Republican women on and off the yacht.

It is perversely fascinating to watch the Republican Party attempt to fill in the "gender gap" and mollify female voters.

At a special "Salute to Women" luncheon at the San Diego convention, the Singing Senators, led by Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, serenaded a roomful of female delegates and elected officials from around the country with "Hey, Good Lookin'." Tables at the entrance to the ballroom were heaped with cookbooks and GOP aprons.

"I'm so glad to be singing for this audience," Lott's aide and fraternity brother Guy Hovis told the assembled women, before bursting into a lounge-act rendition of "That's What Friends Are For." "Keep smiling, keep shining, knowing you can always count on me, `cause that's what friends are for," Hovis sang, extending his arms toward the audience. "You're beautiful . . . you're our party's heart and soul and I believe we love you."

It's no secret that the Republicans are having a little public-relations problem with women. The problem is bigger than the obvious rift over the radical anti-abortion plank in the platform. The cultural message of the party--including the rhetoric that went over so poorly at the Houston convention in 1992 attacking single mothers and modern immorality--plays particularly badly with women. Polls also show that women are leery of deep budget cuts, and for some reason are just not drawn to Bob Dole (perhaps, an anonymous Dole adviser suggested to the Dallas Morning News, because of the "unresolved meanness issue").

So the Republicans are trying to soften their image, working Elizabeth Dole overtime giving speeches about "the man I love," and keeping pro-life culture warriors like Pat Buchanan out of the spotlight.

Still, despite the party's efforts to smooth things over with the ladies, the anti-feminist message keeps slipping out, like the return of the repressed.

DITCH THE BITCH, DITCH THE FIRST BITCH, DITCH THE WITCH, DITCH THE BITCH IN '96, a stack of bumper stickers declared in the storefront of what is usually a furniture upholstery business outside the San Diego convention hall. A T-shirt featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton's head on top of a dog's body hung in the window. The guy who runs the upholstery shop looked embarrassed when I asked why his merchandise was so hard on the First Lady.

"None of it is mine," he told me. "I got it all on consignment." He pointed out that there was one T-shirt that showed the President arm-in-arm with the Three Stooges. Still, he had to concede, the rest of his merchandise all focused on Hillary. "I guess they're saying she more or less runs the White House rather than Bill," he said.

Inside the convention hall I approached a guy wearing a DITCH THE BITCH T-shirt--Dale Olson, a substitute teacher from Bakersfield, California. He responded shyly when I asked about his shirt. "Well, sometimes I wish it was a `W' instead of a `B,"' he said, blushing. "I didn't realize how a lot of women would find that word offensive. I've had women come up to me here and say, `I'm a Republican and that offends me."' So why did he buy the shirt? "Well, I guess because Hillary sort of wears the pants," he said.

If the Republicans are having a hard time making a good impression on women, Republican women who are used to "wearing the pants"--well-educated, pro-choice professionals--are having an equally hard time relating to their party.

Many of these women fought the antiabortion platform plank, and are disturbed by their sense that a rabble of fanatical yahoos has wrested control from the party's traditional elite.

"This convention is a wake-up call to America," said Kate Gooderham, Republican vice president of the National Women's Political Caucus. "We are, particularly in the Republican Party, living under the tyranny of a minority. We have to show up and start to take back our party."

Gooderham addressed her "wake-up call" to a group of pro-choice Republican women at a champagne breakfast aboard the yacht High Spirits, during the "Yank the Plank" cruise--a $125-a-head fundraising jaunt for the National Women's Political Caucus.

Governor William Weld of Massachusetts and Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCoy Ross of New York got on board to deliver speeches explaining how protecting the right to privacy and keeping the government out of people's bedrooms mesh with traditional Republican values.

"To be socially conservative is to recognize that there are certain things that are just off limits to the government," Weld said.

A woman at the table next to mine, Gigi Cramer, leaned conspiratorially toward her breakfast companions to say she was reunited at the convention with "a good old fraternity boy from Sigma Nu" who was a classmate of hers from William and Mary. "I said, `Go conservatives!' and he said, `Yes, go conservatives!' and then he says, `Guess what? I just joined the Christian Coalition.' And I said, `John!' All of a sudden, I just didn't want to see him anymore! I just wanted to shake him! A Sigma Nu brother!"

She gestured emphatically with her free hand. "I mean, these people kept the governor of our great state of California out of the convention. . . . I was absolutely livid! Absolutely livid! My husband sold Pete Wilson his first home, when he was just a young man coming up. . . . If they can deny our governor the right to give an address--they are so powerful. It's these ultra-ultra-rightwing radicals!"

Other women on the yacht sounded just as disturbed. "It has me so worried that they've taken over the party apparatus," said Barbara Goyin, a doctor in charge of the San Diego hospital's ultrasound division and a founding member of her local chapter of the National Women's Political Caucus. "This is what the Nazis did in Germany. They took over the Party apparatus and people like me paid no attention--people who had lives and jobs."

Anne Patton, a Caucus member who helped organize the cruise, agreed that the more moderate forces in the party have been beaten back. "The biggest problem is it's difficult to radicalize a moderate. A lot of them tend to be apolitical. They get political around election time." Patton noded when I asked if many of these women would vote for Clinton. "The Republicans have to lose a few elections before they tend to get the message. And they will."

As we got off the yacht, Marla Painter, a rural organizer who recently moved to San Diego to run a progressive social-change foundation, expressed her frustration, "I kept wanting to get up and say, `Face it, you got your butts out-organized.' These comfortable, middle-class women don't know how to organize and harness that anger. It's all about amelioration for them--you look at those Christian Coalition women, and they are not going to take it."

