The Incredible Shrinking Party

The challenge facing the Republicans streaming into San Diego is less to hail a vice-presidential nominee--few ever make much difference--than to find an alchemist who can turn the lead of the GOP’s 1995-96 credibility collapse back into the golden hopes of November 1994.

Bob Dole, during the last six months, has become part of the collapse. But it’s not just his flaws as a candidate; it’s also the weakness of the party, and beyond that, of the message. Dole’s running-mate selection process, like his pie-in-the-sky tax cuts, are symptoms of the problem, not solutions. And it’s this that San Diego conventioneers need to face.

The former Kansas senator, after all, isn’t the first about-to-be-finalized Republican presidential nominee of the 1990s to be told: “Please, you’re an awful campaigner and you can’t win; step aside so we can nominate somebody else.” George Bush, remember, was given that same message in newspaper columns and even in hints from friends in the summer of 1992.

Even more to the point, Bush wasn’t the only person on the 1992 ticket urged to step aside. Vice President Dan Quayle heard as much everyday: “You’re hurting the ticket; you should get out.”

During July’s doldrums, Dole wasn’t the only one one to get advice to think about folding his 1996 hand. House Speaker Newt Gingrich heard a similar refrain: “You’re so controversial, such an albatross, that you’re hurting the ticket; why don’t you step down--retire and become a professor again (or make speeches)--otherwise, the Democrats will use you to defeat other Republicans in Congress.”

Dole is a lackluster presidential candidate. Gingrich has achieved unprecedented levels of unpopularity as House speaker. Bush did take a 90% job-approval level down to 30% in just 16 months, and Quayle still reminds skeptics of a deer caught in headlights on a country highway. But it’s hard to buy the idea of four flukes. In fact, all represent the mainstream viewpoints, and also the most elevated selection processes, of the national Republican Party of the 1990s.

The same can be said about Dole’s biggest recent blunders--his back-and-forth, ever-changing position on abortion, and his election-year, Christmas-in-August, $500-billion big-contributor-tilted tax cut. These ineptitudes, straddles and seeming contradictions are not just Dole’s; both issues involve the biggest divisions and special interests in the Republican coalition. The abortion tong wars and the fiscal bad blood between the balanced-budget zealots and the tax-cut Houdinis split the GOP like a latter-day Hatfield-vs.-McCoy feud. Aristotle or Machiavelli would be having trouble, too.

With national polls showing Dole down by 16-30 points, and California statewide surveys equally cheerless, the Republican Party is heading to San Diego in the worst shape since . . . well, since 1976, when appointive President Gerald R. Ford, down 20-25 points, had to try a longshot strategy himself and picked Dole as his running mate. Dole didn’t have much impact in that year’s campaign, which the GOP lost, and the same has been true of most of the other Republican vice-presidential nominees since World War II. Most Democrats, too, for that matter.

So Dole’s insistence that he could find himself a “10” as a running mate was laughable. Even Colin L. Powell, whose selection and acceptance would have been an exciting gamble, was probably only an “8”--electoral counterforces would have begun moving immediately (like a Patrick J. Buchanan or religious-right third-party race). History, we can guess, will give Dole’s 1996 veep choice a rating between “5” and “7,” not much effect either way.

The central problem facing the Republican Party in San Diego is just that: the Republican Party. Earlier this year, its strategists were ready to write off California without understanding that the GOP presidential coalition that dominated the White House from 1968 to 1992 got its start and its two most important presidents, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, from California. Party thinkers, in turn, have been all too ready to fault message bearers--Bush, Quayle, Dole and Gingrich--to avoid coming to grips with their own tragically flawed 1995-96 blueprints. Most of all, it’s a party on the verge of losing record numbers of its own registered supporters, and for the second time in a row.

Three major July polls--national surveys by CBS and Time/CNN and a California sampling by the Los Angeles Times--have shown Dole’s share of the presidential vote among registered Republicans alone shrinking into the 60s. Some of this has been in the cards since mid-1995, when skepticism of the GOP’s congressional performance and budget-cut excesses produced major disenchantment among rank-and-file Republican voters, further confirmed by polls last autumn showing 20%-30% of registered Republicans ready to support Powell or Ross Perot as independents in November.

Yet, well into 1996, most party strategists insisted that both Bush’s weakness and Perot’s candidacy were flukes, especially given the surprise 1994 Republican capture of Congress. But the speed with which the GOP Congress itself became a flickering candle, left Bush to look less unique and Perot to become the first third-party presidential candidate of the Republican-Democratic era able to score in double digits and then come back to run again four years later.

The upshot is a Grand Old Party convening knee-high in what Bush used to call deep doo-doo. Nationally, and in barometric California, only two-thirds of registered Republicans are picking Dole in a three-way race with President Clinton and Reform Party founder Perot. Depending on the poll, 12%-20% back Perot, and another 15%-20% support Clinton. When Bush wound up with only 37.5% of the total 1992 vote for president, he drew only 71% support from his own party. Perot drew 19%, Clinton 10%.

Will the Republican nominee return to that low point in 1996--or even drop a little farther? It’s conceivable, given current intraparty dissension.

Perot’s autumn plans still aren’t clear, but his scheduling of the two-part 1996 Reform convention, to come right before and then right after the Republican’s own assemblage, suggests that he’s out to cloud Dole’s San Diego day in the sun and then lure away disenchanted Republicans with a high-powered September and October TV blitzkrieg.

The Libertarians, in turn, are also targeting the Republicans for talking small government, taxpayer protection, property rights and gun owners’ rights--and then breaking their promises. It hasn’t worked in national elections before, but the Libertarians have a semi-serious nominee this time in investment guru Harry Browne. Should right-wing libertarians decide to send Dole and the national party a message, they could push up Browne’s share by 1 1/2% or 2% of the total presidential vote, mostly at Dole’s expense.

Buchanan, Dole’s principal primary foe, seems to have been brought back into the Dole camp by the right-to-life victories on abortion. But Buchanan has also suggested that those of his supporters concerned about economic nationalist issues--the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and multinational corporations relocating jobs overseas--could go to Perot.

And on abortion, of course, the ultimate Dole and Republican acceptance of the Christian Coalition and Buchanan position has wound up offending GOP moderates, especially women. In California, where Dole looks like the weakest Republican presidential nominee since the Depression, the latest statewide Los Angeles Times poll shows 34% of Republican women supporting Clinton, rather than Dole, in a two-way race.

Finally, the importance of the religious right in the GOP, and the South’s increasing dominance of the congressional Republican Party, was a major factor in Powell’s July decision to support Dole, but not campaign for him.

By itself, a Dole loss in November to an incumbent president with a reasonably good job rating would not mean all that much. But a blow-out defeat would. Even retention of Congress by the GOP would be clouded if voters continue to feel the Gingrich crowd needs a mass rabies shot and warrants being kept in the majority only to counter a Clinton likely to be too cocky after his landslide. On the presidential level, the Balkanization hinted by the various degrees of Perotista, Buchananite, Libertarian and moderate Republican exodus could shrink the “big tent” into a pup tent.

This week in San Diego, moreover, the assembled Republican delegates are going to be addressed by the first GOP presidential nominee to lose the New Hampshire primary since Barry Goldwater Jr. (Dole), the least credible vice-president in memory (Quayle), the most unpopular House speaker of the 20th century (Gingrich) and the first Republican president in history to be defeated for reelection without carrying a single state northeast of the Potomac River (Bush). And these four are the stars.

All Republicans, not just the San Diego attendees, must begin a serious debate: Where is this party going, if anywhere, and under what possible approximation of consistent and first-rate leadership?