One from column A

National Review, Nov 10, 1997

THE off-year races in Virginia and New Jersey (governors) and New York City (mayor) provide a textbook array of GOP types: disappointing conservative, disappointing liberal, best possible liberal.

In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate James Gilmore has provided a model of how to mishandle the abortion issue. Two weeks before the election, he said he would support spousal-notification legislation. Then he backed off, explaining he couldn't support it because the Supreme Court had found it unconstitutional. Finally, he said he would oppose notification even if it were constitutional. All this sashaying only focused attention on Gilmore's vague abortion position -- he's for it in the first 8 to 12 weeks, difficult to pin down after that -- and cast doubt on his political fortitude. Fortunately for Gilmore, Democrat Donald Beyer's response to his initial endorsement of spousal notification -- a common-sense policy which about 70 per cent of people support in polls -- was clearly overboard: "We've come a long way from when we treated women as property, women as chattel."

Beyer has helped Gilmore in other ways. His harsh attacks on Pat Robertson have energized the Christian conservatives whom Gilmore had done his best to deflate. And Beyer, a good-looking Volvo salesman, has made being a New Democrat seem mere posturing in a way that even President Clinton never could. Beyer's education plan --to increase Virginia teachers' salaries to the national average --is a transparent PR ploy that no one has taken seriously as policy. His response to Gilmore's plan to eliminate the hated personal-property tax on automobiles was first to denounce it as irresponsible, then to adopt his own version. On November 4, Gilmore's popular tax plan should help get him safely home -- and show once again that tax reform is one of the best ways for Republicans to get there.

Four years ago in New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman toppled a Democratic incumbent with a strong tax-cut campaign. Gov. Whitman delivered on her promise. But now she is in a close race with Democrat James McGreevey, a little-known state legislator. Mrs. Whitman alienated social conservatives by scolding the GOP for its lack of inclusiveness, railing against the party's pro-life platform, and vetoing the ban on partial-birth abortions passed by her own Republican legislature. Mrs. Whitman's Republican tent has no room for pro-lifers. She disappointed economic conservatives as well by borrowing heavily in order to avoid spending cuts, and she abandoned GOP mayor Bret Schundler in his fight for school choice in Jersey City.

Now Mrs. Whitman has third-party problems. Murray Sabrin, a socially conservative Libertarian, has qualified for matching funds and the right to appear in candidate debates, where he has ably made the case for conservative government. (Richard Pezzullo, the candidate of the New Jersey Conservative Party, is running far behind Sabrin.) Mrs. Whitman is not like the liberal titans of thirty years ago. She lacks Nelson Rockefeller's money and John Lindsay's glamour. But she has done her best to tug the party in a counterhistorical direction. Conservatives cannot support her for re-election.

New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as Richard Brookhiser reports (p. 39), has pulled his share of Whitmanesque stunts: endorsing Democratic candidates, bumptiously taking liberal positions on immigration and rent control. But he addressed a central conservative concern, the crime problem, showing creativity and toughness, and achieving thereby what urbanologist Fred Siegel calls the only significant success in urban policy in thirty years. To do this, he has put many of New York's other problems on hold, and his ambition may carry him into realms where crime-fighting is not relevant. (Would Sen. Giuliani arrest difficult colleagues?) Mr. Giuliani cruises to a re-election, possibly a blowout. He will have, and deserve, the support of local conservatives -- this time out.

One option is not available to voters in 1997: best possible conservative. If some don't materialize, GOP prospects in 1998 and 2000 look dim.