N.J. Governor Urges GOP to Strip Anti-Abortion Plank : Politics: Whitman counsels her party to let voters know that ‘extremists’ are not in control. She also advises caution on welfare reform.

Plunging into a sharpening debate over the political role of religious conservatives, Christine Todd Whitman, the Republican governor of New Jersey, Monday called on the GOP to delete the anti-abortion plank from its 1996 platform and warned that the party must convince voters it has not been captured by “extremists.”

In a breakfast interview with Times reporters and editors, Whitman also counseled the party to move cautiously on efforts to discourage out-of-wedlock births by cutting welfare benefits.

Though New Jersey was the first state to deny additional benefits to women who have children while already on welfare, Whitman said it is not yet clear whether the program--which went into effect last August--is working. Until more evidence is in, she said, it would be premature to require all states to adopt the so-called family cap, as Republicans in Congress have proposed.

“What works in New Jersey isn’t necessarily going to work in Nevada or Texas,” she said. “We (governors) need to have the ability to address the problems as we see them.”

Whitman, who emerged as a rising GOP star last fall with her come-from-behind win over Democratic incumbent James J. Florio, dismissed as “silly and premature” talk that she might seek a spot on the 1996 GOP presidential ticket. But in a brisk, assured presentation, she signaled an intent to make her presence felt in the sharpening intraparty discussions over abortion, welfare reform and the role of religious conservatives.

On each of those issues, Whitman--a fiscal conservative who has pushed through an across-the-board reduction in state income taxes--came down firmly on the side of the party’s outnumbered moderate wing. (At one point, she referred to herself as a “Rockefeller Republican”--a political species of Northeastern moderate Republican usually considered almost extinct.)

Whitman said that she believes a moderate Republican could win the party’s presidential nomination--but that it may first take another electoral disaster, like the 1964 wipe-out of Barry Goldwater, to dislodge the party’s dominant conservative wing.

“We’ve got to understand what it takes to win nationally, and that’s why . . . it may take another year like ’64 to really convince people that extremism, as perceived or real, is not going to win. It cannot win nationally,” she said.

On the party’s most divisive social issue, Whitman called for the GOP in 1996 to abandon entirely the rigid anti-abortion position in its party platform. “I would hope . . . there’s going to be enough of a voice to get that plank knocked out of the platform entirely,” she said. “It’s not a partisan political issue, and it doesn’t belong in a party platform.”

Whitman, though, acknowledged that the increasing prominence of religious conservatives in the GOP would make it difficult to change the party’s direction on abortion. “Of course, the trouble with it is that as you look at people like the religious right . . . , they can only win in caucuses and they can only win in conventions and platform committee meetings,” she said. “That’s where they can concentrate their forces.”

In some instances, Whitman said, critics have been too quick to label conservative victories as a “takeover” of the GOP by religious conservatives. But she criticized the tone of the 1992 GOP convention, where social conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and televangelist Pat Robertson played prominent roles. “I think the way the party presented its face at the convention in Houston (in 1992) really predetermined the election,” she said.

And, she said, the party had to make clear its independence from “extremists . . . (who) have (only) one or two issues about which they care. . . . We’re going to have to be very careful as we move forward to ensure that the public knows there’s a lot more to the Republican Party than that,” she said.

On welfare, Whitman also struck a centrist note. In addition to counseling caution on expansion of the family cap proposal, she also expressed doubts about another priority of conservatives in Washington: cutting off benefits entirely to young women who bear children out of wedlock.

While indicating that she might support allowing states to experiment with such an approach--which is based on proposals from conservative social policy analyst Charles Murray--she questioned its premise that eliminating welfare benefits would significantly discourage out-of-wedlock births.

“It goes far beyond, I believe, just the dollars that come in,” she said. “That’s not the incentive for the majority of those children that are having children.”

On immigration--another issue that has polarized the GOP--Whitman said that New Jersey would join legal efforts by California, Florida and other states to compel the federal government to reimburse them for providing services to illegal immigrants. But, while insisting that she was not criticizing California Gov. Pete Wilson, Whitman clearly distanced herself from his sharp rhetoric on the issue, saying it is easy for leaders to “fan the flames” with “a little demagoguery.”

She added: “When you lead a state that has 150 different languages spoken in it, you want to understand how important immigration has been and where our strength is and our diversity.”