Attack of the killer pundits.

Attack of the KILLER PUNDITS

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept into the White House and the Republicans took the Senate, many concluded that America had turned decisively to the Right. Eight years later, the old liberal coalition, exhilarated at the prospect of overturning Reaganism, has launched an aggressive campaign to convince us that the conservative movement is a thing of the past.

In the 1988 primary season, different components of the Reagan coalition naturally engaged in speculations (now over) about who would lead the GOP in the next round of battles for conservative values. But the Democratic coalition and its allies among liberal political commentators are much more interested in getting us to jettison conservative values themselves. To this end, they have resurrected two old tactics.

Tactic #1: Convince Republicans the conservative policies that brought Reagan's victories will today only bring defeat.

One year ago, Time published an essay: "A Change in the Weather--As Reagan's era recedes, compassion and government activism regain favor." "Americans," the essay announced, are "coming back home from the picnic of restored nationalism and morale," and are recognizing that it is "time to move beyond the era of self- congratulation and beer-commercial patriotism." In any event, Time reported, conservatism "was never an agenda that took deep root anyway." The political rhetoric of compassion is "a signal of [the public's] recoil against the meannesses of Reaganism..."

That's quite a mouthful. In support of its bold assertions, the essay trotted out polling data that show that 60 per cent of those surveyed "support increased spending for social programs even if it would require an increase in taxes," and that, by a 3 to 1 margin, respondents want to increase spending for social rather than for military programs. That kind of poll doesn't specify the nature or extent of the proposed increase in social programs, much less the size of the tax hike ($2? $50? $500?) people are willing to endure. And, of course, it doesn't tell us which sacrifices in America's defense capability the public would find acceptable.

I don't buy the theory that America is swinging left. The coalition Ronald Reagan trounced in 1984 is just trying to drag us that way. A Gallup survey published last fall by Times Mirror found that 43 per cent of those polled called themselves conservative, while only 30 per cent admitted to being liberal.

Nonetheless, certain conservative commentators seem to be picking up and relaying the Time essay's central thesis. George Will recently wrote in his Washington Post column that "George McGovern...may soon savor a victory especially sweet for being long delayed. The conservative era, such as it was, is coming to an emphatic close." Following Super Tuesday, William Safire advised that "the center of gravity of the Republican Party has moved inexorably to the left."

I think these pundits are wrong. All of the Republican presidential candidates projected messages that would have been deemed radically right-wing in the pre-Reagan era. As Jack Kemp has remarked, "There are no liberals left in the Republican Party. We're all conservatives." Nevertheless, there is a danger that remarks like Will's and Safire's may end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies if GOP opinion leaders become convinced that, in order to win in November, the Republican Party must build bridges to the Left.

The GOP tried that strategy ritualistically for decades; it doesn't work. The bridges always collapse, leaving Republican candidates high and dry on the losing side. That's what happened in 1986: in one case after another, Republican senatorial candidates sought to distance themselves from the Reagan Administration, and not just on one or two unpopular issues. These Republicans, some of whom had been elected to the Senate in 1980 on Ronald Reagan's coattails, ignored conservative themes, and in some cases rejected offers of assistance from conservative groups. They lost races they should have won, and the GOP lost the Senate.

One Trouble with kowtowing to liberal Democratic idols is that Republicans will never be able to outbid politicians like House Speaker Jim Wright. According to the Washington Post, a senior House Democrat quotes Wright as saying: "Taxing and spending is what we're supposed to do; taxing and spending is what government is all about." We know from experience: if the only difference between Democrats and republicans is that we want to spend slightly less money on the same "desperately needed" social programs, the GOP loses. Republicans who fail to articulate conservative values only end up sounding cheap and mean-spirited. Without a positive message of their own to respond to, conservative voters stay home and conservative activists fail to work precincts, man volunteer telephone banks, and shoulder the other inelegant but essential campaign chores for which slick TV advertising can never substitute.

Nor will we deserve to win if the only thing the Republicans offer is a promise to manage the ever-growing Federal Government more efficiently than the Democrats. Political values, like moral ones, have consequences. Republicans will deserve to lose future elections if, by heeding false calls to sell principles for votes, we confuse politics, the world's second oldest profession, with the world's oldest. We have won not by pandering to polls, but by mobilizing our own majority.

Tactic #2: Divide and conquer.

As Bill Rusher pointed out in The Rise of the Right, the winning conservative coalition consists of three forces: economic conservatives, who favor free markets and limited government; social conservatives, who stress the importance of family and religious values; and foreign-policy conservatives, who emphasize that America must be militarily strong and diplomatically resolute to withstand the threat of Soviet imperialism. Together, this tripartite coalition delivered tens of millions of traditionally Democratic votes to the Republican Party. Faced with the strength of this coalition, Democratic strategists now have hit upon a new use for an old tactic: make the conservatives fight among themselves.

