Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081792/08179930.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 122 lines

                                                                                U.S. CAMPAIGN, Page 34

Unfriendly Skies


Faced with its own explosive issues, the G.O.P. heads to Houston
on a wing and a prayer

By GARRY WILLS/HOUSTON


    In this topsy-turvy political year, the Democrats were as
smug as Republicans at their New York convention, and the
Republicans seem fated to be as fratricidal as Democrats this
month in Houston. There is an eerie symmetry at work. Jeane
Kirkpatrick, in her book justifying the neoconservatives'
abandonment of the Democratic Party, described the 1972
Democratic Convention as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
The New Presidential Elite argued that Democrats under McGovern
were more interested in ideological purity than in winning, more
concerned with being "correct" than with being inclusive. It was
a party of rectitude and litmus tests. By contrast, the
Republicans spread a big tent: "Less intense, less holistic
ideologically, and deeply attached to party, the cultural
conservative focused more on building party unity and winning
elections than on articulating correct issue positions -- not
because he was uninterested in policy, but because he was also
strongly attached to the party by fun, friends, and status
satisfactions, and party loyalty as well as policy." The
Republicans, she concluded, believe in the political market and
in peddling a winning product there.

    Few expect the Republicans to be guided, at this year's
convention, by "fun, friends, and status satisfactions," though
they have the prevalent product in a sitting President. All the
tests of political correctness -- on abortion, on homosexuality,
on not raising taxes, on control of the arts -- are matters of
Republican concern this time. This is a party of purges, not
inclusion: it cries for the heads of Richard Darman, Nicholas
Brady, William Reilly, even of Dan Quayle, even of George Bush.
The party is in so little inclusive a mood that it only
grudgingly continues to include its own President.

    The very issues that were emphasized in order to divide
the Democrats have boomeranged, and are splitting the
Republicans. Dinesh D'Souza, in his book on Jerry Falwell,
Falwell: Before the Millennium, describes how the religious
right planned to use abortion as a wedge issue. At sessions to
form the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich said the movement should
"focus attention on the abortion issue, because it would split
the Democratic Party, while hardly affecting the Republican
vote." Paradoxically, the very decision they hated -- Roe v.
Wade -- gave these political operatives the cover they needed:
so long as that ruling was in effect, Republicans could give lip
service to a "right to life" without facing immediate
consequences. But with Roe endangered, the prospect of
legislatures' having to debate the whole matter over again is
daunting. The preference for choice, even among those opposed
to abortion, is clear in the polls. Young Republicans do not
have to be libertarians to want government kept out of the
decisions women make about their pregnancies.

    Abortion now plagues the Republicans far more than it ever
did the Democrats. So do most of the social issues that
Republicans stressed in the past and are still trying to use,
in a more guarded way, when Dan Quayle speaks of family values.
Homosexuality was a Republican issue when the party made fun of
"San Francisco Democrats." But now, when almost everyone has
known someone with AIDS, when people fear that they or their
children may get it, the Republican position, dictated by the
party's religious constituents, seems not only cruel but
dangerous. The party opposes free distribution of condoms and
clean drug needles. It still blocks sex education, family
planning at home and abroad, and full-scale research expenditure
on AIDS. Bob Hattoy, the AIDS-infected man who spoke at the
Democratic Convention, gave a whole new meaning to "family
values" when he reminded the President that "your family has
AIDS" -- part of that large national family New York Governor
Mario Cuomo described at the convention.

    "Family values" takes on new meaning, as well, at a time
when people are worried that they will not be able to educate
their children, give medical aid to their parents or support
themselves in retirement. The economy, which has devastated
black families, threatens white ones too. The "no new taxes" cry
was potent when enough of the electorate felt satisfied with
what it had and wanted to give no more to the government. But
when basic services are in question, people remember that the
government is still good for something. That is a point the
Republicans have been denying for over a decade. Ronald Reagan
said the government could do nothing but fight communists -- a
mission it lacks today -- and otherwise it should just be taken
"off our backs."

    Nothing could better demonstrate how former sources of
strength have become signs of weakness than the scheduling of
a convention speech by Ronald Reagan. That would until recently
have been considered a surefire way of rallying the troops with
memories of glory. But every reaffirmation of Reaganism traps
Bush more helplessly in the real Reagan legacy -- the deficit
that Reaganites are prevented from addressing. They cannot even
admit it is a problem without being called defectors from the
great man's cause. Reagan will come to forgive George Bush for
raising taxes -- and to make sure he never does it again. Which
means that Bush will be as weak in a second term as in the
first. Realists, of course, see this ghost from the past as an
incubus.

    Conventions for the incumbent are supposed to be
ceremonial reaffirmations of the regnant leader. This one is
flirting with thoughts of regicide. The Republicans are acting
less like Democrats than like the early leaders of Students for
a Democratic Society, busily excommunicating each other,
thundering mutual anathemas.