Party divided on mission

WASHINGTON -- They may look like a happy family in the big tent of Madison Square Garden this week. The moderates and the mavericks will even serve as the Republican National Convention's biggest star power: Rudy and Arnold and John McCain, in prime time for America to see.

But the display of Republican unity that the convention will bring to television glosses over the larger forces at work within the GOP. Republicans may control both houses of Congress and the White House, but the party is deeply divided over its core mission and the formula for continued electoral success.

As President Bush and congressional leaders have tacked rightward on social issues, moderate Republicans have found themselves out of the party mainstream and largely confined to the sidelines of policy-making. Some conservatives are growing restless as well: Ballooning spending has deficit hawks concerned, and the first grumblings have emerged from the right over the president's leadership in world affairs.

"The challenge of sustaining power is very real to them," said Philip R. Sharp, interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "They should have been able to expand the base, but because of tough issues and conflicting desires as to where to go, they're at risk."

Patrick J. Buchanan, a two-time Republican presidential candidate, published a book this month that accuses the Bush administration of abandoning conservatives on fiscal issues and with a foreign policy that's "a prescription for permanent war." Buchanan predicted a "civil war" over the "heart and soul and future of the party" in the coming years.

On the other side of the party's political spectrum, the GOP fault lines were laid bare last week during the crafting of the party platform in New York City. The conservative-leaning platform committee drafted planks opposing abortion rights, stem-cell research, and gay marriage and civil unions, and in favor of teaching sexual abstinence.

One Republican activist who is an abortion-rights activist brought platform committee members a bag of marbles, saying they have clearly lost theirs if they're veering so far to the right on the eve of a tight election. A spokesman for the Log Cabin Republicans said showcasing at the convention such moderates as former mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California will be like "putting lipstick on a pig," given the party's official stances.

"We don't want to widen the cultural divide," said Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican who has expressed opposition to leadership policies on abortion, the environment, and the deficit, among other issues. "The party is headlining moderates. If you want to push us forward when it comes time to get elected, take your boot off my neck when it comes to vote."

The divisions are probably not enough, by themselves, to cost Bush the election.

"The party is more energized and unified than it's been since Ronald Reagan," said Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. "Obviously, when you have a big party, you have a lot of opinions. But there are a lot more issues that we're united on, and everybody in the party is unified behind the president."

Still, the party's image is of great concern to Bush and those around him, as evidenced by the depth of centrists who will be on display at the convention. One conservative party leader called it a "moderate murderers' row," and it will be rounded out with a keynote address by a Democrat, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia. Some moderates drew hope from Vice President Dick Cheney's break from party orthodoxy on gay marriage last week, when he said the issue should be settled state by state, not through a federal constitutional amendment.

Centrist Republicans may be an endangered species in Washington, but they're hoping to use the attention they'll get during the convention to shift the party their way. Today, members of a moderate Republican group called the Main Street Partnership are sponsoring a forum in New York to bring attention to their belief that the party has strayed from its core missions.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich will join Christie Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey and Bush appointee as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to call on the party to return to its roots: an emphasis on fiscal discipline, not divisive social issues, said Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, Main Street's executive director.

Gingrich will assert that the "Contract with America," which helped Republicans reclaim Congress a decade ago, focused on fiscal issues and a strong national defense, not hot-button social issues, such as abortion, gay marriage, and stem cells, Resnick said.

"It's an underlying difference in philosophy," she said. "We're being forced to take more of a stand on social issues than many moderates are comfortable with."

Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, said he is disappointed that so many conservative Republicans refuse to accept moderates as equal partners. The result is that the Bush campaign has spent so much time working on his base that moderates and independent voters aren't seeing a reason to support him, Shays said.

"The president has taken too long to grab the center," Shays said. "While he tried to energize his base, he basically energized his opposition."

But conservatives in the party argue that moderates in Congress confuse voters about the party's message and risk alienating the base of conservatives Bush needs to turn out at the polls. This spring, the Club for Growth, an antitax Republican group, narrowly failed in helping to defeat an incumbent senator with a more conservative candidate in Pennsylvania. In that campaign, Senator Arlen Specter was harshly criticized as too "liberal" on abortion rights and other issues.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, calls such Republicans as Specter "RINOs," as in "Republicans in Name Only," and said they "water down" what it means to be a member of the GOP.

Today's Republican Party is still adjusting to a decadeslong trend that has seen its power base shift southward, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. Since the civil rights era, the once-reliably Democratic South has slid to the Republican side, and Republicans in the Northeast find themselves out-of-step with party power brokers and increasingly marginalized, Sabato said.

"There aren't really that many moderates or real liberals left in the Republican Party," Sabato said. "The party today is composed almost entirely of conservatives, and that's the way it's going to be. I don't see this party changing."

Sabato added that this election year, with the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John F. Kerry, touting fiscal discipline and strong defense, cultural issues define the differences between Democrats and Republicans to a greater extent than before.

Moderate Republicans aren't ready to give up the fight. Chafee said Republican governors are in power in five of the six New England states, in addition to the Democratic strongholds of California and New York. A close Bush victory or a Bush defeat this year could convince party leaders that they need to broaden their reach to moderates, he said.

Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire said moderates in Congress remain an important bloc in crafting legislation, though their influence is usually felt at the margins. Dissent on social issues show that the party has a bigger tent than the Democrats, he said. Sununu said the number of Republicans who support abortion rights far exceeds the number of Democrats who oppose them.

This election will go a long way in defining the future of the party, said Resnick, of Main Street Partnership.

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.