Positioning for a General Election

Tuesday is D-day for the Democrats. It’s also R-day for the Republicans. It’s the big showdown when both nominating contests will very likely be decided, with Arizona Sen. John McCain in the GOP and former Sen. Bill Bradley in the Democrats struggling to survive.

We already know one outcome. The race between Bradley and Vice President Al Gore has been good for the Democrats, while the contest between McCain and Texas Gov. George W. Bush has been bad for the GOP.

Notice how the word “conservative” is at the center of the debate in both parties?

McCain, who is desperate to break Bush’s hold over the partisan Republican vote, is now calling himself a conservative. At the same time, Bush is trying to break out of his party’s conservative base and demonstrate broader appeal. Yet, Bush has had to run so far to the right, he risks appearing unelectable.

Meanwhile, Bradley has been calling Gore a conservative because of Gore’s votes in Congress 20 years ago. But as long as Gore is winning, he’s probably not unhappy to be called a conservative. That positions Gore to run as a centrist.

Bad luck for Bush: His opposition came from the center and pushed him right. Good luck for Gore: His opposition came from the left and pushed him center.

Wednesday’s debate at The Times made it clear: Bradley and Gore don’t differ very much on anything, and that shows up in the vote. There is no ideological division among Democrats. On the GOP side, McCain and Bush are also virtually indistinguishable on issues. But, oh, boy, look at the donnybrook in the GOP!

In last week’s Virginia primary, McCain took two-thirds of the liberal and moderate vote. Bush got two-thirds of the vote among those who described themselves as “somewhat conservative” and 84% among “very conservative” voters.

Anti-abortion voters went heavily for Bush. Pro-choice voters went for McCain, who happens to be an ardent opponent of abortion rights with a near-perfect anti-abortion voting record in Congress.

It’s amazing. Two look-alike conservatives, and the voters are responding as if this were a race between Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). What’s driving the split?

Republicans and conservatives are closing ranks around Bush because they see McCain as the enemy. Conservatives fought for decades to turn the Republican Party into a conservative movement. Now McCain insists the GOP must change.

“If you want to start regaining the majority we had in the ‘80s,” McCain said Tuesday, “then you’ve got to change the party.” McCain wants the GOP to be a reform party. He’s welcoming Democrats and independents and says he wants to govern from “the great center.”

To conservatives, the great center is the great Satan. McCain is threatening conservatives’ hard-won hegemony over the GOP, and they are not giving up without a fight. McCain escalated the battle last week with his attacks on Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, whom he has accused of slandering him and his campaign. But there was more to it than retribution.

The religious right has become a GOP insider. That wasn’t true in 1988, when Robertson ran for president and the party establishment held solid for Vice President George Bush. Since 1988, however, the religious right has joined forces with the GOP establishment. In 1992 and 1996, religious-right leaders resisted the appeals of Patrick J. Buchanan and succeeded in holding their voters in line for, respectively, President Bush and Bob Dole.

The religious right has played power politics, masterminded by former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, now a Bush strategist. This year, the religious right is making common cause with the GOP establishment against a different kind of threat: McCain.

Religious-right leaders have become power brokers. That gave McCain his opening to denounce them as a special interest. In his speech in Virginia on Monday, McCain compared religious right leaders to “union bosses who have subordinated the interests of working families to their own political power.”

McCain does not say he disagrees with the religious right on the issues. He goes out of his way to embrace the cause of social and moral conservatism. But he denounced Robertson and Falwell as “people who have turned good causes into businesses.” They’re in it for themselves. He accused Bush of pandering to them, just like Gary Hart accused Vice President Walter F. Mondale of pandering to special interests in 1984.

But McCain went further. He called Robertson and Falwell “agents of intolerance,” comparable to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left. That goes far beyond the charge of being special interests. McCain accused the religious leaders of extremism, a charge comparable to candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism of rap artist Sister Souljah in 1992 for her anti-white extremism.

McCain’s attacks can succeed politically only if he is seen as a conservative trying to save the conservative cause from corrupt and self-interested leaders. Not someone trying to discredit the conservative cause.

Would a Democrat who attacked Farrakhan and Sharpton be seen as a racist? Not if his civil-rights credentials were otherwise strong. Same with McCain. Are his conservative credentials strong enough to give him standing to attack Robertson, Falwell and Bob Jones University?

They weren’t in Virginia. Religious-right voters delivered big time for Bush in Virginia on Tuesday: more than 80% of their vote, compared with two-thirds for Bush in South Carolina. McCain may have been hoping to make gains among nonreligious-right voters, but they didn’t materialize, at least in Virginia. Maybe they will Tuesday in New York or California.

In primary after primary, McCain has been losing Republicans to Bush by better than two to one. That’s going to be a problem for him in more and more states beginning Tuesday, where primaries are open only to registered Republicans. McCain simply can’t win the GOP nomination if rank-and-file Republicans continue to say “over our dead bodies.” Which is what they’ve been saying.

Bush will likely emerge victorious on Tuesday: Polls show the Texas governor ahead everywhere but New England. But he is damaged. Bush’s negatives have been rising, to the point where a race between him and Gore is now too close to call. The controversy over his visit to Bob Jones University cost Bush crucial support among Catholic voters. And McCain’s charges have reinforced Bush’s image as a front man for the big-money boys.

The best news for Bush last week? Not his victories in Virginia and Washington, but the fact that he could finally get off the defensive. McCain’s attacks on Falwell and Robertson were intended to intensify the controversy over Bush’s visit to Bob Jones University. Instead, they displaced it and created a new controversy.

McCain is now on the defensive, with Bush accusing him of “pitting one religion against another” and using wedge issues to divide the GOP. On Wednesday, McCain had to apologize for calling Robertson and Falwell “forces of evil.” What McCain did was step on his own story, the Bob Jones story that had kept Bush on the defensive for weeks.

McCain’s best hope now is to convince Republicans that Bush is a loser. He has evidence on his side. California Republican leaders implored Bush to run last year because they were desperate for a winner. A recent poll taken in California shows Gore beating Bush by 13 points, while McCain and Gore are neck-and-neck. Will that persuade California Republicans to abandon Bush? Probably not. Their reason for supporting him has changed. It’s no longer because Bush is a winner. Now, it’s because he’s defending the conservative faith.

There’s very little hope for Bradley, either. Bradley has yet to give Democrats a convincing reason not to go with Gore. He’s tried everything.

Bradley started out calling Gore small-minded--as compared with himself, a man of big ambitions. That didn’t work. Gore has been pretty successful with the step-by-step approach. What does Bradley want, another health-care debacle?

OK, try something else. Bradley started calling attention to the 1996 fund-raising scandal. The charge? Gore is ethically compromised. But Democrats resented that: Bradley seemed to be handing ammunition to the GOP.

So he escalated and warned Democrats that Gore is a loser. Democrats may have been worried about that last fall, but once they saw Bush in the debates, their concern faded. Now, Democrats believe, Gore can take this guy. So what has Bradley got left? How about this: Gore’s a conservative. Look at his voting record in Congress. But that was long ago. Democrats have a pretty good idea of who Gore is now: He’s President Bill Clinton’s man. How can a candidate who gets endorsed by Kennedy and Jesse Jackson be a conservative?

Bradley’s challenge looked far more serious last fall, and it did the Gore campaign no end of good. Gore shook up his staff, loosened up his style and became a “fighter.” The alpha male emerged.

Bush’s victory will solidify the conservative ascendancy over the GOP. Gore’s victory will solidify the New Democratic ascendancy over the Democratic Party. Guess which party will be in a more competitive position.