The Rascals on the Right
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
Washington
The early jockeying for the Republican presidential nomination reveals a split in the G.O.P. between sociocultural conservatives and the economy/ national defense wing, a split likely either to expand Democratic opportunities in 2008 or to produce an exceptionally viable Republican nominee.
The most significant development at this stage of the race is the failure of any G.O.P. candidate to emerge as the consensus conservative, uniting white evangelicals, family-values traditionalists, defense hawks, and opponents of the tax and regulatory state. “There is a vacuum in the field,” says the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, “a big, gaping hole.”
The two Republican candidates leading in polls, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both fail the consensus test. Each stands to the left of the party — well to the left in Giuliani’s case — on the “traditional values” issues: sexual mores, family structure, reproductive choice, gay rights, embryonic stem cell research, and so forth.
While religious leaders and social conservatives have claimed veto power over Republican presidential candidates, there are at least three reasons to doubt this will take place:
First, the G.O.P. has a long history of sticking with front-runners. Second, socially conservative political activists in key primary and caucus states are under intense pressure to choose now, accepting the field as it is. McCain has picked up the support of one of Iowa’s top Christian power brokers, Marlys Popma, despite his denunciation six years ago of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” who “shame our faith, our party and our country.” Third, states such as Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and California are considering advancing their primaries to an early date, Feb. 5. This would weaken the leverage of religious and cultural conservatives who are strongest in the South, and would strengthen the hand of Republicans who are enthusiastic about right-libertarians like McCain and Giuliani.
Where once party leaders and institutional forces screened candidates for moral rectitude — or the semblance of it — the top four candidates in this Republican crop head into the race with nine marriages, five divorces and unknown numbers of extramarital affairs. Among them, only Mitt Romney is viewed as squeaky clean.
Public Opinion Strategies, a highly respected Republican polling firm, noted in an election post-mortem that the impact of personal scandal “on the Republican Party has been understated.” Bill McInturff, a senior partner in the firm, presented data showing that in the closing weeks of the last election, Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned after disclosures that he sent sexually suggestive messages to teenage House pages, had become a better-recognized figure than either Dennis Hastert, the former House speaker, or Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic successor. In October 2006, Foley achieved the dubious distinction of a 69 percent negative rating among respondents, seven points higher than O. J. Simpson and nearly as high as Yasir Arafat.
Although Romney has evidently led an uneventful private life, he is trying to forcibly reinvent himself from his incarnation as a Massachusetts governor who favored abortion rights and gay rights — almost as hard a history to surmount in the G.O.P. as the multiple marriages and divorces of McCain, Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich. (Gingrich set a new standard in nerviness by conducting an affair with a House staffer while leading the drive to impeach President Bill Clinton.)
Social-moral conflicts of the sort surfacing in the Republican Party should help the Democrats, if they choose a candidate who can capitalize on Republican disarray. Sexual mores aside, Democrats have been hampered by a long line of candidates who, no matter how virtuous (or not), have been perceived by swing voters as moralizing, elitist, egg-headed, puritanical, do-good scolds — from Adlai Stevenson to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis to Al Gore.
Unless the Democratic Party can suppress its inclination to pick such nominees, or can find a way to focus public attention on the opportunistic and grandstanding nature of its opponents, the weakness of social conservatives could turn out to be a Republican strength. The nomination of a McCain, or a Giuliani, could result in the selection of a candidate whose macho posture and rascal charm make for a viable general election nominee.
Thomas B. Edsall, who holds the Pulitzer-Moore Chair at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, is a guest columnist. |
