The GOP’s Identity Crisis

For more than 30 years, Sal Russo has been part of the conservative movement in American politics, working to elect the likes of Jack Kemp, George Deukmejian and the movement’s modern-day saint, Ronald Reagan.

But ask Russo what it means to be a conservative these days and his response is telling. “That’s a good question,” he says. “Uh. . . .” After pausing fully 10 seconds, the GOP strategist admits: “I don’t know what it means to people anymore.”

And therein lies a problem for the Republican Party, beyond even the current fallout from efforts to throw President Clinton out of office.

Although the impeachment vote provided a moment of singular clarity--most House Republicans in favor, most Democrats against--it belied deep divisions within the GOP over perhaps the most fundamental question there is: What lies at the philosophical core of the party? And furthermore, who’s to say?

The conflict, boiled to its essence, is reflected in the disputed definition of “conservative,” the emblematic label that once served to unite politically as well as conquer.

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the word “conservative” conjured thoughts of fiscal prudence, a muscular defense and, not least, a rugged individuality and radiant optimism embodied in Reagan’s own sunny personality.

But at the very time many conservative ideals have reached fruition--witness the balanced budget, welfare reform and a slimmed-down federal bureaucracy--the political meaning of conservative has grown increasingly muddied.

In good part that reflects Republican success attracting followers ranging from hands-off libertarians to hard-core fundamentalists, all of whom consider themselves conservatives in good standing.

The practical effect, however, is that “conservative” has come to mean pretty much what anyone says it does--including Democrats, who have strived mightily to recast the word in the angry image of outgoing House Speaker Newt Gingrich and, more recently, to partisan efforts to drive Clinton from office.

“The meaning has been contaminated to suggest someone who’s harsh, who doesn’t seem to have a tolerant view of the world,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic campaign consultant who conducted scores of interviews with voters over the past year.

Most Republicans probably would disagree. After all, public opinion polls over the last 20 years have been remarkably consistent, showing that far more Americans call themselves conservative than liberal (though most tend to call themselves moderate).

Still, many Republicans, like political strategist Steve Schmidt, acknowledge that Democrats “have certainly cast a shadow on the word.”

“They have been successful defining conservative as something mean-spirited and outside the mainstream,” said Schmidt, who tried to fight back as press secretary for California Treasurer Matt Fong’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid.

“If Republicans don’t rally,” Schmidt went on, “certainly by the end of the [2000] election cycle ‘conservative’ will be a dirty word.”

Already, a kind of hyphenated or qualified conservatism has begun to flower, in evident response to Democrats’ assault. Pick your pleasure: There is compassionate conservatism (Texas Gov. George W. Bush), common-sense conservatism (New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) and mainstream conservatism (outgoing California Gov. Pete Wilson). And that’s just among possible presidential contenders.

In Politics, It’s Words That Hurt

The significance of all this verbal skirmishing and rhetorical repositioning goes beyond semantics. Sticks and stones won’t break any bones; in politics, it’s words that hurt you.

“Politics is a battle of language,” said Jim Pinkerton, a GOP strategist and lecturer at George Washington University. And labels--like liberal and conservative--are an important part of any campaign arsenal.

Consider what happened to “liberal,” once the proud emblem of politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to Hubert Humphrey. By 1988, the appellation had grown so debased that then-Vice President George Bush used the “L-word” like a cutlass, eviscerating the hapless Michael Dukakis--”a card-carrying member of the ACLU”--to win the White House in a walk.

For many voters, a label like that is all the information they need.

“A lot of people don’t want to expend a lot of energy making their choices,” said Fred Steeper, a veteran GOP pollster based in the Midwest. “So these shorthand terms are a useful shortcut. . . . It’s a very quick way of telling them a whole bunch of things about each candidate.”

Indeed, Steeper continued, “for 60% or more of the voters, the most useful information you can give them is who’s the Democrat and who’s the Republican, two of the oldest terms around.”

Words like “liberal” and “conservative” tap something even deeper. They summon an entire history, reflecting personalities and a set of policies and principles that have been either validated or discredited over the course of many years. Call it our collective political consciousness.

“Labels are symbolic of a whole range of issues,” said Q. Whitfield Ayres, a Republican poll-taker and Southern campaign consultant. “That’s why they’re so effective, insofar as they mean roughly similar things to many different people.”

To work, however, a label has to be more than a rhetorical bumper sticker.

“It’s foolishness to think if only you use the right terms people will be seduced,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, a journal of conservative opinion. “The reason conservatism came to the forefront was not [merely] the intelligent use of language.”

Rather, credit Barry Goldwater, the late Arizona senator and tribune of the modern conservative movement, whose spectacularly unsuccessful 1964 run for president laid the groundwork for Reagan’s victory 16 years later. Goldwater stated his philosophy, repudiating decades of liberal orthodoxy, with elegant simplicity in his 1960 book “Conscience of a Conservative.”

“I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size,” he stated. “I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”

In 1980, Reagan ran on the same basic themes that Goldwater promulgated--lower taxes, smaller government and a strong national defense--that, for many Republicans, remain the essential core of conservatism.

Naturally, a good deal happened in the intervening years to make Reagan’s success possible, not least a growing disenchantment with the perceived failings of decades of liberal policies, embodied by raging inflation at home and the humiliation of Americans held hostage by Iranian terrorists abroad.

“Reagan very much rose up to meet the times,” said Jerry Z. Muller, a professor of modern history at Catholic University and editor of a recent anthology of conservative thought. “His theme of too much government, a traditional Republican theme, resonated with a lot of voters after the tremendous growth of government in the 1960s and 1970s and the perceived dysfunction it caused.”