There are any number of ways to play Divide and Conquer. Some journalists do it by repeatedly asserting that the conservative coalition has collapsed. "Republicans in 1988 risk a split between their traditional elite and populist newcomers who helped elect Reagan," trumpets the lead of an article last fall in the National Journal. David Shribman, who writes about politics for the Wall Street Journal, reported last spring that "a bitter struggle to shape conservatism in the post-Reagan era is already getting under way, and there is little hope of any resolution before the first political tests early next year." More recently Shribman quotes Kirk O'Donnell, president of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think-tank, as saying "the Republican Party is a coalition that is about to fracture."

Another version of this tactic is to egg on one component of the coalition against another. The Washington Post reported that, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association last year, Arizona State University's Warren E. Miller argued "that the chances of... Bush defeating a Democratic opponent in 1988 would improve in direct proportion to Bush's willingness to do battle with the Christian Right during the primaries." Taking the other side, in their new book Politics and Society in the South, Earl and Merle Black caustically refer to "country clubs and magnificent resorts, the natural habitats of the Republican elite..."

Even conservatives play. Two days after the Vice President's third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, the Wall Street Journal reported that well-known political strategist Kevin Phillips "thinks Mr. Bush's best chance to restore his fortunes is to pick a fight with Mr. Robertson." In a Washington Post article last August, Phillips asserted that "the Reagan coalition...is breaking down."

Phillips is wrong: the Vice President has triumphed without attacking Mr. Robertson-indeed, he has won the support of many social conservatives.

There is trouble ahead, however, if the GOP takes social conservatives for granted. Southern voters, blue-collar voters, and ethnic voters deserted the Democratic Party in droves when Democratic candidates failed to address their fears about the breakdown of the family, drugs and pornography, and the triumph of Sixties morality over America's traditional values.

But the Republican Party can't count on maintaining the political support of these traditionally Democratic social conservatives forever. Memories of the Democrats' excesses may fade--and a good many Democrats appear to have learned their lesson: when it comes to extolling "family values," the Democrats' rhetoric (if not their performance) is just as good as Republicans'. As Bill Lacy, formerly of the White House Office of Political Affairs, puts it, "It is important that the Republican Party understand that they are now part of our coalition and that the issues that brought them in are crucial and cannot be dropped." The back burner simply isn't any place for the legitimate concerns of social conservatives.

The GOP ought to invite social conservatives into its party organization. The other side of the coin, of course, is that the newcomers ought to avoid unnecessary fights with those party officials who, although they might not have supported Robertson, have labored long and hard for the conservative coalition. How Republican officials treat social conservatives between now and New Orleans may well determine whether Republican candidates receive their enthusiastic support.

What should the GOP avoid? Shrill statements like the one attributed by the Washington Post to a South Carolina Republican who compared a Robertson meeting to "a Nazi pep rally." Nor do we need the kind of blood-letting evident in January's Michigan caucuses, which led Rich Bond, Vice President Bush's Deputy Campaign Manager, to describe Michigan aptly as "the Beirut of Republican politics," and set Congressman Guy Vander Jagt worrying about losing the "blue-collar, suburban Detroit vote Pat Robertson attracted, [which] was an important part of the Reagan coalition." I agree.

This is a matter of some urgency, for the conservative coalition could break down if the Republican Party begins to believe that there is some inherent inconsistency in its coalition. Perhaps with that in mind, pundits--still pursuing tactic #2 --are offering a veritable menu of "choices" conservatives allegedly must make. A Wall Street Journal article, for example, tells us that conservatives "have to choose whether to give a greater voice to the Religious Right or to young professionals who twenty years ago might have been lured into the liberals' camp but who today worry about issues of economic growth."

Nonsense! We do not have to choose between the different agendas of the component parts of the conservative movement. A major political party not only can but should deal with a large variety of the problems and issues that confront our society. Voters who identify with conservative candidates primarily because they want economic growth are also concerned about the quality and moral content of the education their children receive--as William Bennett points out, "Everybody cares about their kids." And social conservatives who joined the party mainly because they don't want to be junior partners in a political coalition that includes NOW and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force can also agree that the answer is less, not more, federal intrusion into our lives.

On specific issues, conservatives may well disagree among themselves. Then Republican leaders will be challenged to accommodate, lest they be forced to choose between, disparate points of view. That's the function of leadership.

But the surest road to GOP defeat is to lose confidence in the essential rightness and viability of the conservative coalition--which brought America peace and prosperity, and the Republican Party out of the wilderness. Our enemies are engaged in what I believe is a calculated effort to split the conservative coalition. The stakes are far too high to allow them to succeed.