As a Republican member of Congress, Lynn Martin represented the Illinois district around Rockford, the area where Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas and where Ronald Reagan was born and grew up.
Like many Republicans, Martin, a former secretary of labor, spends little time reliving her friend George Bush’s presidential defeat in 1992. She sees her party as resilient, but perhaps more important, she believes that it has vexing, fundamental problems, that it must reintroduce itself to millions of voters with whom it has lost touch.
“We need to literally go out and talk to the people who didn’t vote for us,” said Martin, now working for the management-consultant arm of a Big Six accounting firm in Chicago.
“We can never replicate our victories in 1980 and 1984. We have to talk about issues that are not particularly identified as Republican-issues like jobs and issues that matter to families.”
Martin’s concern is shared by many Republicans, particularly outside Washington.
In a series of interviews with party officials and activists in several states, a portrait emerges of a party struggling in the absence of a true leader or a unifying principle.
Even as Republicans weigh the first 18 months of the Clinton presidency, internecine warfare is evident in Minnesota and Iowa, where a pair of GOP governors are being challenged from within party ranks.
In Virginia, the Senate candidacy of Iran-contra figure Oliver North has split the party between the darling of the social conservatives and former Reagan administration Budget Director James Miller, the choice of party moderates.
In Texas party Chairman Fred Meyer is stepping down rather than confront a bitter conservative challenge at the state convention.
And in hundreds of cities and counties in dozens of states, well-organized and aggressive members of the Christian Coalition are standing for county board seats and school board seats, in many cases confronting what might be called “regular” Republicans.
In her travels among state Republicans, Martin hears plenty about factional fighting.
“People say, What about the Christian Right?” she said. “Well, what are you going to do, put them on a boat? What you can’t have is any particular group defining the party.”
Beyond intraparty wrangles, there is concern that a cacaphony of voices-many of them in Congress, many of them interested in the presidency-have over the last 18 months defined the party only in terms of what it opposes.
“On the national level, we can’t continue to let Clinton define the parameters of the debate the way he’s done on health care,” said Indiana GOP Chairman Al Hubbard.
Hubbard, a former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle, followed up on his concern that Republicans stand for something by placing a full-page newspaper ad in Indiana that outlined a detailed GOP agenda for the state legislative session.
He then bought more ads, letting people know what happened to Republican proposals on crime, education and taxes.
Like many Republicans, Martin and Hubbard want to look beyond 1992 but are aware of deep divisions among Republicans over abortion, the role of government and an uncertain future.
Those divisions and-in the Republican view-the untimely end of the “Reagan Revolution” have plunged the party into ferment and a search for its soul.
Most Republicans share the view that 1992 was a personal defeat for Bush, and most blame his decision to renege on his “Read my lips: No new taxes” campaign pledge.
“George Bush is a friend of mine, but he ran a miserable campaign,” said Betty Rendel, a GOP county chairwoman in Indiana who started in politics as a Barry Goldwater delegate in 1964.
If Republicans were nursing an ideological hangover from the Bush defeat, evidence suggests they are finding a tonic in the swings and roundabouts of Clinton’s presidency.
Republicans are dismissive of Clinton (“He lies when the truth would do better,” Rendel sniffs), but they respect his political skills. And they are irate that he has appropriated what they view as Republican positions on crime, welfare and traditional values.
More ominously for the party, the internal fault lines hidden from view during Reagan’s eight-year run in the White House have been put on display.
With Bush all but forgotten, Republicans recall the Reagan years through a giddy, gauzy haze. Throughout the 1980s, Reagan’s primacy-and an extended run of economic good times-papered over many of the ideological rifts inside the party.
Now, out of the White House for the first time in 12 years, Republicans are grappling with the emergence of evangelical Christians as a powerful force inside the party apparatus and with the question of abortion, the Great Divide in the party.
“The Republican strategy for the future is not coherent,” analyst Kevin Phillips said, “but the good news for them is that Democratic policy is less so.
“Republicans have 20 years of demons hanging over them, and they’re still pumping away on issues people don’t care about. You see it in a kind of ultrafree-marketism, in bailing out on health care, in the never-ending defense of the 1980s.”
Phillips, who helped design Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and pull white middle-class voters toward the Republican Party a generation ago, paints a darker vision of the GOP condition than most partisans.
