Fault Lines in GOP Race May Erode Party’s Ability to Win White House

As the Republicans claw and scratch toward tonight’s Iowa caucus, they may all be losing sight of the big picture. The point of the nomination process that begins in earnest here is to find a candidate who can beat Bill Clinton. But the structure that’s now settling over the race may be pointing them directly away from that goal.

Republicans still have many reasons to feel optimistic about their prospects next fall. Most often a party that has suffered a congressional defeat as devastating as the pasting the Democrats absorbed in 1994 has gone on to lose the White House two years later. And President Clinton’s own political standing remains tenuous.

Though he leads GOP front-runner Bob Dole in early polls measuring sentiment about next fall’s election, the public continues to give Clinton equivocal grades for his performance. Republican pollster Ed Goeas and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake jointly released a new survey here last week in which exactly half of Americans said they’d like to give a new person a chance in the White House; just 41% said Clinton deserves reelection.

But despite all that, Clinton is unquestionably stronger than appeared possible one year ago. And several trends are emerging in the GOP race that could make him stronger yet. Three are most important.

Most obvious is the astoundingly negative character of the GOP campaign so far. The only place Iowans find more mud than on their farms--which are basking in a welcome midwinter thaw--is on their televisions and radios. At any given moment, you can find ads from Bob Dole attacking Steve Forbes, and vice versa; ads from Forbes attacking Lamar Alexander or Phil Gramm; and ads from Alexander dismissing Dole and Forbes as Washington and Wall Street insiders.

Forbes, in particular, has taken an AK-47 approach to the campaign, spraying ads at rivals above, below and beside him in the polls. His media strategy appears to be modeled after the old biker T-shirt saying: Kill them all, and let God sort it out.

Attacks during the presidential primaries are nothing new, and not typically fatal. Paul Tsongas’ description of Clinton as a “pander bear” in 1992 did not hurt him much against George Bush. But other times, the internecine battles of the spring have left the survivors vulnerable to the opposition party in the fall. The best recent example came in 1984, when Gary Hart portrayed Walter Mondale as a prisoner of the past beholden to special interests--locking in an image that Ronald Reagan exploited in the general election.

Something similar may be happening as the Republican candidates relentlessly tag Dole as an inveterate trimmer, a tired compromiser who lacks vision and principle. It will be difficult for Dole to make that argument against Clinton now that his opponents have made it so effectively against him.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, the states where voters have been heavily exposed to these arguments, it’s now common for even Republican activists to see Dole precisely through the negative prism his opponents have constructed. “Dole is probably a good guy,” says Chuck Davis, a Des Moines insurance salesman backing Patrick J. Buchanan. “But he’s too establishment, too old, too compromised.”

Even more damage has been done to the flat tax. Before the primaries, most GOP strategists expected the flat tax to be a cornerstone of the party’s general election message. But the other candidates’ assault on Forbes’ version of the idea may have strangled it in its crib. “By the time we come out of New Hampshire, the flat tax isn’t going to have much appeal left,” predicts Dan Pero, Alexander’s campaign manager. The Republican campaign this fall will probably include some emphasis on tax simplification--but the talk is likely to be more vague, and less central, than it earlier appeared.

Less visible than the proliferation of negative ads, but potentially even more damaging, is a second trend now gathering speed: the threat that the race will repel socially moderate voters.

Forbes is the flash point for this conflict. With an eye on Iowa’s large bloc of religious conservatives, Dole, Buchanan and Gramm are all pillorying Forbes as insufficiently pure on social issues from gay rights to abortion. (Forbes says he would try to restrict abortion, but would not attempt to ban it now because public opinion wouldn’t support such a step.)

Forbes has tried to make peace with religious conservatives by tilting to the right on abortion and saying he would accept a recommendation from the military to reverse President Clinton’s policy on gays in the military. But over the weekend, he also criticized the Christian Coalition for trying to enforce a narrow orthodoxy on abortion in the party.

This escalating dispute presses at the two deepest fault lines in the GOP. Forbes runs best among the upscale, secular, independent-minded voters who abandoned the GOP in droves for Ross Perot in 1992 but then returned to help power the party’s capture of Congress in 1994. Forbes’ biggest problems are with religious conservatives who are critical to the GOP’s fortunes--but always sensitive to signs the party is sublimating their concerns.

If Forbes remains a viable candidate, the signs point toward a race that pits these two volatile segments of the GOP coalition directly against each other. While social conservative leaders are increasingly critical of Forbes, many centrist Republicans here are increasingly irritated at their attacks. At a rally for Forbes in Ames on Saturday night, Dave Bluder, a Des Moines banker, rose from the crowd and said pointedly: “I would like to say ‘God bless you,’ even though the Christian Coalition isn’t going to say it.”

In the weeks ahead, these tensions could well intensify. The likelihood that Buchanan will run well here and in New Hampshire means he’ll remain visible for weeks--pushing his call for a “cultural war” and frightening many moderates in the process. And if Forbes manages to defeat Dole in New Hampshire next week, Dole would have little choice but to run to Forbes’ right on social issues--particularly abortion--in an effort to convince hard-core partisans (especially in the South) that his challenger isn’t a “real Republican.”

“If Forbes makes it a two-person race,” then that dynamic “is inevitable,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond, a Dole supporter. Dole might even be forced into a milder version of that strategy if his principal rival turns out to be Alexander, who opposes overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Drawing a narrowing circle on social issues could help Dole survive a challenge from the center in the spring--but at considerable cost if he makes it to the fall. “The tighter they draw the circle to win the primary,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “the harder it is to expand the circle in the general election.”

A third trend is also pointing Republicans in the wrong direction. To woo primary voters, almost all of the GOP candidates are promising to accelerate the stalled congressional Republican revolution. From the stump, they tumble over each other with promises to cut more spending, eliminate more departments, send more federal programs to the states, slash more regulations and scrap affirmative action.

Yet a perceptive new study for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism by Richard Harwood, an opinion analyst, suggests this militancy may be badly misreading the public eagerness for bipartisan compromise and incremental reforms, which he likens to confidence-building measures. While a series of focus groups around the nation showed general support for shrinking the federal government, Harwood found Americans divided over exactly how to implement that belief--and nervous about calls for revolution.

“There can be no mandate for wholesale change at a time when people are so torn,” he writes.

That ambivalence undergirds Clinton’s best reelection argument: that voters need him in the White House to keep congressional Republicans from rolling back government too much. When Dole says in his speeches that he “is not going to take [America] over the edge” it’s clear he understands the power of that appeal. But Dole walks a thin line, for he can also read in the attraction of Buchanan and Forbes a hunger among many Republicans for a candidate who will shake up Washington without hesitation, remorse or compromise.

That cross-pressure is now just one of several tearing at the GOP in a bitter winter Republicans may someday look back upon with regret.