Familiar Surnames Haunt GOP Conservatives

Bush and Dole: Now as in 1988, the two names haunt the Republican Party’s conservative activists.

Eleven years ago, many conservatives fumed when the GOP presidential race came down to two candidates rooted in the party’s more moderate wing: Bob Dole, then a senator from Kansas, and George Bush, the then-vice president who went on to win the nomination and the White House.

Now, conservative activists confront a 2000 race eerily paralleling the ’88 campaign. Once again, the two leading contenders are rooted in the party’s center. And once again, they are named Bush and Dole.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the former president’s son, is the clear front-runner--a position he underscored Sunday by unveiling a heavyweight team of party leaders to head his campaign exploratory committee. Elizabeth Hanford Dole, the wife of the GOP’s 1996 presidential nominee, runs a solid second in the polls and is to announce her own exploratory panel Wednesday in Iowa.

Surveys Show Wide Appeal

The most conservative candidates eyeing the race--who include 1996 hopeful Steve Forbes, former Vice President Dan Quayle and two-time contender Patrick J. Buchanan--remain confident that many in the party’s base will demand a more right-leaning alternative.

But surveys in several key primary states have found Bush and Dole demonstrating such broad appeal--running well even among conservative voters--that they could make it difficult for a challenger to emerge on their right.

“There may just not be enough of those [voters] there on the right to make anyone else viable when you’ve got two people who have such broad appeal,” said Warren Tompkins, a South Carolina-based GOP strategist.

As Bush and Dole move closer to the race, that prospect is already compelling the most conservative contenders to challenge their credentials.

“Is this really going to be the salvation?” asked Jeff Bell, a senior advisor to social conservative activist Gary Bauer, who plans to announce his presidential candidacy next month.

Referring to President Bush’s failed 1992 reelection bid and Bob Dole’s loss in 1996, Bell added: “Our nominees were named Bush and Dole the last two times and we averaged about 40% of the popular vote. There are a lot of reasons why people should be very chary of that.”

Their inherited name identification is part of the reason Gov. Bush and Mrs. Dole, if they run, would begin the race in such strong shape.

Recent polls in states such as Iowa, Michigan and Ohio have found Bush leading, with Dole second. In New Hampshire, the most recent CNN/WMUR survey found Dole and Bush both drawing around 30%, with no one else above single digits. In national surveys, Dole still runs second to Bush but more distantly: a new Time/CNN poll puts him at 48% and her at 17%.

“It’s like her and Bush in that tier, and then everybody else,” one senior Dole advisor said.

Whether it stays that way is another question. A presidential race headlined by this Dole and this Bush looks far less predictable than the 1988 contest.

Though Bush has been successful as Texas governor, he has never before sought national office. Dole, who recently stepped down as president of the American Red Cross, is even more of a wild card. While she has held high-level Washington positions since the mid-1960s, including Cabinet posts, Dole has never run for any public office.

That lack of electoral experience may be one reason her prospective candidacy has drawn relatively little support from GOP office-holders, even as governors, state legislators and members of Congress from around the country are in a virtual stampede to endorse Bush. (Just last week, 19 of California’s 24 Republican House members wrote a letter urging Bush to formally declare his candidacy.)

Other questions loom over a potential Dole candidacy. While she has raised millions at the Red Cross, her ability to attract political funds remains unproven. And while she can be an accomplished performer, she also has a reputation for demanding exacting control over all situations in which she places herself--an instinct that may not be compatible with the campaign trail’s free-form chaos.

“She is so tightly wound that when they wanted to do a stop with Better Homes and Gardens [magazine] last time, she did two hours of prep on her favorite apple pie recipe,” said one veteran of the Bob Dole 1996 campaign.

Most unclear is how Mrs. Dole would affect the basic geometry of the emerging GOP race. Like Bush, she has taken few specific positions. Yet her early appearances suggest that she will position herself as a “compassionate conservative” strikingly similar to Bush. Both have presented themselves as advocates of traditional values (and opponents of legal abortion). They also have signaled that they will try to craft a more tolerant and inclusive message.

Given that ideological overlap, some in the GOP believe that Dole’s entry would help the conservative candidates by peeling away centrist voters from Bush, if he ultimately runs.

Dole Candidacy Could Complicate Race

Yet a Dole candidacy could have much more complicated implications. Most immediately, it would put enormous pressure on prospective centrist candidates other than Bush--such as Arizona Sen. John McCain, Ohio Rep. John R. Kasich, and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander. Each would face a formidable new competitor for attention and fund-raising dollars.

More surprisingly, a Dole candidacy also could threaten the strategies of the conservative candidates.

Almost universally, these contenders believe that the race eventually will come down to a choice between someone from the center and someone from the right. But if Dole can sustain significant support, that assumption may be undermined.

In 1988, conservative candidates such as Jack Kemp also assumed that the race would end up pitting a conservative against a moderate. But no conservative ever cracked the first tier because George Bush and Bob Dole attracted too much support from conservative voters in the early primaries to leave a base for anyone else.

The same thing could happen this time. In the recent CNN/WMUR poll--as well as a private Iowa survey--the younger Bush and Mrs. Dole ran as strongly among conservative Republicans as they did among moderates.

“If they can hold onto 40% of that very conservative group, you don’t leave a lot of room for an alternative conservative candidate to emerge,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

Forbes’ advisor Greg Mueller argued that Bush and Dole would see their support narrow on the right “once they start getting into a discussion of the issues.”

There’s another complication facing both the centrist and conservative contenders chasing Bush and Dole. These candidates face the risk that attacks on either of the front-runners could simply drive support from one to the other--rather than to any of them. Indeed, a recent University of Cincinnati poll in Ohio found that, by far, the top second choice of Bush supporters in 2000 was Dole--and vice-versa.

This potential alignment presents a final unusual wrinkle.

Frequently, the No. 2 candidate in the primaries takes the lead in trying to tear down the front-runner. But for now, Bush and Dole show virtually no inclination to criticize each other--perhaps partly because many believe that Dole could be the presumptive choice as Bush’s vice president if he runs and wins the nomination.

Times staff writer Faye Fiore contributed to this story.