The Clinton Republicans

SAN DIEGO — For the past 16 years, much of the American political landscape has been defined by the phenomenon of the Reagan Democrat--the blue-collar, ethnic and patriotic former Democrats who helped Ronald Reagan win the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984, and to whom George Bush turned in 1988.

But the role of the Reagan Democrat as the nation’s political pivot may be giving way to an even more potent phenomenon. Despite all the best efforts of the Republicans in San Diego last week, and their presentation of that old familiar GOP elephant in sheep’s clothing, we may be witnessing the arrival of the Clinton Republican--and she holds the fate of the nation in her hands.

The Clinton Republican is not just female. She is, cobbling together a composite portrait from various polls, a 35-year-old working mother with a high-school education or better. And she seems to be rejecting the Republican Party as viscerally as the blue-collar ethnics rejected the Jimmy Carter-Walter F. Mondale-Michael S. Dukakis Democratic tickets in the 1980s.

The tracking polls during the GOP convention run by the San Diego Union Tribune suggested that Bob Dole’s convention bounce was largely a male phenomenon. Dole closed Bill Clinton’s lead to four points (42-38) among males, but Clinton remained 19 points ahead among women, with a margin of 53-34. Yet, just as Mondale left the 1984 convention tied with Reagan, one CNN poll taken before Dole’s speech showed the gender gap had been cut in half--but these numbers could prove as transient as Mondale’s.

This was an acute disappointment to Michael K. Deaver and Paul Manafort, the impresarios of an event carefully designed to portray the GOP as female-friendly. The heart-warming filmed cameos of women and minorities were as central to their theme as the deployment of that great asset, Elizabeth H. Dole.

Elizabeth Dole launched her own private challenge in the presidential campaign in San Diego, her whole demeanor a promise to challenge First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton directly as an experienced political activist and former Cabinet member--but also as a traditional wife.

A star was born at San Diego, along with something new in U.S. politics: a foretaste of the first three-way campaign among presidents, vice presidents and first ladies. This was Hillary Clinton in soft focus--politically accomplished but unthreatening, a woman of power without harsh feminist edges.

Whereas Hillary Rodham’s high-school classmates nicknamed her “Sister Frigidaire” in their yearbook, Elizabeth Hanford was awarded an equally revealing nickname when she worked in the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon White Houses.

She was, in those chauvinist days, called “Sugar Lips,” and her stellar performance of Grand Old Oprah, as she roamed the convention floor with a portable mike, explained the sobriquet. But this may not help. Bush suffered from a gender gap, despite being paired with the nation’s favorite grandma in Barbara Bush. This problem requires far more than an appealing first lady to fix.

The Republicans gave it everything they had. Every flavor of GOP womanhood was on display, a tactic of saturation bombing in the hope that something would work.

For those who wanted red-hot political mommas, there was Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison with the endless sound-bite of “over-regulating, bureaucracy-trusting, class-baiting, privacy-violating, values-crushing, truth-dodging, Medicare-forsaking, property rights-taking, job-destroying” Clinton.

With that archetypal 35-year-old working mom and ethnic Catholic in mind, they offered Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, cast with her baby in the unlikely role of the Madonna of Staten Island. There was New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, as elegant as her bloodlines for those who thought the classic country-club look might work.

You want Asian? They had the Korean ancestry of Sen. Phil Gramm’s wife. You want African American? They had the Capitol Hill policewoman who cried as she hugged Dole goodbye from the Senate. For drop-dead gorgeous, they offered supermodel Kim Alexis insisting that “a strong sense of family is what God wants for us.”

There was an air of desperation about the female parade--as though the men who run the GOP tried to confront Sigmund Freud’s baffled question--”What does woman want?”--and responded with everything they had in stock.

It was, of course, a shameless facade. The reality of the Republican National Convention was that women were strikingly less in evidence than in the past. In 1984, women were 45% of the delegates, and 44% at Houston four years ago. This year, the proportion was down to 35% for full delegates.

