c. 1999 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Of all the improbable candidates in an improbable field of 10 announced or aspiring contenders for the Republican presidential nomination next year, none is more improbable than Gary Bauer. You could ask him.
“I don’t look like a president,” Bauer says. “It’s possible for me to walk into a room and nobody notices.” He’s so slight, he seems smaller than the 5-foot-6 his staff claims.
But his message, Bauer insists, is something Republicans ignore at their peril: Only a campaign emphasizing family values and social issues, including opposition to abortion, can rally enough grass-roots Republicans and conservative Democrats to produce a GOP presidential victory.
He sees himself as the catalyst for faith-based politics in the GOP, either as a candidate or as a force in shaping the party platform _ not merely preserving the anti-abortion plank but strengthening it by supporting legislation that would define the unborn as people under the 14th Amendment, which establishes citizenship and protects personal rights.
And what of the conventional wisdom that another public bout over abortion could damage the party’s presidential prospects, as it has the last two elections? “I see zero evidence of that,” Bauer says, and adds that “a Grand Old Party needs to believe in a few grand old things.”
Who is this political unknown who would take the GOP to the brink again over abortion?
Gary Lee Bauer, 54, is an original Reagan Democrat, born into a blue-collar Democratic family in Newport, Ky. There, an 18-year-old Bauer was awakened to politics by Ronald Reagan’s speech to the 1964 Republican convention.
Despite his relative anonymity, Bauer has been around Washington and its politics for more than 25 years, though he has never held elective office. He lives with his wife and three children in nearby Fairfax, Va.
A 1973 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, Bauer worked as research director of the Republican National Committee in the early 1970s, joined the first Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 as a policy analyst, and moved into the White House as a domestic policy adviser after Reagan’s election. Subsequently, he served as first deputy undersecretary for planning in the Education Department and later as undersecretary.
With Reagan’s departure from Washington, Bauer took over the Family Research Council as its president, earning $150,000 a year. In 10 years he has built the council into a formidable force opposing abortion and gay rights and pushing tax breaks for families _ the very issues he now sees as the keys to Republican victory next year.
Any GOP campaign rooted solely in the traditional Wall Street issues of smaller federal government and tax cuts is “an absolute loser,” he argues. The Clinton-era prosperity has robbed Republicans of that issue. “How are we going to do better than 2 percent inflation and 4 percent unemployment?”
Events compel the GOP to stake its bid for the White House on a strong social issues agenda, in Bauer’s view. Even “secular audiences,” he says, are more responsive to his social issues message since the school killings in Littleton, Colo.
Bauer sees a kind of neglected majority in America _”including millions of Democrats”_ that thinks as he does. They find abortion repugnant, he says, oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriages, favor school vouchers and want greater governmental exertions on behalf of families, including a public stress on moral values and a rightful place for religion in “the public square.”
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans fill that need today, he said, and that hurts the Republican cause among voters.
“They have concluded that one party (the GOP) isn’t serious about it and the other is hostile,” Bauer said, “so they’ll go with the party that cares about their economic interests.” Advantage Democrats.
Bauer has few illusions about his own nomination prospects _ or most anybody else’s: “I’m obviously a long shot, but so is everybody but the governor of Texas.”
Gov. George W. Bush is on the verge of lapping the field before the race has really begun _ “they all want Bush,” Bauer says, meaning the GOP establishment in Washington and Wall Street. But he believes the Texas governor is squishy on the issues, especially abortion, and a “conservative alternative” will emerge from the ranks of those vying for the favor of religious and social conservatives _ commentator Pat Buchanan, publisher Steve Forbes, former Vice President Dan Quayle and himself.
Despite that group’s common commitment to social-values themes, Bauer finds himself at odds with each of those rivals over one item or another in the conservative agenda.
He favors a version of the flat tax but not Forbes’ version. He rejects Buchanan’s criticism of Israel and thinks Buchanan would withdraw the United States too much from world affairs. He opposes most-favored-nation trading status for China; Quayle supports it.
But his sharpest difference with Quayle involves Gov. Christie Whitman of New Jersey.”He campaigned for Whitman. I couldn’t do that,”Bauer said.”It’s one thing to be pro-choice, as she says she is, it’s another to support partial-birth (a controversial late-term procedure) abortion. That’s beyond the pale.”
Unlike his Republican rivals, Bauer is a passionate defender of Social Security, rejecting calls to privatize the program.
“Where I grew up, the elderly would have been living in poverty without Social Security, my mother included,” Bauer said. “I bristle when I hear my libertarian friends talk about that program like the worst thing in America. That’s the kind of attitude that hurts my party.”
And in another departure from Republican orthodoxy, Bauer is no fan of the global economy. It’s eroding the loyalty of U.S. corporations to this country and pushing their policies and officers, historically Republican and conservative, in a liberal direction, he argued.
“They’ve embraced social liberalism as part of the global economy. They give money to the American Civil Liberties Union and they’re down here pounding on us to promote trade with China.”
All that will change if Gary Bauer has his way.
Most observers interviewed paint Bauer as principled, articulate and gracious personally, but they also suspect social and religious conservatives will have less influence next year than in 1996 _ for two reasons.
They’re divided over whom to support. And this time they want a winner.
That’s how Charles Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report here, sees it. He believes the Christian right is “on a down cycle” and will be less of a force in 2000. “They want to win this time.”
But Bauer, he says, shouldn’t be underestimated. “He looks so meek and mild, but I’ve seen him wail out one hell of a speech. He can really crank up an audience.”
The religious right Bauer hopes to lead “continues to be a considerable influence,” says Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Report, an independent political newsletter here, “but increasingly, they’re driven by a desire to stop Al Gore and punish Bill Clinton.
“Bauer is probably right that Republicans can’t win on economic issues. But that doesn’t mean they’ll win by going harder to the right.”
One who believes Bauer’s rightward push would be fatal for Republicans is the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. But he doesn’t underestimate Bauer.
Bauer, he said, believes the comfortable economic conditions and the absence of any serious foreign threat like the Soviet Union mean that “this year, more than any other, Americans are ready to vote on moral issues. Gary is a true believer, not someone with his finger in the wind politically. I disagree with him on almost everything, but I like him. It’s his extremist positions that horrify me.”
At the same time, Lynn believes Bauer’s candidacy is less quixotic than it might seem.
“It elevates his capacity to influence the platform and advance his positions. And that’s always been his main concern,” Lynn said.
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