Party Strategists Fear GOP Has
Compounded Its Negatives
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A14
Republican strategists are worried that the public's negative view of their
party goes far beyond the negative reaction to the GOP's role in
impeachment.
Impeachment, they say, is part of a growing record of miscalculation dating
to 1995 that reinforced the image of a party defiant of -- if not claiming to
be superior to -- the public will, deeply opposed to President Clinton,
driven by a minority of intensely partisan interest groups and ideologues.
The end of the impeachment inquiry will not mean a new dawn for the
GOP; instead, in this view, the Republican Party faces a long, difficult
struggle to restore the credibility it initially built up in the 1980s, and then
again in the 1994 election, only to be steadily squandered since then.
"We have been the British army: the best troops and the worst generals," a
GOP media specialist said. "We pick fights and run away, we pick the
wrong fights and then run away. We should at least make the enemy take
some casualties before we retreat, but we don't even do that."
Tony Fabrizio, who polled for GOP nominee Robert J. Dole's 1996
presidential campaign and will likely work for Elizabeth Hanford Dole, his
wife, said: "They [Democrats] have become less doctrinaire and we have
become more doctrinaire. When they were the hard-core ideologues and
the purists, they got their brains beaten in. We are on that road."
Many Republicans worry that leaders of the drive to impeach Clinton have
reinforced the view that the party is out of sync with the public.
The anti-Clinton GOP leaders argued that their case is strong but the
American people have either failed to recognize its seriousness or that
voters have become morally lax in judging public officials. Some strategists
say there is another interpretation far more threatening to the GOP: The
American people do recognize that what Clinton has acknowledged doing
is very serious, but reject impeachment because of distrust of the GOP as
an arbiter of morality.
"These polls may not mean the collapse of nation's moral fiber, they may
just mean that people don't trust a bunch like Ken Starr, Henry Hyde and
Bob Barr to make their judgments for them," one Republican commented.
In 1994, the GOP took over the House and Senate with a message
portraying the Democratic Party as dominated by liberal special interests
supportive of a corrupting welfare system and of social programs that
defied common sense, determined to use partisan power to overrule the
views of the majority of voters.
After winning power with strong public approval in the polls, Republican
congressional leaders within a year lost ground dramatically, shutting down
the federal government twice and infuriating the public. What made the
shutdowns particularly dangerous tactics was that the public had grown
wary of anti-government rhetoric; the shutdowns followed the bombing of
the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168, and widespread
disclosures of civilian militias violently opposed to federal authority.
"Oklahoma City put a human face on people in government and it became
harder to sustain the [Rep.] Tom DeLay [R-Tex.] style of attack on
government," said University of California San Diego political scientist
Gary Jacobson.
The 1995 government shutdowns were forced in behalf of a GOP budget
proposal calling for $280 billion in tax cuts and a $280 billion reduction in
the rate of spending for a highly popular government program, Medicare.
"If you were an angry white male in 1994, there were lots of things you
were angry about from taxes to gays in the military to Joycelyn Elders
[former surgeon general]," said William Kristol, editor of the conservative
Weekly Standard. "One thing you were not angry about was Medicare."
While less noticed by the general public, the House Republican leadership
proceeded to initiate some of the most aggressive partisan policies in
recent memory, despite the growing demand by voters for constructive,
bipartisan approaches to governance.
Private GOP polls conducted in mid-1997 showed that when voters were
asked to identify the most negative aspect of the Republican Party, a
strong plurality said it was the party's determination "to force Bill Clinton
out of office," and this was before the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal broke.
These findings stunned Republicans. Their belief in a party committed to
tax cuts, free and open markets, family values and respect for authority
was not shared by the public, which saw the GOP as "the anti-Clinton
party."
"Clearly the impeachment process has built a negative image for this party
that goes beyond this trial and the impeachment itself," GOP pollster Dick
Dresner said.
"There is a sense that our guys have overreached, and have continued to
do so since '94. They get elected and they're like a kid in a candy store
going too far, too fast," another pollster said. Moreover, with the
retirement of the highly visible speaker, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), this
pollster said that the problem now is that there is no sense of "who the
messenger is; the public no longer sees anyone as the messenger, no one
knows or cares who [House Speaker J. Dennis] Hastert [R-Ill.], [Senate
Majority Leader Trent] Lott [R-Miss.] or [Republican National Committee
chairman Jim] Nicholson is."
At least one GOP consultant is anticipating a 2000 election in which Texas
Gov. George W. Bush could win the presidency but Republicans lose
control of the House. "It would be the first time in history we get a
Democratic president replaced with a Republican and one of the two
houses goes the other way."
Compounding GOP problems is that independent counsel Kenneth W.
Starr remains a wild card, in the eyes of many strategists. "We can bring
impeachment to a halt, but Ken Starr will continue, and we will still be
screwed," a Republican operative said, noting that Starr is overwhelmingly
associated with the Republican Party in the view of the electorate.
"This isn't like getting out of bed after a bad flu," one GOP operative said,
anticipating the tasks facing the party after the impeachment issue is
resolved. "It's going to take reconstructive surgery to get back the love and
affection of the voters."
Kristol noted that the issues that formed the core of the GOP agenda have
declined in salience. "The meat and potatoes of the Republican Party was
anti-communism, the bread and butter was tax cuts, and the appetizers and
dessert were crime and welfare. All of these are diminished, or Clinton has
come over to the Republican side. What's left are a whole bunch of issues
the Republicans haven't figured out," he said.
Not everyone is as pessimistic, but even those who see light at the end of
the tunnel disagree on the strategies to get there.
Pollster Frank Luntz said it is crucial that Republicans define the ideological
differences between the two parties. "It just has to be clear to Americans
that the Republican Party is the party of lower taxes. We have lost some of
our differences over the past four years. The more the party differentiates
itself, the more effective it becomes," he said.
But Jan van Lohuisen, who conducts surveys for the Republican National
Committee, said, "what is going to pull us out of malaise is achieving
something and achieving it in bipartisan fashion."
Kristol said, "The truth is impeachment masked the true weaknesses of the
Republican Party. The true nightmare, the true problem, if you are a
Republican, is when you look at what the public thinks of the party on
issue after issue, it is running 20 points behind [Democrats] on every one."
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