Jul

31

Moderation in the Pursuit of Victory

[From New York Times]

Moderation in the Pursuit of Victory

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
“I AM pro-life,” Bill Frist, the Senate Republican leader, announced last week, elucidating his decision to buck President Bush and support expanded federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. “I also believe,” he added a bit later, “that embryonic stem cell research should be encouraged and supported.”

If the instant outrage Mr. Frist’s comments generated among conservative leaders is any measure, the senator will soon learn whether it is possible for a Republican to hold both those views and still run for president, as Mr. Frist is expected to do in 2008.

In recent years, cultural conservatives, once the fiery insurgents of their party, have become the central pillar of the new G.O.P. establishment. They dominate presidential primaries and caucuses, even in a nominal blue state like New Jersey. Their advocates in Washington can bestow or deny credibility to legislation and presidential aspirants alike. And they have even begun to supplant Wall Street businessmen as the party’s financial base.

Yet the early list of Republican White House contenders is dominated by politicians whose commitment to conservative orthodoxy is newfound, inconstant or diminishing. They include Mr. Frist; George E. Pataki, who announced last week that he would not run for a fourth term as governor of New York; Senator John McCain of Arizona; Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts — Massachusetts? — and, of course, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, a job that before Mr. Giuliani held it might have ranked only slightly ahead of “former pornographer” in its unsuitability for G.O.P. candidates seeking higher office.

To many political analysts, the question of whether such Republicans can buck the conservative establishment and become president has a simple answer: No.

The road taken by Mr. Pataki, who is all but certain to mount a presidential bid, illustrates the conundrum such candidates face. In 1994, Mr. Pataki rode a nationwide Republican surge to defeat the liberal lion Mario Cuomo, instantly becoming a conservative hero. He cut taxes, slashed welfare rolls and pushed to reinstate the death penalty. In later years, however, he governed from the center, cutting generous deals with unions and allowing spending to rise by about 72 percent.

But while he zagged to the middle, the conservatives who came into power in 1994 were consolidating power in Washington and the Republican Party. The election of George W. Bush cemented the shift. These days, the conservatives who once sang Mr. Pataki’s praises are not amused. In New Hampshire, the influential conservative editorial page of The Manchester Union Leader has already declared Mr. Pataki unfit for a run.

Marshall Wittmann, a former lobbyist with the Christian Coalition who is now a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic research group, noted that the very qualities that allow Republicans to win in blue states like New York can doom them for the higher office. “It’s the opposite of what Frank Sinatra sang,” he said. “If you can make it there, you can’t necessarily make it anywhere in the Republican Party.”

It was, ultimately, the enmity of the new Republican establishment that doomed Mr. McCain - despite what were solidly conservative ratings on abortion and gun control - to defeat in the 2000 primaries. And in the last five years, Mr. McCain’s record has become even less conservative on many issues. He has pushed for legislation on global warming and voted against most of the Bush tax cuts, calling them fiscally irresponsible.

But some saw Mr. McCain’s steadfast support of Mr. Bush during the 2004 campaign as a way for him to earn his way back into his party’s good graces. Mark McKinnon, the media strategist for Mr. Bush’s campaigns, recently said he would work for Mr. McCain should he run in 2008, and the senator retains high public approval ratings. “McCain has the asset of being pro-life, if not quite as adamantly pro-life as Bush was,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “But a good share of that base doesn’t trust him for different reasons, whether for his campaign finance efforts, or his bipartisanship or because he ran against Bush.”

That could change, Mr. Ornstein said, if the Republicans’ current troubles - from investigations into the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s activities on behalf of Indian tribes to questions about the fund-raising of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader - cost the party congressional seats in 2006. Establishment conservatives might swallow their dislike of Mr. McCain, hoping that his reformist credentials defuse a Democratic resurgence.

During his first term, Mr. Frist was best known for his work on health issues, and his record, though not liberal, put him somewhere in the Republican middle. But after becoming Senate majority leader in 2003 - and a presumptive contender for the party’s presidential nomination - Mr. Frist moved quickly to earn credibility with power brokers on the right.

He pushed to overturn Senate rules that would have made it harder to advance President Bush’s most controversial nominees to the federal bench. During the debate over the Terry Schiavo case, he quickly pushed through a bill giving jurisdiction over her fate to federal courts. His announcement Friday many not prove damaging in the end: Polls show that even most Republicans support embryonic stem cell research, as does a majority of the public as a whole.

Can Mr. Giuliani be the one Republican with a chance to transcend the disadvantages of geography and cultural moderation? As mayor, he established himself as a political Eliot Ness, a tough guy whose congenital inability to mince words proved his greatest asset. The Sept. 11 attacks gave him deep credibility on the issues of strength and vulnerability that have dominated presidential politics since.

“There’s a sense that something evil is out there in the world, and you have to have people with enough malevolence themselves that they can take on people who are forbidding and frightening,” said Fred Siegel, a professor of history and humanities at Cooper Union and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life. “The more important the terrorist threat is, the more it overshadows the issue of his social views.”

But with deficits deepening, spending growing and involvement in Iraq dragging on, the tectonics of 2008 are hard to read.

“It will come down to, what’s the big question on voters’ minds?” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Will it be, ‘Who’s going to make sure we never get into another Iraq?’ Would it be, ‘Who will give us more tax cuts?’ Or will it be, ‘I’m glad we fought the terrorists and cut taxes, but who’s going to do something about spending?’”

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