A Quayle Rather Than a Tiger by the Tail : The Conservatives Have Had Their Moment, and They Have Gotten the Message

One of the more eloquent testimonies to the sad disarray of the Republican conservatives was their reported elation at the choice of Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle by Vice President George Bush as his running mate.

While it is true that Quayle’s voting record in the Senate--a solid 82% rating with the American Conservative Union--would make him acceptable to the right, he champions no issues that are truly dear to their hearts. His affable blandness also raises questions of how energetically he would push the agenda of the right with Bush, a man whose credentials as a conservative have always been suspect.

Bush deserves a good deal of credit for political astuteness in picking Quayle, because the selection gives him legitimacy with the conservatives without pandering to them by selecting one of their darlings. Had he chosen almost any other prominent conservative, he would have had a tiger by the tail. Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), a man whom Bush reportedly cannot abide, is a true believer in a variety of economic nostrums that Bush regards as hare-brained. Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the La Pasionaria of the American right, is still in her pre- glasnost fighting crouch and might upstage and embarrass the less combative Bush in the one area in which he claims unchallenged supremacy over Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis--foreign affairs. As for Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), he no longer is seen by many conservatives as one of their own. Rather, he is regarded as a man who has been hopelessly compromised by the moderate give-and-take of Senate politics and whose sallies at liberalism seem to be more cantankerous than pointed.

The quiescence of this most raucous group of Republicans at New Orleans has been the most notable feature of a convention that has generally been devoid of benchmark events. The leadership of the once-mighty right has fallen to New Hampshire’s Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey, a man unlikely to be confused with the Granite State’s great statesman, Daniel Webster. Humphrey’s vetting of the proceedings has been cranky and episodic rather than passionate and sustained. The right wing’s favorite senator, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, has been invisible in New Orleans, and such ideological enforcers as Patrick Buchanan have chosen to take the high road of political commentary. What has happened to the Republican right that was so influential in 1981 that one of its stalwarts, Paul M. Weyrich, could publicly intimidate newly elected Vice President Bush and warn him that his every act would be scrutinized for its fidelity to the Reagan principles? What has happened to make the Robertsons and the Falwells so sweet-tempered and compliant, despite their certain knowledge that Bush is at best a thinly galvanized conservative?

The most obvious answer is that the right has simply gotten everything at once. Bush, in his 7 1/2 years as vice president, has not dissented from any major element of the Reagan policy and has even at times seemed to be its most energetic cheerleader. Bush’s choice for a running mate is well within the acceptable doctrinal limits. And the platform adopted by the GOP is a photo duplicate of the conservative 1984 document that venerates all of the conservative dogmas. While all of this gladdens the hearts of conservatives, the cumulative effect has not been to energize them.

The true source of conservative demobilization lies not in the adroit--some would say slavish--conformity of Bush to the Reagan principles. Nor has the right wing been sedated by a 1988 platform lifted virtually in its entirety from the one on which Reagan ran in 1984. The real source of conservatives’ quiescence and their token and half-hearted efforts made earlier this week to put up a candidate to run against Bush is none other than Ronald Reagan himself.

Reagan, this century’s only conservative activist President, advanced the small government, anti-communist campaign of the American right to its furthest practical point within the restrictions of this political system. Yet he will end these two triumphant terms with major pledges unredeemed in the areas of abortion, school prayer and the shrinkage of the federal stablishment. What is even more somber, from the perspective of the right, is that relations with the communist nations of the world have never been better. The American right has gone as far as it can go with Reagan. Its cause will not progress much with Bush, a man whose viscera do not throb to the same conservative impulses. But the conservatives did not even send their first team to New Orleans to challenge him--because he enjoys Reagan’s benediction.

The gestures to conservatives in the form of Quayle, a minor conservative figure at best, and a platform that is about as binding on Bush as the receipt that you get at a parking lot disclaiming liability for damage to your car, are mere trimmings.

With nothing to hope for and nowhere to go, American conservatives are between the upper and nether millstones. On the top is the weight of a revolution that tested the limits of what was achievable in the conservative agenda. Below lies the hard reality that the future holds either a President whose commitment to the cause is lukewarm at best or, most horrifying of all, a Democrat in the White House.