true as far as it goes,” Kemp said. “But I would add a comma and say, ‘That government is best which does the most to create a climate of opportunity.’ ”

But by far the sharpest division and the hardest one to heal is the rift over so-called social issues, particularly over a woman’s right to abortion. Those on each side of the issue argue on both moral and political grounds.

Contending that the party would have a hard time winning a presidential election if it abandoned its opposition to abortion, Patrick J. Buchanan, whose challenge to Bush’s renomination established him as a force to be reckoned with, said at the Republican Majority Coalition hearing: “If we walk away from that, they (the voters) will say these people (Republicans) don’t really believe in anything.”

But at the same hearing, Maryland Rep. Constance A. Morella linked the party platform’s unyielding opposition to abortion with Bush’s 1992 defeat. “Had the Republican Party platform reflected the views of rank-and-file mainstream Republicans and not the extreme, extreme right, the party would have retained the loyalty of Republicans who are traditional conservatives, liberals and libertarians,” she said.

Moreover, the opposing positions on abortion are at the core of a vast divergence in attitudes on cultural and value issues in general.

Thus, welcoming participants to the first conference of the American Cause, the educational foundation he recently set up, Buchanan reiterated the declaration of cultural war he proclaimed at the 1992 GOP convention and added: “We traditionalists and conservatives have only just begun to fight.”

For her part, Morella said of the platform that convention adopted: “It sent a message that was loud, clear, mean and intolerant across this country. If you don’t talk a certain way, raise your kids a certain way, love a certain way and pray a certain way, you are most certainly not welcome here.”

Despite the impassioned tone of the rhetoric on both sides, many feel that airing such differences is the only way they can be resolved.

“I think there is going to be a long-term debate” on the abortion issue, said Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who set up the hearing at which Morella and Buchanan were pitted against each other. “But I think it is indispensable that we start to pick up the issue and start debating it.”