Many in GOP Ranks Irate Over Party’s Tactics in Impeachment

She has never been one to get caught up in the political whirl, but every two years, 77-year-old Charlotte “Charlie” Parker of Bellevue, Wash., has faithfully gone to the polls and cast her ballot as a Republican.

Then early last year, the feisty great-grandmother broke her ankle and was stuck in front of a television set as a sex scandal engulfed the nation’s capital.

Her ankle is now healed, but for Mrs. Parker, nothing else is the same. Today, she is mad as a hornet at the Republican Party that she embraced all her life. And she is ready to lick stamps and work phones for a Democrat--pretty much any Democrat-in 2000.

“The Republicans themselves are the ones who changed my attitude,” said Mrs. Parker. “When you listen to these senators and representatives speak, it’s a vendetta. They’ll have to pay a terrible price for it.”

Just how big a price could depend on how many Republicans are, like Mrs. Parker, mad enough to change party affiliation. But the pool of available angry Republicans is legion. According to a recent Los Angeles Times Poll, 37% of those identifying themselves as Republicans said that they were against President Clinton’s impeachment or removal from office. By contrast, recent polls found less than 10% of Democrats favored impeachment.

Party Unleashes Torrent of Emotions

Ask Republicans like Mrs. Parker to reflect on their party and you unleash a torrent of emotions. Many declare that they will stand and fight. Others, like Mrs. Parker, swear that they will abandon the GOP, at least in the next election.

“I’ve been a Republican for as long as I can remember. But before I was Republican, I was a public servant,” said Leigh Ratiner, who served as an attorney in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. “What has gotten to me about impeachment is the failure of Congress to have a public-service commitment. To see them kowtowing to the House managers, who are nothing but a bunch of bitter, vindictive, angry and vengeful men--that seems to me unworthy.”

Ratiner is a sailor who knows that you do not always follow a straight line to reach your destination. His party, he said, “needs a wake-up call,” and the only way he knows to send it is to go to work for the other side.

Ratiner was one of thousands of GOP members in recent weeks who answered a computer challenge launched by a fellow Republican. On Feb. 2, Laurance Rockefeller, a New York environmental lawyer and nephew of the late Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, asked anti-impeachment Republicans, in effect, what now?

“Our views--let’s face it, have been ignored,” Rockefeller wrote on https://MoveOn.org, an Internet site that has become a meeting place for those opposing impeachment. When he asked Republicans to tell him whether they would leave the Republican Party or “stay and fight” to make the party more centrist, he got a screenful. In the first week after posting his query, about 5,000 self-identified Republicans responded. The site became a virtual support group for anti-impeachment GOP members.

Last Tuesday, Rockefeller arrived at the offices of the Republican National Committee to deliver three file boxes of correspondence he had collected from fellow Republicans. Despite having called a day ahead to arrange a meeting, he found the doors locked.

Undaunted, Rockefeller then stopped by the offices of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Outside the leaders’ suites, Capitol Hill Police guards whisked away his boxes with an urgency that suggested they contained a bomb. And Rockefeller left without so much as a greeting from a staffer.

“It looks like Republicans who are opposed to impeachment are not welcome,” said Rockefeller recently. “Maybe the big tent is not so big after all.”

Like Rockefeller, many anti-impeachment Republicans say that they feel marginalized and estranged.

“I have friends that are right-wing Republicans. We don’t talk about this,” said Jo Wessling, a 46-year-old Republican from Des Moines. “I’m well aware that 25% of the Republican Party is Christian conservative, and they’re the ones who can get out the vote. Unfortunately, moderates like myself don’t go out and vote religiously.”

Wessling, who works for a Des Moines mortgage firm, is ready to bolt. “If the Democrats run Bonzo the Monkey or Bozo the Clown, that’s who I’m voting for,” she said.

Does that pain her? “Absolutely,” said Wessling. But not as much as the regret she feels that she voted for Rep. Greg Ganske (R-Iowa), who voted yes on five of the six impeachment counts, and for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who is expected to vote for the president’s removal. “I didn’t send him there to vote his conscience,” said Wessling of Ganske. “I sent him there to vote my conscience.”

But for many Republicans, leaving is just too wrenching, so they are fighting from within.

Justin Dart Jr., an advocate for the disabled here, thinks that the GOP has strayed far from its roots as the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Dart worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and his father, California businessman Justin Dart, was part of Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen Cabinet” of unofficial advisors. But Dart recently spent $10,000 for radio ads calling for the end of the impeachment proceedings.

Voting Democratic, said Dart, “is not the only way to repudiate the philosophy of retreat. We have our own conventions, our own way of nominating people. We can use those methods.”

Some Long to Lash Out at Leadership

But for rank-and-file Republicans like Bettie and Ted Smith of Hemet, Calif., the best revenge is giving party leaders a piece of their mind. Bettie Smith, a retired kindergarten teacher, said she sees the party’s behavior on impeachment as evidence that “the party has been taken over by the Christian Coalition.”

But they have remained registered Republicans, “perhaps just out of cussedness,” said 75-year-old Mrs. Smith, so that when the party polls them for their views, they can unload.

“We retain our membership so when they send out surveys, we can tell them how tacky they are,” said Mrs. Smith, who plans to vote against Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) in the next election. “They have no class!” her husband shouted from the next room.

Ron West of Flower Mound, Texas, calls himself “a die-hard Republican conservative--about as conservative as you can get without having a tombstone for a headboard.” But now he is “thinking about being an independent.”

Wanda Schreiner, a 59-year-old interior decorator in Glendale, Ariz., is also ready to vote against anyone who favored impeachment or the president’s removal.

“I definitely will not forget this little episode,” she said.