GOP Hears Lots of Debate, No Unified Voice

SAN DIEGO — The Republican Party is a moving target.

Less than two years ago, the party appeared firmly under the guidance of a coterie of conservatives whose ardor burned hotter than even that of Ronald Reagan. Its ideas and ideology, the direction of its march and the underlying philosophy guiding it were clear.

But the backlash that greeted the Republican-led Congress has clouded that vision. And now, as the party heads into the general election campaign, its course is much less clear.

“We’re redefining on the fly,” said a senior aide to presidential nominee Bob Dole.

The result all week has been a hot contest of ideas here--promulgated in large part by politicians with their eyes set firmly on the year 2000.

Publicly, as the Republicans left their convention city, they insisted that Dole will win the election. But, just in case, politicians who hope to be contenders in four years spent much of the week trying to shape the ideological contours of the party.

The action off the floor stood in sharp contrast to scenes played out before the television cameras. On the convention’s opening night, for instance, former First Lady Nancy Reagan paid an emotion-choked visit to the convention. A videotape recalling her husband’s presidency brought tears to many eyes. But the nostalgia only underscored the sense that this is no longer the unified party it was during the 1980s--and the convention has provided no suggestion of who is in charge.

Patrick J. Buchanan punctuated the week with rallies aimed at promoting his conservative social agenda that is protectionist, antiabortion and anti-gay.

Buchanan made numerous appearances in TV anchor booths overlooking the floor of the San Diego Convention Center. But he was not welcome on the floor, let alone at the podium.

His address at the Houston convention in 1992, angry in its denunciation of cultural differences across the nation, was seen by convention organizers here as so off-putting to voters that each speaker’s text this week was carefully examined to comb out any rhetoric that could be divisive to the GOP coalition.

House Republican freshmen, whose victories two years ago so shook up the political scene, were barely players in San Diego.

Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell made his debut with a much-noticed opening-night address that sought to push the party to a middle ground that is pro-abortion rights and pro-affirmative action. But his views have failed to catch fire.

Steve Forbes organized an economic forum at which panelists moderated by Jeb Bush, the son of the former president and the party’s unsuccessful candidate for governor of Florida in 1994, and Pierre S. “Pete” Du Pont IV, the former governor of Delaware, touted the theory that supply-side tax cuts will boost the economy while reducing the federal budget deficit. The audience wandered in and out of the basement meeting room at the Hotel del Coronado amid stores selling orange Indian sapphires and the Miss Manners book “On Weddings.”

On the main floor above them, Dole spoke to the convention’s New York delegation, part of a crowd that spilled out into the lobby. He joked about his hometown and his choice of Jack Kemp as his running mate.

He paid no heed to Forbes.

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As for Kemp, he was everywhere--physically and ideologically. One of the convention’s major news stories, in fact, was Kemp’s reversal of his opposition to expelling the children of illegal immigrants from public schools and his embrace of a California ballot initiative to eliminate state affirmative action programs, a measure he previously had questioned. In both cases, Kemp’s new positions put him on track with Dole.

To a large degree, the GOP finds itself seeking new definition because it is evolving from its homogeneous roots into a more diverse and larger coalition. As such, it is following the path of the Democratic Party, which in the 1930s and 1940s evolved into a coalition party made up of such varied segments of American society as white farmers in Mississippi, Detroit factory workers and teachers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Many see Dole searching for a new definition of the party that decisively breaks from the image crafted by House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas and the House freshmen.

“It’s a Reagan-Dole-Kemp-Powell ticket,” said William Kristol, once Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and now editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard, a conservative publication. Such a definition of the presidential ticket, he argued, leaves little room for the approaches favored by the House freshmen and their mentor, Gingrich.

Now, the party joins social conservatives with fiscal conservatives--those who put the highest priority on cutting taxes and those--like Dole until he unveiled his tax-reduction plan earlier this month--who would put off tax cuts until the federal budget deficit has been eliminated. It is also home to free traders and those who would build tariff walls around the country. All this makes it much more difficult for the party to define itself.

Finding answers to questions of definition, even more than nominating its presidential and vice presidential candidates, is “what the whole convention is about,” said Gerald Pomper, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who spent the week here. He is an expert on political parties and their platforms.

“American politics used to be simple. It was really about economic policy and how you would redistribute the wealth,” he said. “Now we’ve added all these social issues, on traditional morality and free lifestyles. These two dimensions--the economic and the social--don’t correlate.”

Now, he said, the differences within the party range not only over its ideology but over its even more basic raison d’etre.

Former President Ford told the convention Monday night that the party’s foremost purpose was to win elections. But, Pomper said, “the Buchanan people, and there are a lot of them, would say: ‘No, we don’t want to win the election. We want to win the principle.’ ”

Clearly, Ford’s realpolitik approach motivated the convention managers, who trooped one friendly face after another to the podium.

The division so evident at the GOP convention in Houston four years ago was not given a presence here from the podium or the floor.

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“They’re saying, ‘We don’t have a platform, we don’t have a record and we don’t have a Houston,’ ” said Samuel L. Popkin, a political science professor at UC San Diego who advised the Clinton campaign four years ago. “But . . . they still haven’t told people what they’ll do differently from what [House Speaker] Newt Gingrich did.”

Advocates of the “big tent” theory--that the party must be big enough in its philosophy to offer a home to a wide swath of the American political spectrum--say it is all of the above.

“There is a redefining going on. We are trying to live the big tent,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, Reagan’s last White House chief of staff, referring to an inclusive GOP.

But, said John Petrocik, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Society and Politics, “Dole doesn’t define what it means to be a Republican. I don’t think he defines the Republican Party in the minds of most voters. Ronald Reagan was the last to do that.”

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Future Contenders?

Here is a look at four GOP leaders who, should Bob Dole lose this November, may be among those jockeying for the nomination in 2000.

* Patrick J. Buchanan:

Retains intense loyalty of antiabortion, anti-United Nations, anti-gay-rights troops

* Steve Forbes:

Paid his dues in 1996 presidential bid, knows where to find the money for another try

* Jack Kemp:

His prospects probably will depend on how well he does on the stump this fall; questions surround his discipline as a campaigner

* Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell:

Powerful speaker and commanding presence, but may be too moderate to beat back a charge from the right.