Nor were the delegates representative of much else beyond GOP activism. A Washington Post survey of the delegates found 72% thought abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Only 52% of registered Republicans--and 41% of all registered voters--hold such views. On affirmative action for woman and minorities, 83% of the delegates were against it, compared with 52% of all registered voters.

Party activists are expected to be a bit out of step, but they are supposed to stay in touch with the mood of the public they hope to represent, and the Republicans should have seen the problem coming many years ago.

The Democrats’ lead among women voters is not new; but the scale of it this year is revolutionary. And because 52% of all registered voters are women, the electoral advantage to the Democrats is even greater than it looks.

The gender gap began to emerge as a serious political phenomenon in 1976, when Carter beat President Gerald R. Ford by four points. In 1980, Carter still had a three-point advantage among women; Mondale widened it to four, and Dukakis managed a five-point gap. Clinton in 1992 won by six points among women--but the double-digit lead he now enjoys has no parallel in U.S. political history.

Because the phenomenon began in the 1970s, it is tempting to place this in the context of Roe vs. Wade and offer the glib explanation of abortion. That is what the (male) Republican leaders appear to believe, from their contortions over the party platform and the strenuous efforts at the convention to play down the abortion row.

Most of the public fuss focused on the complaints of the pro-choice Republicans that they were not given the podium, or when they were permitted prime-time, it was to deliver a carefully neutered speech. Colin L. Powell had the personal authority to deliver a single phrase on the matter--and was booed for his pains.

But the anti-abortion camp had equal reason to complain. Their point of view, having triumphed in the platform, was then pushed firmly aside. Former Vice President Dan Quayle was able to attack late-term abortion, but the passionate statement of conviction of a Patrick J. Buchanan or a Pat Robertson at conventions past were powerfully discouraged.

Republican pollsters have put huge effort into researching their gender problem. Kellyanne Fitzpatrick’s research suggests that gender is a far less reliable voting indicator than other clues--from homeownership to marital status to church-going.

Moreover, there is some cogent evidence, in polling by Linda DeVall and a separate Gallup study, that abortion is not the core issue explaining female disaffection. In the Gallup study, women ranked abortion 10th in a list of 12 issues of concern, far behind the economy, crime, education and family issues.

Rather like defense and patriotism for the Reagan Democrats, family issues may be what jars Republican women loose from their loyalties. They seem to be the trigger that starts them looking at Clinton’s Family Leave Act and Medicare for elderly parents and college loans, and all the other social programs that the GOP revolution in Congress threatened over the past two years.

Ann Stone, of Republicans for Choice, suggests that abortion “is just the tip of the iceberg,” and even staunch anti-abortionists like Bay Buchanan, now a single mother while also campaign manager for her brother Pat, acknowledges that the party simply does not know how to relate to her sex in general.

“We have done very little to explain how we understand women’s problems,” she says. “The Democrats give them something like the minimum wage to make women feel they are concerned, they care. I don’t think our party knows how to reach women from the heart,”

At least this year they are trying. Four years ago, the stridency of the anti-abortion camp at the Houston convention dismayed one GOP delegate, Tanya Melich, who tried to explain the effect of an encounter with the Operation Rescue zealots in her book “The Republican War Against Women.”

“When I returned from the confrontation with (Operation Rescue leader) Randall Terry, I went to my hotel room and cried,” she wrote. “I realized I literally hated George Bush, and I knew I could not go to the convention floor that night and vote for him.”

Dole has avoided that kind of defection this year, sidestepping this issue by saying he has not even read the GOP platform. This is a document promising “legislative and judicial protection of that right [to life] against those who perform abortions.”

This appears to mean that doctors who perform abortions will be treated as criminals. At least, that is the way we can expect Clinton to put the question at the presidential debates, when he asks Dole if he has read that part yet. Knowing what the Reagan Democrats did to Mondale and Dukakis, the White House will leave no stone unturned to turn today’s gender gap into November’s Clinton Democrats.