“George Bush underperformed Herbert Hoover by two percentage points,” he said. ” . . . When you lose an election the way Republicans did, you should probably be out of the White House for a while.”
That is a contrarian view, but fear of a bleak presidential future drives many Republicans toward the notion of reaching out to voters with a more credible domestic agenda than Bush’s.
“We can’t come at people empty-handed,” said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who recently prepared an 80-page “strategic document” for Republicans in the House.
“We can’t let whole groups of people-Reagan Democrats, Republican women, 18-to-34-year-olds-walk away from us, but that’s what happened in the last election.”
There is evidence that for all his political missteps, Clinton’s relentless focus on domestic matters is having an impact on voter perceptions and, ultimately, on Republicans.
Last month, a Washington Post/ABC News poll indicated that voters had more confidence in Democrats than Republicans in coping with the nation’s biggest problems.
Traditionally, crime and the economy are issues with which Republicans have held sway with voters, as they have on foreign policy and reducing taxes.
GOP Chairman Haley Barbour said the numbers “don’t bother me because Bill Clinton talks like a moderate but governs like a liberal, and the American people are beginning to see that.”
Despite Barbour’s bravado, there is a Republican longing for the ability to speak with one voice on a number of domestic issues, notably health care.
“We have to understand that what Clinton is doing right is recognizing real problems and trying to solve them,” said Indiana’s Hubbard.
“We don’t agree with his solutions, particularly on health care, but we must change the view that Republicans have ignored some of the serious problems in the country.”
Since his election in early 1993, Barbour has labored to keep Republicans focused on those opinions they share, always trying to turn the debate away from fratricidal rhetoric.
He never tires of noting that since Clinton’s election, Republicans have won two Senate races, two gubernatorial contests and mayoralty races in New York and Los Angeles.
Barbour recently mailed a survey to more than 800,000 Republicans, asking their views on a variety of subjects, and he received nearly 150,000 responses.
Most confirmed the comfortable view of Main Street Republicanism, with its passionate dislike of new taxes, old regulations, big government and its fondness for “family values and a strong national defense.”
But, inevitably, the survey exposed deep party divisions over abortion and other troublesome social issues.
There is perhaps no better yardstick for measuring that adjustment than the post-presidential election birth of a variety of GOP interest groups and think tanks, many of them based in Washington.
With no unifying figure in the party, these groups function as intellectual governments in exile and as vehicles for ambitious politicos.
Many Republicans are taken with the success of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group formed after the Reagan landslide in 1984 to move the Democrats toward the political mainstream.
They view the council as a model, noting that Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was at its helm until he declared his presidential candidacy in 1991.
Inside the Beltway, the group getting the most attention is the Project for the Republican Future, a think tank organized by former Quayle chief of staff William Kristol.
Operating in what many Republicans view as a “policy vacuum,” Kristol has sparked internal GOP debate with a series of public memos, many dealing with a political strategy for combating Clinton’s health-care plan.
The clash of egos and whine of fax machines are at a far remove from a place like Indiana, where state Republican coffers are full, where incumbent GOP Sen. Richard Lugar is all but certain to be re-elected at the top of the statewide ticket this year, and where Republicans are looking forward to 1996 and the departure of Democratic Gov. Evan Bayh, who cannot seek another term.
The landscape is more rugged in Minnesota, where GOP Gov. Arne Carlson, a moderate who supports abortion rights, is being challenged for re-nomination by social and cultural conservatives led by former state legislator Allen Quist.
The well-organized rebellion worries mainstream Republicans but is celebrated by the party’s most conservative voices, notably one-time presidential candidate and commentator Patrick Buchanan.
“The insurgents are about to take over the state convention and convert Minnesota into the first Bull Run of a civil war for the soul of the GOP,” Buchanan wrote in his syndicated column last month. “Today Minnesota, tomorrow the nation.”
Carlson’s backers, perhaps embarrassed by their own lack of initiative, are concerned the evangelicals will push the GOP to the ideological margins.
“What we’re in danger of doing is repeating the mistake that Democrats made for years,” said one Midwestern Republican Party official. “We’ll start nominating people who can’t win elections.”
If Buchanan is right, Minnesota is hearing the first salvo in the coming civil war inside the GOP. That is the issue that cannot be ducked by the party, the issue that has nothing at all to do with Clinton’s presidency.
