Social Conservative Bauer Enters President’s Race

Conservative activist Gary Bauer formally launched his campaign for president Wednesday, decrying a “culture of death” in America that tolerates abortion and fosters violence like the bloody school massacre in Colorado.

“The culture glorifies death in a thousand ways,” said Bauer, who announced his bid for the GOP nomination at his high school alma mater here. “It’s in our movies. It’s in our music.”

In the wake of the Colorado killings, Bauer abruptly scrapped his prepared text--a policy-oriented speech designed to showcase his views on a wide range of issues--and instead ad-libbed on the subject that has been his career’s driving force: the need to mend America’s fraying moral fiber.

“There is something wrong in America,” he said. “This country can be better than it is, and I intend to make it better.”

Bauer, a former top aide to President Reagan and a staunch champion of the Christian right, enters the presidential fray at a time when some social conservatives, such as Paul Weyrich, are calling for Christian activists to retreat from politics and a secular culture they see as irreversibly hostile to traditional values. But Bauer is sticking to the political trenches to fight the culture war.

And unlike a growing number of Republican presidential candidates who have tried to downplay the divisive issue of abortion, Bauer stresses his ardent opposition to abortion rights.

“I will never sacrifice one American child--born or unborn,” he said Wednesday. “You can count on that.”

But Bauer, a diminutive 52-year-old with a cherubic visage, remains a longshot in a crowded field that so far has been dominated by two unannounced candidates--Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole.

This is, after all, Bauer’s first run for elective office. Evidence of the challenge he faces came in a survey released Wednesday by independent pollster John Zogby in which New Hampshire voters put Bauer at the back of the pack, with a minuscule 0.5% saying they would support him in the state’s GOP primary.

But the poll also suggested that his candidacy has unrealized potential: When the GOP contenders were described rather than named, support for Bauer jumped to 10%. And Bauer has a loyal following among social conservatives who fear that their party establishment is giving short shrift to their agenda.

Bauer associates say his best shot at moving up in the pack is to present himself as a serious conservative alternative to the Republican leadership’s favored candidates, Bush and Dole. But he has stiff competition for the role of anti-establishment gadfly, especially from Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator who has run for president twice before.

William Kristol, a Republican strategist who worked with Bauer in the Reagan administration, said that his friend “knows he is a longshot, but . . . he could become the conservative alternative to the establishment by emphasizing the moral and cultural issues and being the Reaganite candidate against a Bush and a Dole.” Like Reagan, Bauer hopes to demonstrate an appeal to blue-collar voters who share his social conservatism. He sought to underscore his own working-class roots by returning to his hometown Wednesday to kick off his campaign.

Bauer aides cite the saga of Newport, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, as key to why he continues to believe that moral values can be advanced through political action. For decades, the town was a haven for organized crime, gambling, prostitution and other vice. In the 1960s, as a high school student, Bauer was active in a successful campaign to clean up the community.

“He lived through, in a formative time in his life, an example of how a political movement can actually change the moral climate of a city,” said Jeff Bell, a consultant to the Bauer campaign.

The son of an alcoholic janitor, Bauer earned a law degree and in the 1980s established his political credentials during the Reagan administration. He rose from an obscure corner of the Education Department to become top domestic policy advisor to the president.

In 1988, he was tapped by Christian activist James Dobson to take the helm of the Family Research Council, a conservative family values group. Bauer built the council into a powerful voice of the pro-family, anti-abortion wing of the party--and into a bullhorn for his own pronouncements.

Two years ago he founded a political action committee, Campaign for Working Families, that contributed millions of dollars in the 1998 campaign to conservative, anti-abortion Republican candidates for Congress--including some who knocked off moderate Republican primary opponents.

The PAC has shown it can attract funds from a nationwide base, according to an analysis of its contributions done for The Times and CNN by the Virginia-based Campaign Study Group. The challenge now facing Bauer, said Dwight Morris, the group’s president, “is whether he will be able to raise money in this new context as a presidential candidate.”

Recent Federal Election Commission reports showed that in the first quarter of 1999, Bauer’s campaign committee raised more than $1.3 million. That was a respectable showing compared to many of the GOP candidates, but a far cry from the $7.6 million Bush raised.

Bauer eschews Washington’s half-a-loaf politics of compromise--a purist streak that has caused as many headaches for his own party as it has for Democrats. He has complained, for instance, about efforts by GOP congressional leaders to chart a more centrist course that soft-pedals social issues. In the presidential race, he already has opened fire on Bush and Dole over what he sees as their efforts to compromise the party’s opposition to abortion.

“For 20 years, our party has told America we are the party dedicated to preserving the first of all rights, the right to life, for the most innocent of all people, unborn children,” Bauer wrote in a recent letter to Dole. “Now as the country is moving back in our direction, as people recoil in horror at the reality of 25 million children who will never draw a first breath, many leaders in our party have grown timid and have lost their voice.”

Bauer has said that, if elected, he would send to Congress legislation making it clear that unborn children are people and therefore entitled to the full protections of the Constitution.

On economic matters, Bauer has championed a 16% flat tax.

In foreign policy, he says he is an internationalist in the Reagan tradition. But he has come out against U.S. military intervention in Kosovo. In a position that has put him at odds with President Clinton and many Republicans, he has opposed doing business with China until the country makes more progress on human rights.

Advisors had intended for Bauer to address these policy issues in his announcement speech. “It’s especially important for someone of Gary’s background to establish competence in foreign policy and economics,” Bell said.

But this script was abandoned just hours before the announcement because Bauer thought it inappropriate to go into a high school without addressing the Colorado tragedy.

Thus, he lambasted Hollywood for producing movies and television shows he charged glorify violence. “In the America I want, those producers and directors would not be able to show their faces in public,” he said. “I would use the power of my office to shame them.”

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Profile: Gary Bauer

Born: May 4, 1946, in Covington, Ky.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science, Georgetown College in Kentucky, 1968. Law degree, Georgetown University in Washington, 1973.

Career Highlights: Education Department undersecretary, 1982-85; Reagan administration’s chief advisor on domestic policy, 1987-88; president of Family Research Council, a conservative political advocacy group that gathers research on social and family issues, 1988-99. Author of “Our Journey Home: What Parents Are Doing to Preserve Family Values” (1992) and “Our Hopes, Our Dreams: A Vision for America” (1996).

Family: Married to Carol (Hoke) since 1972, two daughters (21 and 17) and one son (12). His father, Stanley R. “Spike” Bauer, was a high school dropout who suffered from alcoholism and worked as a truck driver and maintenance man. His mother, Elizabeth Jane (Gossett), was a homemaker.

Quote: “There is something wrong in America. This country can be better than it is, and I intend to make it better.”

Compiled by Times researcher Tricia Ford