Activists Limit Dole Freedom to Woo Center

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Republicans disparaged Democrats as little more than a collection of interest groups more committed to advancing their own goals than the party’s electoral prospects. But as they battle over the party platform in San Diego, Republicans are finding themselves in a similarly uncomfortable position.

Democrats struggled unsuccessfully for years to square the demands of organized labor, feminists and minority groups with their need to court the centrist voters who decide presidential campaigns. Now, Bob Dole finds himself straining to hold together a diverse and contentious party whose most dynamic grass-roots elements are at least as committed to their own agendas as to his election.

That separation of interests was emphatically demonstrated late Monday night when social conservatives on the Republican platform committee forced Dole to abandon his proposal to add language expressing “tolerance” for diverse views on abortion. The nominee-to-be insisted on Tuesday the platform panel’s action was a victory for him; few could be found who would endorse that view.

The stunning reversal marked a milestone in the drive of social conservatives to expand their influence within the GOP. But it also dealt a significant blow to Dole’s hopes of reaching out to independent and moderate Republican voters--at a time when those voters are defecting to Clinton in unusually large numbers.

Coming just after President Clinton’s decision to sign welfare reform legislation--despite objections from liberal groups--the Republican platform committee uprising illuminated the odd reversal of roles evident so far in this campaign: Clinton has enjoyed virtually untrammeled freedom to shed party orthodoxy in search of support from swing voters while pressure from the right continues to constrain Dole’s freedom to court the center.

“The party that is most successful now is the one that can best reduce--if not silence--the noise on the extremes of their party,” said Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that has attempted to reduce the influence of liberal interest groups within the Democratic Party. “And right now the Democrats are doing a better job of it.”

Just as the grass-roots energy of the environmental, civil rights, feminist and organized labor activists boosted Democrats for many years, Republicans in the past decade have benefited enormously from a political awakening among conservative Christians, gun owners and anti-tax activists. But the platform vote this week underscores the extent to which this alliance has come with an offsetting price--limited flexibility to reach out to less ideological voters.

“It is like trying to ride a wave,” said Brian Kennedy, the Iowa Republican Party chairman. “We have brought in a lot of new activists. But at the same time you have to be conscious that the issues that drive their activism are explained in a way that doesn’t turn off other segments of the electorate.”

In that difficult balancing act, Republicans in the 1990s find themselves wrestling with many of the same problems that confronted Democrats beginning in the early 1970s. Like Democrats in the era of George S. McGovern, Republicans today are in a situation where the driving force within the party is increasingly outside the party--in the issue-oriented “movement” groups that provide most of the party’s recruits and enthusiasm.

Ironically, the shift in power toward the activist groups in the GOP has come even as Clinton has reclaimed authority from Democratic interest groups. After bending to liberal interests during his first two years on issues like gay rights, crime and welfare, Clinton has sharply reversed course since the Republican landslide in 1994. Over the past year, he has aggressively courted centrist voters by breaking from party orthodoxy on such issues as the balanced budget, welfare reform, limiting death-row appeals and gay marriage.

That effort has met with considerable success: Though independents have favored Republicans in almost all presidential elections over the past 40 years, Clinton is now consistently attracting from 55% to 60% of them in national surveys. And polls show the president siphoning away as many as one-fourth of Republicans who describe themselves as moderates; in California, Clinton leads Dole among moderate Republicans, according to a recent Times poll.

Over the past several weeks, Dole has plainly struggled to reconnect with those voters without alienating his base. In the broadest sense, the desire to appeal to those voters was part of the reason for the tax-cut plan Dole released Monday.

Other moves have been more specifically targeted at moderate voters. Last month, he reversed his promise to repeal the ban on assault weapons, though in such a protracted and ambiguous manner that he managed to anger the National Rifle Assn. without sending a clear signal to moderates.

Dole had those same centrist voters in mind in early June, when he proposed to add “a declaration of tolerance” for dissenting views to the section in the GOP platform that calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

But resistance from social conservatives forced Dole into a succession of retreats; finally on Monday, he reluctantly agreed to abandon the effort altogether.

Echoing the long-standing Republican charges against their party, Democrats seized Tuesday on Dole’s abandonment of his original language to gleefully charge the presumptive GOP nominee with subservience to special interests. “With his decision to . . . adopt Pat Robertson’s and Pat Buchanan’s definition of ‘tolerance,’ all traces of Bob Dole’s reported move to the center have been erased,” said Ann Lewis, Clinton’s deputy campaign manager.

To some extent the resistance to Dole’s tolerance plank reflected diverging political strategies. While Dole’s original call for tolerance was based on the conviction that the party had to recapture voters in the center, the social-issue activists who killed it argue that the party’s best chance in November is to energize its base with an unswervingly conservative message.

“I understand the explanation [for why Dole wanted the plank],” said Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, one of the groups that led the revolt against the tolerance language. “But for a Republican to win, you’ve got to have the pro-family conservatives and the right-to-life people and the low-tax activists all mobilized.”

Notwithstanding such considerations, most observers believe the battle over the platform is less about winning control of the White House than winning control of the party. With even many Republicans privately pessimistic about Dole’s prospects, both supporters and opponents of legalized abortion within the GOP appear to be maneuvering with one eye toward the battle over the party’s direction that will immediately erupt if Dole loses.

“You have a situation where people are taking care of themselves because no one believes the nominee has any strength,” said Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.