‘Culture War’ Troops Attack Dole Strategy

Once again, it’s the season when social conservatives gear up for an election-year ritual: flooding mailboxes with political leaflets.

But the ebullience of past drives has faded into malaise. Just a few days before the election, activists are woefully aware that the issues they had hoped would propel the 1996 presidential campaign--support for school vouchers and school prayer, opposition to abortion rights and gay rights, for instance--remain missing in action.

The letdown sank in slowly. At the start of the campaign, for example, Ione Dilley, head of the Christian Coalition in Iowa, was the belle of the Republican ball. After intense wooing by most of the party’s presidential field, she endorsed Bob Dole. The political grapevine sparked with the news.

But after months of hearing more about Dole’s proposed 15% cut in income tax rates than his vision for improving America’s moral climate, she finds herself frustrated.

Likewise, when anti-gay-rights activist Bill Horn snapped his fingers in February, all of the major GOP presidential candidates scrambled to support his group’s “marriage protection resolution” against same-sex marriage.

Since then, though, Horn has listened with growing impatience as Dole tiptoes around the “culture war” issues that motivate social conservatives.

With Nov. 5 looming, Horn and Dilley still back the GOP ticket. But they also wish desperately, they say, that the Republican presidential candidate would use the final days of the campaign to trumpet their battle cry: Morality! Decency! Values!

His decision not to spotlight such concerns, Dilley and Horn are convinced, is the major reason he languishes in the polls.

Independent political analyst Stuart Rothenberg calls that view “poppycock.” Like most pundits, he said Dole’s polling numbers would be even worse had he hammered away at gay rights or President Clinton’s veto of the so-called partial-birth abortion ban.

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Still, it is not hard to understand why social conservatives are deflated by their inability to define the presidential debate.

Less than two years ago, plenty of pundits credited them with playing a major role in propelling the GOP takeover of Congress. The economy was a background concern then, and the buzz was that this ascendant political alliance of religious conservatives, gun owners, anti-abortion-rights activists and “pro-family” groups would dominate the ’96 debate.

Those groups’ concerns did loom over the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, but then faded fast. At the Republican National Convention in August, social conservatives nailed down the planks they wanted in the GOP platform, but party leaders used the gathering itself to court moderate voters. Since then, GOP vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp has occasionally touted his party’s conservative stands on such matters as abortion and school prayer, but Dole has pretty much left them alone.

Not all social conservatives object to that pragmatic approach. Attorney Al Rubega, president of Gun Owners of New Hampshire, said Dole is smart to target moderates because Clinton has already energized gun owners by “demonizing” them.

Other activists, however, lament that it may be more difficult to inspire like-minded voters this year because the troops themselves aren’t chomping at the bit.

“Six or eight years ago it was easy to get my Christian friends to walk precincts,” said Candy Nunno, the director of the “Worship Warfare Department” at Crisis Communicators International in Santa Ana. “Now it’s like pulling teeth.”

Nunno said she senses a “weariness in the [conservative] camp” and wishes that Dole would have fired folks up by hitting social issues head on.

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Horn offers this analysis to Dole: “If you had campaigned on these issues that are important to an overwhelming majority of families in America, you’d have done better. But you listened to the liberal media that said people don’t want to hear about these issues, so . . . you end up retiring.”

Doug Patton, head of the Christian Coalition in Nebraska, is already looking beyond this year’s vote.

“There’s no question that the economy makes a difference,” he said. “But a lot of people are very troubled by the direction--culturally and morally--that our nation is going.”

He added: “‘The thing to keep in mind is that the Christian Coalition is in this for the long haul.”