Despite a Few Squeaky Planks, Parties Stand on Their Platforms

Long after the final balloons burst and the confetti gets swept away, the most enduring record of this summer’s major political conventions will be a pair of volumes destined for some musty shelf.

When Republicans gather July 31 in Philadelphia and Democrats meet two weeks later in Los Angeles, one of their first orders of business will be adoption of their respective party platforms. In short--and that’s something of an oxymoron when it comes to these sprawling documents--the platforms constitute a formal written statement of each party’s principles.

It is fashionable to deride the collection of platitudes and promises as a meaningless catchall, brimming with overblown rhetoric and the odd bone tossed to appease snarling special interests. In 1996, GOP nominee Bob Dole arrived at his convention declaring he hadn’t even read his party’s platform and didn’t much care to.

But dismissing a platform’s import belies this fact: Few things better predict what a president will do, or at least attempt to accomplish, once he settles into the White House.

“They encapsulate what a party believes in,” said Gerald Pomper of Rutgers University, who has studied 52 years of platforms. “To the extent they point toward the future, they also present a statement of where [parties] want to go. And then, when they get into power, they do a lot of it.”

Pomper’s research, covering 1944 through 1996, found that approximately 70% of the specific promises made in platforms were eventually implemented. “They do matter,” Pomper insisted.

Moving to the Center

But platforms may be even more important for their symbolic value and the tone they take, since relatively few people have even a cursory knowledge of their content.

“A platform tells a lot about where a party is,” said Andrei Cherny, chief draftsman of the document that Democrats will ratify in Los Angeles. “It sends an important message not just to the party itself but to the general public about where each party stands and what it believes in.”

As a political document, platforms tend to reflect the tenor of their times, speaking to epic issues of the day: from slavery to the Vietnam War, from women’s rights to the free coinage of silver.

This year, absent epic issues, both major party platforms aim for a soothingly centrist tone, reflecting the broad consensus that things are going relatively well and most changes should be attempted on a fairly modest scale.

There are, of course, plenty of differences to distinguish the pending nominees, Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, and the two major parties. Republicans want a big tax cut; Democrats advocate more gun control; Republicans want to outlaw abortion; Democrats favor more expansive gay rights.

But the more striking thing is the way the candidates--and the major party platforms--have inched toward the middle.

The Democratic version supports targeted tax cuts, the death penalty, a limited missile-defense system and a plan to pay off the national debt over 12 years--positions that easily could have come from Republican platforms of a generation ago.

Other planks--on trade, racial profiling and DNA testing in death penalty cases--address at least some concerns of labor unions and minorities, two of the party’s key liberal constituencies. But overall, the centrist approach is a testament to the legacy of President Clinton, who thoroughly recast the party by running in 1992 as a “different kind of Democrat.”

“A hundred years from now, that’s what people will remember,” said Robert G. Beckel, a Democratic strategist. “The strategic decision to grab the center.”

Now Texas Gov. Bush is attempting a similar refashioning of the Republican Party through the philosophy he calls “compassionate conservatism.” The GOP platform serves as chapter and verse. Aiming for an inclusive tone, the document will likely abandon the party’s call for eliminating the Department of Education, take a softer stand on immigration and advocate more spending on women’s health programs.

But in a major capitulation to the party’s social conservatives, the hard-line stance against abortion will almost certainly remain unchanged.

Since 1984, the GOP platform has called for a constitutional ban on the procedure and for appointment of judges inclined to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Although Bush has said he opposes judicial litmus tests and would allow abortions in cases involving rape, incest or to save a mother’s life, he also said he would not seek to change the platform’s uncompromising language, which denounces abortion in all circumstances.

Both parties have learned, often the hard way, the perils of a platform fight.

In 1968, at their famously convulsive Chicago convention, Democrats battled over the Vietnam War and ripped their party apart. In 1980, forces loyal to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) waged a marathon platform fight over economic issues, helping send President Carter to his defeat.

Four years later, after another hard-fought primary season, Democrats led by Walter F. Mondale sought to paper over their differences, literally, by drafting a 45,000-word treatise effectively coauthored by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, Mondale’s vanquished foes. The resulting kitchen-sink catalog did nothing to alleviate Mondale’s image as a captive of special interests.

This year, in contrast, Bush and Gore wrapped up their nominating fights quickly enough to control the platform-writing process from the start.

“If you have no competition, you can draft it in a way, in tone and substance, that describes you and your political philosophy,” said Beckel, who managed Mondale’s campaign and oversaw the 1984 platform process. “You can be very short and to the point. In fact, the shorter the better.” (The very first platform, adopted by Democrats in 1840, had only nine paragraphs, but presumably those were simpler times.)

Definitive Statements

Both the Democrats and the Republicans will hold public sessions later this week to finish drafting their manifestoes. But, in reality, the most important decisions on matters of tone and substance were made well in advance, at a safe remove from the press and public.

After all work is completed, the final documents will be presented for adoption by convention delegates and, in all likelihood, gaveled to approval long before most people even tune in. (Once ratified, the platforms will be posted on the parties’ respective Web sites (https://www.rnc.org and https://www.democrats.org).

As summer reading, the documents are hardly compelling; Harry Potter needn’t worry about tumbling from the bestseller lists. “But,” said Rutgers professor Pomper, “if you want an idea through all the fog and rhetoric and bad language of what a party really stands for and what it’s likely to do, then go to the platform. That’s the definitive statement.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Plank by Plank

Democratic and Republican conventions have tackled tough issues in their platforms over the years. Some examples:

*

1896: Democratic

William Jennings Bryan delivers famous “Cross of Gold” speech while endorsing plank supporting free and unlimited coinage of silver. Passed 626 to 303.

*

1924: Democratic *

Proposal to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Defeated 543 to 542.

*

1932: Republican

Proposal calling for repeal of Prohibition. Defeated 691 to 460.

*

1964: Republican

Proposal to strengthen civil rights plank with pledges for speedy school desegregation, full voting rights and elimination of job bias. Defeated 897 to 409.

*

1968: Democratic

Proposed antiwar statement on Vietnam, including a call for a halt to bombing in North Vietnam. Defeated 1,568 to 1,041.

*

1984: Republican

Proposal calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. Overwhelmingly approved by voice vote.

*

1988: Democratic *

Proposal pledging that United States would make “no first use” of nuclear weapons. Defeated 2,474 to 1,221.

*

Source: Congressional Quarterly