Smith’s Bolt Is a Boon for Bush

The latest Republican presidential buzz concerns New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith. Not that Smith is going anywhere--at least not inside the GOP. Instead, Smith, one of the dozen Republicans seeking next year’s nomination, is poised to drop out of the GOP race and instead accept the 2000 anointment of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, a far-right splinter faction. But while the Republican hierarchy seems sad about Smith’s departure, it should be happy, because paradoxically, Smith’s disendorsement of Republican front-runner George W. Bush would be far more valuable to the Texas governor than an endorsement.

The American people have come to accept the traditional free-market and limited-government thinking of the Republicans. Yet at the same time, voters are hostile to the more recent Religious Right-type social-issue crusading. Bush understands that if he can run as the former kind of Republican, he’ll likely win, while if he runs as the other kind, he’ll likely lose.

So while Bush says he is “pro-life,” he seizes every opportunity to distance himself from the GOP’s strident antiabortion posturing and platforming. He says that the Supreme Court’s abortion-legalizing Roe vs. Wade decision is “settled” and that as president he will impose no abortion-related “litmus tests” on his judicial nominees. In other words, a Bush presidency will probably see a continuation of the pro-choice status quo.

This is too much for the right-to-life Right. On Monday, Smith’s home-state paper, the Manchester Union-Leader, reported that he will formally announce his departure from the Republican Party today.

But Smith isn’t much of a candidate, and the U.S. Taxpayers Party isn’t much of a party. According to the latest CNN/Gallup poll, Bush wins 59% of Republican primary voters, while Smith ranks last with 1%. As for Smith’s new party, its platform is hardcore-everything: from the abolition of the IRS, to withdrawal from all “New World Order” institutions, to a return to “biblical” jurisprudence, which, in practice, means a total ban on abortion. In 1996, Howard Phillips was its presidential standard-bearer; he received 184,656 votes, 0.19% of the national total.

To be sure, in a close election, every vote counts; John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon in 1960 by just 118,000 votes. Smith may not care about winning in 2000, but after eight years of Bill Clinton, most conservatives are willing to compromise for the sake of winning. Televangelist Pat Robertson, for example, says that Smith’s bolt would be “an awful mistake.” Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson wrote a letter to Smith saying his defection was “counterproductive.” But having done his perfunctory bit for party unity, Nicholson should give up on dissuading the Granite Stater. Indeed, if Nicholson’s goal is to win back the White House for the GOP, he should quietly cheer Smith’s departure.

Why? Because oftentimes, siphoning away votes on the fringe helps frame a party in the center. And that’s what Bush and the GOP need most: the perception that they are once again normal, that they are no longer controlled by the far right.

Yet even as Smith has been plotting his exit, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League has been making its move as well. NARAL, of course, never met an abortion it didn’t like. If Smith is 100% opposed to abortion, NARAL is 100% for it. And Bush, declares NARAL President Kate Michelman, “poses a distinct threat to the fundamental freedom to choose.”

Indeed, the line that Bush is only a make-believe moderate--that he, too, is a tool of the vast right-wing conspiracy--is the strongest argument the Democrats have in 2000. Because if Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” seems to be a reasonable alternative to Clintonism, then the normal “time for a change” impulse will likely flush out the incumbent party.

And that’s why Smith’s edge-of-the-Earth candidacy will probably help Bush. How can the Left persuade swing voters that Bush is a dangerous right winger when the certifiable right wingers are denouncing him as a dangerous liberal? Ideologues at either end of the spectrum never enjoy being reminded that elections are won in the center. And so if fringe figures such as Smith and Michelman both agree that Bush is a menace, then the American people are likely to conclude that he can’t be too bad.