Moreover, Reagan infused conservatism with an upbeat, can-do attitude, a useful make-over for a movement long associated with a crabbed and decidedly dour view of the world.

“Basically, conservatism is a vision of constraints,” said Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor and editor of World, a conservative Christian news weekly. “You can’t expand the budget to do everything. In terms of personal behavior, you shouldn’t do everything. The 1980s idea of conservatism as unbounded optimism is just a historical anomaly.”

Indeed, in Reagan’s absence, conservatism has become increasingly associated with a series of negative stances--against abortion, against gun control, against environmental protections--and with angry messengers like two-time presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and the Christian Coalition’s Pat Robertson.

The adversarial approach was manifest in the 1995 shutdown of the federal government, a political disaster from which Gingrich--and the image of the GOP-led Congress--never completely recovered.

But that pugnacious sensibility may have reached its apogee with the impeachment of Clinton, a move pushed hardest by social conservatives in the face of countervailing opinion polls and the initial reluctance of the GOP’s more moderate elements.

Impeachment showed “how important and powerful the religious base, the moralistic base” of the Republican Party has become, said Allan Hoffenblum, a longtime California GOP strategist, who frets that conservatism is increasingly viewed by average voters as “a philosophy that is rigid, exclusionary and intolerant.”

Even before Clinton surfaced on the national scene, Goldwater himself lamented a perceived shift in the conservative movement. He became an ardent critic of the religious right and condemned the movement’s increasingly judgmental tone. “They’re nuts,” he said at one point. “They expect from conservatism some things that no political philosophy could or should deliver.”

Labels Reflect Party Splintering

Others too see the movement growing narrower and more exclusionary--and the conservative label being tainted--as social conservatives, religious fundamentalists and single-issue groups assert increasing control. Schmidt, the former Fong strategist, asks only half-jokingly whether Reagan could be considered a true conservative “by today’s standards,” given his support for the Brady gun control bill.

But Randy Tate, executive director of the Christian Coalition, insists that religious activists are the ones hewing closest to the true meaning of conservative--which he defined as “pro-family”--and contends that, if anything, Republicans have hurt themselves by shying away from social issues such as school prayer and abortion.

“What’s the old saying? The sincerest form of flattery is imitation,” said Tate, pointing to Democratic efforts to present a more family-friendly image.

Led by Clinton, Democrats have indeed helped blur political distinctions by co-opting a number of conservative--albeit secular--causes, such as a balanced budget and welfare reform, and by campaigning on conservative-sounding themes like V-chips for television sets, school uniforms and the death penalty.

“What’s gotten confused,” said Ayres, the GOP pollster, “is the good guy, bad guy component of conservative versus liberal.”

Conservatives have further damaged their cause, Ayres argued, by too often sacrificing pragmatism to ideological purity and “following certain preconceived principles in the face of common sense, such as restricting bills banning guns in schools because that violates the constitutional right to bear arms.”

Voters tend to reward politicians “who act against their ideology to solve problems,” Ayres said, citing Richard Nixon’s trip to China as a prime example.

In Clinton’s case, voters rewarded a conscious effort to break with a discredited past, as he explicitly rejected liberal doctrine in his first run for president. He dropped off the presidential campaign trail to preside over an execution, conspicuously distanced himself from the party’s congressional barons and blatantly snubbed the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other left-wing leaders.

“If people aren’t buying a product, you want a label that says the product is different--particularly if you want people to buy it,” said Al From, a Clinton advisor who was instrumental in helping fashion the president’s “new Democrat” image.

Packaging aside, some say the conservative label may be simply wearing out. “Part of it is people get tired of any word,” said Pinkerton, former house intellectual of the Bush administration.

Indeed, overuse can make the snappiest sound bite go flat. Consider once more the L-word, as proof of this eventual obsolescence. “Calling someone a ‘tax-and-spend liberal’ doesn’t work anymore,” said Don Sipple, a California-based GOP media strategist and TV ad-meister. “It’s become a tired, old cliche and voters simply discount it.”

For his part, Sipple insists that the C-word still has shelf life and remains a net plus for Republicans, unless it is paired with modifiers like “extreme” or “right-wing.”

Many more in the party, however, echoed Olasky’s suggestion that the word conservative, while nowhere on a par with liberal, “may be on a slippery slope” toward the same kind of ignominy.

Noting the proliferation of qualified conservatives--compassionate, mainstream, et al--he argued, “That’s the top of the slippery slope, when you still use the word but apply an adjective to it. It’s the same way some liberals tried to call themselves ‘realistic liberals.’ ”

To take an informal survey, participate in a discussion and hear Times political reporter Mark Z. Barabak’s audio analysis on conservatism, go to the Times’ World Wide Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/conservative

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The Right Stuff

BARRY GOLDWATER: The late Arizona senator was the father of the modern conservative movement. IN 1960, he stated his philosophy with elegant simplicity: less government, more individual freedom. But he grew to criticize the increasing influence of the religious right.

RONALD REAGAN: He won two terms in the White House running on Goldwater’s themes of lower taxes, smaller government and a strong national defense. Significantly, Reagan cut against the grain of history by giving conservatism a happy face. In his absence, the movement has increasingly been associated with negative stances.

NEWT GINGRICH: The Georgian has been a favorite target of Democrats striving to recast the word “conservative” in the angry image of this outgoing House speaker. He engineered the 1995 federal government shutdown that illustrated, as did the recent near-party-line impeachment of President Clinton, the adversarial approach that animates many conservative activists.

RANDY TATE: A former congressman from Washington state, Tate is executive director of the Christian Coalition. Tate defines conservative as “pro-family.” He says Republicans are shying away too much from social issues such as school prayer and opposition to abortion.