The Changing Face of the GOP : National GOP Looks More and More Like California’s--Oh No!

HOUSTON — Two Republican National Conventions played out in Houston last week. One was a picture-pretty TV show in which the California delegation served as little more than occasional bit players. Its message to viewers was that the GOP tent, although anchored by conservative underpinnings, is big enough to embrace even a state as diverse as California.

Yet the party platform is the most rigidly conservative in decades. Its strong religious imagery and hard-line anti-abortion and anti-gun control stands have little resonance for mainstream California. The message broadcast to the Golden State can be summed up as: “Bush to California: ‘DROP DEAD.’ ”

There’s an irony in all this. At the same time national Republicans may be hanging the Golden State out to dry, they are rushing toward the same fate as the California GOP: internecine warfare that tears the fabric of the party and threatens its ability to run and win--and govern.

That’s not good news for George Bush and the national Republicans. Or for the country.

Once again, as California goes, so goes the nation. And, like the demise of the state’s economy and the disintegration of its politics and governance, that is something to be dreaded, not cheered.

Under the Astrodome, GOP central casting came calling on the California delegation again and again, looking for the requisite demographic symbols to grace the podium--Sarah Flores, Matt Fong, former National Security Agency staffer Condoleeza Rice, Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi.

Meanwhile, Gov. Pete Wilson’s long-distance convention stint assailing Democratic legislators and the state budget deadlock was used to showcase California’s dubious role as proof that the nation’s ills are the fault of Democratic deadlock. California has become the test case for Congress-bashing.

But, for most of the week, the dire economic problems of the state were given short shrift and the voices of moderation in its delegation were ignored.

That disturbed some California delegates, who see in the schizophrenic rhetoric of the Republicans’ TV show--where tough talk alternated with homilies--a weak strategy in a state where Bush badly trails his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, in opinion polls.

Bush “cannot just be negative on Clinton,” one state GOP leader complained last week. “To have a chance of bringing California back, you need a California-specific campaign.” Yet the President’s acceptance speech did little to address the state’s economic problems.

Some California moderates see the national party’s tilt toward the Religious Right as disastrous. One delegate explained, “I am very fearful that the party will be so torn up by the Religious Right phenomenon, that it will undo the coalition of the ‘80s.”

California Republicans ought to know. The division now evident in the national party mirrors the division in their own delegation between anti-abortion-rights conservatives and Wilson moderates. This division underscores the deep ideological rifts that have sundered the state Republican Party and stymied Wilson in Sacramento.

And that, too, concerns many California delegates, who see the national party fights over abortion rights as an extension of that brutal war.

But in Houston there was no wrenching public debate over abortion rights. Responding to an electronic plea from Wilson, rank-and-file delegates from California, who opposed the party’s anti-abortion-rights platform, sat down and shut up. Moderate delegates surrendered--as Bush had--to the unyielding demands of a strong and well-organized coalition of the religious right and anti-abortion conservatives.

What’s really going on?

Remember, a primary function of political conventions is to pull the party’s base back together. When the 1992 GOP gathering was planned, the nation and California were still in the throes of Perot-mania. Bush was looking to shore up the hard-right base that could have given him the edge in a three-way race against Democrat Bill Clinton and the seemingly more centrist Ross Perot. The GOP convention was framed as the cornerstone of that strategy.

With the sudden exit of Perot from the race last month, Bush found himself locked into the conservative positions on hot-button issues he had taken earlier. In part, that’s what the August convention reflected--with moderate speakers added as a slight course correction.

That’s why California’s convention delegation--organized in the heat of the Perot phenomenon--was more conservative than it might have been. Wilson, as a moderate, certainly would have preferred a more ideologically compatible group of delegates. But, on the crucial electoral battleground of California, the Bush people used delegate slots to bring back straying Reaganites and shore up the support of conservative activists in the state GOP.

OK, maybe that explains Bush’s behavior. Maybe that accounts for the convention’s split-screen messages. But why was there so little kicking and screaming and blood-letting--trademarks of California GOP gatherings--in Houston?

Here’s a hint: When was the last time California Republicans shut up as a favor to Wilson? When winning the governorship meant grabbing the gold of reapportionment.

Now California Republicans are poised to seize the spoils of that victory. But moderates fear a poor showing by Bush in the state will trigger a full-scale electoral debacle. And that is something they cannot afford if the GOP strategy to take control of the state legislature and congressional delegation is to have a chance to succeed.

Brutal convention battles would have only added to the potential that a Bush-Quayle ticket in free-fall in California would take the party’s two Senate nominees and GOP congressional and legislative candidates down with it.

No point bleeding over ideology, moderate Republicans concluded, when you’re fighting for survival. Especially when there are indications Californians will get little help from the national party to stop the hemorrhaging.

Robert S. Teeter, the President’s national campaign chair, addressed an anxious California delegation last week, to counter media speculation that the Bush campaign was abandoning the state. “There is absolutely no possibility whatsoever that we would ever write off California,” he insisted. In fact, there will be “a full-blown organization in California.”

California Republicans need to watch the President’s post-convention bounce and late August polls. If Bush’s ratings in the state show little upward movement by the time September rolls around, take bets that the GOP will kiss off California and wage a blue-smoke-and-mirrors campaign in the state--lots of surrogate motion and no money.

The final irony for Golden State Republicans is that, in an attempt to salvage state and local elections, the moderates who came to Houston--and the governor who urged them to leave the battlefield rather than risk disunity--may have jettisoned their party.

Wilson’s dream of moderate realignment in California and politics may remain a nightmare of political division and government deadlock for years to come.