Bush Sails, Smith Bails

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

George W. Bush's `compassionate conservatism' has won accolades, but for some GOP ideologues, victory is tainted if you can't outlaw abortion and unencumber gun ownership.

Politics is a messy and ugly business. For successful practitioners, those who get things done, it is the art of the possible. Compromises have to be made, priorities identified. And winning elections is the bottom line. If you can't secure office, then what's the point? To win, you have to persuade the swing vote -- just under a quarter of the electorate -- to back you. According to conservative Republican pragmatists -- in other words, the intellectual descendants of the late Lee Atwater -- these basic truths appear to have passed by long-shot presidential candidate Sen. Bob Smith, who quit the GOP after accusing the party of engaging in a "charade."

In his angry and at times rambling July 13 Senate floor speech explaining why he is bolting the Republican Party, Smith devoted the bulk of his remarks to abortion. "Thirty-five million unborn children have died since [the Roe vs. Wade] decision in 1973. Thirty-five million of our best never get a chance to be a senator ... to be a teacher, to be a father, a mother," he said. And on a note of rising sarcasm, Smith lashed out, asserting that the GOP's pro-life position "isn't worth the paper it's written on."

In politics, the fight between purists and pragmatists is a perennial and a given. There are ebbs and flows, of course. Pragmatism without the guiding hand of principle arguably is what we have now -- a Clinton presidency. Principle without pragmatism is at best Jimmy Carter and at worst the mad mullahs of Iran. For conservative Republican pragmatists, and there now are few other kinds, Smith's stand is folly but a reminder that all won't necessarily be plain sailing for George W. Bush and his "compassionate conservatism." The Texas governor may have won the "money primary" hands down, but Smith has put him on notice that the sniping from some social conservatives won't stop.

Certainly presidential campaign rival and fellow conservative purist Gary Bauer remains undaunted. He wasted no time in folding the Smith resignation into the current battle for the GOP White House nomination. In an exercise in opportunism, he laid the blame for Smith's departure from the Republican ranks firmly at the door of the "Wunderkid" from Austin.

"George W. Bush has been effectively in charge of the Republican Party for about four months now," he said. "And so after four months of a Bush Republican Party, the only measurable result we've got is that Republicans have one fewer senator in Congress, which is not a good start." For Bauer, "a party that loses Bob Smith cannot win."

Bauer is wrong -- and on two counts.

To reduce Smith's principled withdrawal from the GOP as a mere reaction to the front-runner status of George "Moneybags" Bush is to ill-serve the New Hampshire senator. Right or wrong, Smith's motivations for quitting the GOP were more fundamental than any disapproval of Bush, who promptly said he was sorry to see Smith leave the party. Bauer's remark almost implies that Smith woke up one fine morning and resigned in a fit of pique. "Oh, George is leading, I'm quitting the party." That wasn't the case.

Smith's senatorial colleagues say the roots for his departure go back some way, at least to last winter's impeachment saga and his disgust with the whole sordid process. And more than one of his colleagues sees his action as an accumulated primal scream against the nitty-gritty of politics -- a rejection of campaign maneuverings, of backroom legislative deal-making and the dominance of pollsters in policy formation. "I salute his passion but this isn't a political revolt but a rebellion against politics" says one Southern senator.

And second, Bauer is mistaken to suggest that a party that loses uncompromising souls such as Smith will suffer at the polls -- it is, in fact, far more likely to win. Surely the history of the Democratic Party of the 1970s and 1980s teaches that. Stuck with the unrealistic liberalism of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, the Democrats were no match for the nuts-and-bolts pragmatism of Richard Nixon and the conservative realism of Ronald Reagan. As the Democratic Party suffered its reversals and setbacks it came to see betrayal as the catch-all explanation for its plight. "We aren't liberal enough" was the mantra of Democratic purists, followed by "We have to shift further left." Pursuing that approach condemned the Democrats to years in the presidential wilderness. Jimmy Carter only bucked the trend because of the Watergate scandals and not because of a sudden American embrace of starry-eyed liberalism.

For Smith and, for that matter, Bauer, victory apparently isn't worth a fig if you can't ban abortion and allow completely unfettered gun ownership. But would a Democratic electoral landslide further their causes? Would a President Al Gore, a House Speaker Richard Gephardt and a Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle result in more-restricted access to abortion or an end to federal tinkering with gun ownership? That is exactly what Smith's erstwhile GOP colleagues, conservatives included, tried to impress on him in the weeks and days leading up to his July 13 scream.