There does appear to be a class split between the social moderates and the more radical social conservatives in the Republican Party. Some surveys bear out this impression, suggesting that anti-abortion activists tend to have less education and lower incomes than women who are actively pro-choice. It may be, as Painter suggests, that the pro-life, "pro-family," conservative Christian movement taps into the anger of a lower-middle class that senses it is losing ground socially and economically.

Alan Keyes seemed to touch on this in a speech to a group of pro-lifers during the convention. "We can offer a unity that goes beyond the unity of stupid self-interest," Keyes said. "You cannot ask your children to die for the sake of the cars they'll never drive and the houses they'll never live in once the sacrifices are made. But you can ask them to live and risk their lives for the sake of great principles."

Pat Buchanan, who delivered stirring speeches aimed at working-class voters throughout his Presidential campaign, also invoked the class theme during the convention, urging the "peasants with pitchforks" in his campaign to suspend their battle and unite with the "nobles and knights" of the Republican Party.

But from the mood at the convention rallies, it seemed that Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks" and the anti-abortion crusaders with their gory placards were advancing, while the ladies on the yacht were in retreat.

"Are we all feeling tolerant and inclusive here?" Buchanan asked a raucous pro-life crowd at Sea World to a chorus of appreciative laughter. The gathering, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, brought together members of the Christian Coalition and the Buchanan campaign for a victory celebration. "We may not be speakers [on the convention hall stage]," Buchanan said, "but the platform of the Republican Party is our platform."

That point was reinforced later at a massive Christian Coalition rally. "In case you haven't heard it from the podium in the last two days, the Republican Party is a pro-life party," Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed declared, brandishing a copy of the party platform. He pointed out sections that call for prayer in public schools, an anti-abortion "human-life amendment" to the Constitution, abolishing the Department of Education, and spending "not one more dime on Planned Parenthood."

But many pro-life women I spoke with who supported the conservative social agenda still said that abortion was less important to them than economic issues.

"The mainstream media have blown up the abortion issue," said Olivia McClellan, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother and a staunch Buchanan supporter. McClellan said if she couldn't vote for Buchanan, she'd vote for Ralph Nader.

Abortion "is not the problem," said another woman, a nurse, who overheard me talking to McClellan. "The problem is the people versus corporate America."

"We see the leaders of both parties as being bought and paid for by the same interests," said McClellan. "When I started supporting Pat Buchanan, I was drawn to him because of his America First, nationalist philosophies. I was a staunch pro-choicer. I have moved from being staunchly pro-choice to being moderately pro-life. . . . A lot of moral and good people are in this campaign," she says. "A lot of people came into the Buchanan campaign with abortion as their only issue and were totally unaware of political issues like NAFTA and GATT. They've built my spiritual awareness as I've built their political awareness."

The spirit of the Buchanan campaign has given the Republican Party a boost. But while the party has absorbed Buchanan's conservative cultural message, it has entirely left aside his anti-corporate message and his economic populism.

Buchanan was the only Republican at the convention to connect the fuzzy issues of family and morality to structural, economic problems: "Young women who used to stay home with their preschool children now are forced into the labor market because of declining wages," he said at his rally in Escondido. It is a remarkably obvious point. Yet incredibly, the rest of the Republican Party has ignored it. For all the cookbooks-and-aprons nostalgia invoked by the Dole campaign, the Republicans fail to note that there are almost no stay-at-home moms in America today--not because women don't want to spend time with their young children, but because the era of the family-supporting wage is over.

In his speech accepting his party's Presidential nomination, Bob Dole made it sound as though the difficult plight of working mothers were due not to broad social changes, but to individual moral failings. He came across as a strict old father, talking sternly about washing children's mouths out with soap and restoring "discipline" to the family.

"Permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed," Dole declared, attacking the "values of the present" as causing "illegitimacy, abortion, abdication of duty, and abandonment of children." Modern women, it seems, are directly responsible for much of what Dole finds wrong with America.

In her keynote address at the convention, Representative Susan Molinari of New York struck a more empathetic note toward working mothers, saying the Republicans "can't promise you more hours in the day," but instead can offer a tax break that is supposed to give women more time to be at home with their children.

But tax cuts do not begin to address the economic problems faced by most American families. Buchanan, the only candidate in either major party's primary to talk about the growing wage gap between rich and poor, told a story about some women he met at a Fruit of the Loom plant in Louisiana who lost their jobs when the plant moved to Mexico. "These women are going to end up on welfare," he said.

It's surprising to hear any Republican politician expressing sympathy for women on welfare. For while welfare mothers have been discussed more than any other group of women by politicians in this election season, no one is reaching out to them. And here is where the "pro-family" message of the Republican Party falls apart.

I asked Phyllis Schlafly whether abolishing welfare doesn't conflict with family values and the idea that women should stay at home with their children.

"Basically, yes. . . . But I don't think some mother has got the right to have other taxpayers support her so she can stay home."

And that value comes before the value of seeing to it that someone is at home raising the children?

"Well, the first value is not sticking your hand in my pocket," she said.

That, in a nutshell, is the unifying theme of the Republican Party. Forget whether single mothers are heaped with shame and contempt, or whether women with power and authority are called bitches. Forget whether Bob Dole is a lovable guy. Forget abortion. The bottom line is: Do you or do you not want to pay taxes?

The message of the Dole campaign is that taxes and government-run programs are themselves the cause of poverty and social ills. Not paying taxes is therefore the moral thing to do, and will help us achieve a better society. As a group, women are somewhat less inclined to buy it.