CHANGING GOP COURSE; LUNGREN'S CATHOLICISM COULD SERVE AS LATINO LURE.

Byline: Tony Quinn

ATTORNEY General Dan Lungren's decision to highlight his Catholic moral values in the race for governor was met with instant derision by Democratic opponents convinced an appeal to religion won't sell in laid-back California. But Lungren's use of religion to define himself is more nuanced, and may signal an important shift in Republican thinking.

It is easy for Lungren and Republicans to align themselves with Catholic opposition to abortion, and support for school choice and prayer in schools. More difficult, however, will be an embrace of the strongly pro-immigrant position of the Catholic bishops, which runs directly counter to recent Republican political tactics.

The Catholic bishops strongly condemned Proposition 187's restrictions on public assistance to illegal immigrants, and the cutoff of welfare for legal immigrants supported by Republicans as part of welfare reform. The Catholic position isn't just more bleeding-heart liberalism; it is deeply rooted in the Catholic experience in America. Any appeal to Catholic values has to begin with a condemnation of immigrant bashing.

That's because throughout American history, nativism has been the wellspring of anti-Catholicism. Fear of the immigrant drove the first anti-Catholic movement in America, the Know-Nothings in the 1850s. They condemned early waves of Catholic immigration to America as ``popish foreigners'' who could never become real Americans.

Fashionable anti-Catholicism made its way into the post-Civil War Republican party. When a Massachusetts GOP senator referred to the ``criminal class of the great cities,'' everyone knew exactly whom he meant: Irish Catholics. In 1884, Republican denunciation of ``rum, Romanism and rebellion'' drove Irish voters to the Democrats and was responsible for defeat of the GOP candidate for president.

Even in this century, Republicans alienated two generations of Italian and Southern European voters with nativist rhetoric in the 1920s, culminating in the 1928 campaign against the first Catholic to run for president, Democratic Gov. Al Smith of New York. As late as 1960, John Kennedy's religion was a major issue in his campaign for president. In each case, the target was Catholics as a class.

The Republican anti-Mexican wedge politics in 1994 and 1996 closely mirrored traditional anti-Catholicism. The Boston establishment a century ago welcomed Irish to dig ditches or wash clothes in the homes of the rich, but they had better not try to go to the better schools or join the better clubs. Because he was Irish, Joseph P. Kennedy, even as a rich banker driving a plum-colored Rolls Royce, was blackballed from the upper-caste social clubs in Cohasset where he summered. Likewise, under Proposition 187 the illegal Mexican is welcome to work the fields or clear the tables, just not to go to school or get public benefits.

The GOP started with an arguably legitimate target, illegal aliens, and then when that worked in 1994, the party moved with seamless transition to legal immigrants. Television ads showing Mexicans streaming across the border sent the message of foreigners threatening the native culture. A favorite GOP argument in the early 1990s was that 80 or 90 or some other outrageous percentage of births in Los Angeles public hospitals were to immigrant Mexican women. What began with targeting specific illegal conduct ultimately extended to all Latinos as a class. It was the same with the Irish a century ago and Italians in the 1920s - their numbers are too great, therefore they are a threat.

The political problem for the GOP is that the numbers are indeed large. Latinos are surging into the California electorate; the vast majority of new registrants in Los Angeles County in 1998 are Latinos. More than 1.1 million Latinos voted in the 1996 election. And that's causing Republicans heartburn.

On his way to the second-worst Republican presidential showing in modern times, Bob Dole managed the considerable feat of receiving fewer Latino votes than George Bush's disastrous showing in 1992 (the worst GOP presidential loss this half-century). According to political demographer Patrick Reddy, Dole lost the California Latino vote to Clinton by 675,000 votes. Compare that to the Democratic edge among Latinos of less than 200,000 votes just six years ago, and Lungren's challenge in 1998 becomes very clear.

Lungren has to cut that loss. There aren't enough white votes to carry California if you spot the eventual Democratic candidate a 675,000-vote margin among Latinos, while losing the Asian-American vote 60 percent to 40 percent, and the black vote 90 percent to 10 percent, as happened in 1996. If the political demographics of 1996 are replicated in 1998, with Republicans getting only 16 percent of the growing Latino vote, no Republican will win statewide office.

The political context to Lungren's embrace of Catholic values as a theme of his governorship may well, at least subliminally, be a message that he is breaking with the recent Republican use of immigration as a wedge issue. While many Republicans, especially those with immigrant roots, were uncomfortable with the GOP's anti- immigrant campaign, the political necessity to break with the recent past is now readily apparent.

Lungren takes a chance by stressing religious and moral values, and many Democrats think it will backfire, especially as the nation's leading Democrat seems not to suffer from a directionless moral compass. But Lungren also can't stop with the easy issues. While he faces a political need to win a significant chunk of the Latino vote, he also cannot enshrine Catholic moral values and remain silent on immigrant bashing. The memory of ``Irish need not apply'' is too recent and too strong.

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Photo: Dan Lungren is taking a chance by stressing religious and moral values.

Evan Yee/Daily News