Dole Advances in Courtship of Conservatives

Sen. Bob Dole’s assiduous efforts to curry favor with religious and social conservatives--a major theme of his presidential campaign for the last few months--appears to be paying off, yielding words of praise from leaders of the conservative movement and preventing his Republican rivals from monopolizing the support of this key GOP primary voting bloc.

In the past several weeks, the Senate majority leader has engineered the defeat of surgeon general nominee Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. because Foster supports abortion rights, assailed Hollywood for polluting the culture with depraved movies and music and hired the former deputy director of the Christian Coalition as a top campaign official. He speaks often on school choice and tax breaks for families--two subjects near to the hearts of social conservatives.

Dole’s support among conservatives could melt over time--particularly if he begins to show signs of moving back to the center later in the campaign, as aides to his rivals predict he will. For now, however, Dole appears to be succeeding in wooing them--a major mission for the Kansas Republican for several reasons.

Dole’s chief pollster, Bill McInturff, believes that religious conservatives make up 25% of the Republican primary electorate, economic conservatives about 45% and moderates another 30%. Simply to start an effective challenge to Dole’s early lead, one of his rivals would have to capture a majority of at least one of those groups. But for now, Dole wins a plurality of each of them, McInturff contends.

Dole has yet to appeal directly to social conservative voters for money, in part because he’s having no trouble meeting his fund-raising goals with big-dollar donors and in part because targeted direct-mail campaigns--the only reliable way of reaching the religious right--are expensive.

But the real benefit of conservative activists is that they can bring to a campaign a level of enthusiasm and organization matched by few other groups.

To tap that rich vein of doorbell ringers and envelope stuffers, Dole recently hired Judy Haynes, the 48-year-old former North Carolina beauty parlor owner who for the last five years has been a top field organizer for the Chesapeake, Va.-based Christian Coalition. Members of the coalition and other religious conservatives are warming to Dole because “his issues are our issues,” Haynes said, citing in particular abortion, education and the degradation of the culture.

“He’s concerned about the family, and it’s working,” she said in an interview last week at Dole’s headquarters in Washington, where she now serves as deputy political director. “As long as he stays on those issues, he can’t lose.”

But Haynes concedes that while she and other leaders of the religious right are increasingly comfortable with Dole, many in the movement’s rank and file are still tentative, having been burned before by politicians, such as former President George Bush, who courted them during his campaigns but, activists argued, abandoned their concerns once in office.

“I think there are still a lot of open minds about the race as far as religious conservatives are concerned,” Haynes said. “They are a much more sophisticated voting bloc than before. They’re not the gullible lambs they were at one point. They’ve been bruised over the years.”

Dole’s recent speeches have won plaudits from such prominent conservative spokesmen as Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, and Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, but, as Haynes noted, skepticism continues at the grass roots about whether Dole, a government insider, deal-maker and political pragmatist, has genuinely embraced their cause.

“Dole clearly is doing well with the leaders of the Christian right, but the foot soldiers are more absolutist, more purist,” said an adviser to another Republican candidate. Among the conservative evangelicals who dominate religious conservative groups, “some of them think he’s . . . maybe even a liberal,” the adviser added.

Dole has long been popular among Republican business leaders and has enjoyed at least modest support from the party’s moderate-to-liberal wing because of his clout in Congress. Only recently, however, has he begun to engender any enthusiasm among conservative family-values advocates.

While Dole may never be able to convince such voters that he is truly one of them, his real motivation is to “prevent another candidate from building a candidacy around this constituency,” Reed said, citing in particular Patrick J. Buchanan and U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who are also aggressively courting the religious right. “It’s the same as a major-league team in a pennant race drafting a star shortstop so another team doesn’t get him,” he said.

So far, that approach appears to be working. “One of the real surprises of our data, starting last fall, was how strong Sen. Dole is with that chunk of the electorate,” McInturff said. Partly as a result, Gramm, who had hoped to establish himself as the conservative alternative to Dole, has had considerable difficulty in recent weeks.

At the same time, however, many conservatives remain somewhat skeptical of Dole--a skepticism that other campaigns have sought to nurture.

“There is a short-term effect that he is benefiting from right now, and that is that his Hollywood speech and Foster and so forth have prevented social conservatives from coalescing around any of the alternatives,” said Bauer, who was a mid-level policy adviser in the Ronald Reagan Administration.

“But in the longer term, my sense is that the pro-family movement is still looking for somebody who will make their heart beat faster. Dole is becoming more and more acceptable to them, but there’s still the possibility that they might gravitate to another candidate,” he added.

Some conservatives are concerned that Dole might move to the left after securing the nomination.

Mark Merritt, a strategist for Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and a former aide to Oliver L. North’s Senate campaign in Virginia, said that Dole runs a substantial risk by so obviously appealing for the support of social conservatives: They are voters with long memories and no tolerance for being used and discarded.

“The danger is that although Dole’s recent shift to the right will enhance his support for now, people will stop giving if they see him shifting back to the left and betraying their trust,” Merritt said.

“These are some of best-educated, most-informed voters there are. They subscribe to conservative publications, they watch TV news, they’re very active politically. They can turn off on a dime if they see a candidate they perceive as a conservative turn to the left. And they will see very quickly, especially someone with Dole’s high profile,” he said.

Suspicions about such a switch have led some conservative leaders to point anxiously at Dole’s powerful chief of staff, Sheila Burke, who has been quoted as describing herself as a “moderate.”

Bauer said that some in the traditional values movement do not consider Burke sufficiently conservative on issues such as welfare and abortion.

In the meantime, however, just as much as other groups within the party, leaders of the Christian right want to get aboard a winning campaign early.

“They’re sucking up [to Dole] like there’s no tomorrow,” contended Roger Stone, a strategist for Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who has focused his campaign for the nomination on combatting the conservatives’ clout within the party. “It’s a classic case of mutual use. They want to be with a winner.”