In an effort to energize its core conservative vote, the Republican Party has overcorrected to the right. Not a single pro-choice plank passed anywhere in the country as the religious right dominated the process in state conventions everywhere. “Moderate voters stayed home in droves, and the wacky right captured the party,” says Richard Murray, a political scientist at the University of Houston. A Bush-Quayle strategist calls the vocal minority “Gothic Republicans,” moralizers who want to use government power to protect the unborn and sanitize the culture. If a far-right platform is the price for supporting Bush, he is happy to accommodate them. But he also wants to signal the pro-choice majority that he is not an extremist. Last week Bush told an interviewer that if his granddaughter became pregnant and chose an abortion, he would stand by her. Barbara Bush went further, telling NEWSWEEK and other news magazines that she didn’t think abortion should be part of the political process, that it was a matter of “personal choice.”
Bush’s straddle on abortion rights is unlikely to bridge the gap between the two sides. Inside the Astrodome, officials worry that zealous right-to-lifers could get out of hand and boo one of the GOP’s rising stars, Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who supports abortion rights and gay rights. Outside the hall, upscale suburban Republican women are protesting in a way they never dreamed possible.“We’ve come out of the closet onto the streets, I mean, wow!” says 68-year-old Anne Hale Johnson, of Potomac, Md. Houstonians who knew the Bushes way back when are baffled by the GOP’s adamant stand on abortion. A handful of “Bush Belles,” women of a certain age who supported Bush in his ‘64 race for Congress, turned up at a pro-choice cocktail party. Friends in Barbara’s Magic Circle social club are outspokenly pro-choice. All worry that GOP women could desert the party in numbers large enough to defeat Bush. What bothers these women most is that they are “the same kind of people” as the Bushes: privileged, socially conscious WASPs, with a tradition of supporting Planned Parenthood. Mrs. Fergis Reid Jr., 88, was having lunch at the Reading Room, an eating club in York Harbor, Maine, when she announced to her table guests, “I’m not going to vote for George Bush because he won’t let me have an abortion.”
In a facade of diversity, more women will address this convention, almost all avowed pro-choicers. “It’s an important statement to make that many of our leaders are pro-choice,” says a GOP consultant. Labor Secretary Lynn Martin, a pro-choice mother of two, is a party favorite. None of these GOP stalwarts is expected to frontally discuss the issue. But unlike the Democrats, the party does not have a dream team of women running for the Senate. Charlene Haar of South Dakota is the only Republican woman challenger to survive her primary. Anti-abortion and pro-guns, the former teacher says she is “absolutely not a feminist.” One campaign newsletter gave her recipe for watermelon pickles. And after she was featured on a local morning show for her rhubarb cake, she challenged her opponent, Sen. Tom Daschle, to a bake-off. He refused.
..CN.-NEWSWEEK POLL
If you had a young daughter who became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion would you:
57% Try to talk her out of it but support whatever decision she made 17% Agree that it is probably the best thing to do 17% Prevent her from having an abortion by any means necessary NEWSWEEK Poll, Aug. 13-14, 1992
