Edition: U.S. / Global

The Republicans: Can They Get It Together?

By Judith Miller;
Published: August 16, 1992

"You won't find any registered Democrats in this town," says Robert R. Pyle, the burly, pipe-smoking librarian of Northeast Harbor, Me., a picturesque resort village 180 miles up the coast from George Bush's summer retreat in Kennebunkport.

"If you encounter any, they were either abused by their mothers as children or they're from away," Pyle adds, deploying the local expression for those who've immigrated from someplace else.

The 46-year-old Pyle says his forebears "have been in these parts for a while." Since the Mayflower, in fact. The Republican Party seems equally well entrenched among Maine's 1.2 million residents, having been a dominant political force in the state since before the Civil War.

Before he was old enough to vote, Pyle campaigned for Barry Goldwater, then enthusiastically supported Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He cheerfully acknowledges that he has never voted for a Democrat for President.

If anyone in America should be solidly behind George Bush, it should be a G.O.P. stalwart like Bob Pyle. But this November, Pyle has every intention of voting against George Bush. Which means that he will actually pull the lever for Bill Clinton.

"I feel like I'm turning against a friend," Pyle says hesitantly. "This is painful, hard stuff for me. And I feel sadness, frustration rather than anger. George Bush -- he's become isolated. He doesn't seem to know what the hell is happening to us.

"Since the middle of Reagan's term, and especially since Bush, the rich have gotten richer," he goes on. "The poor have gotten children, and the middle class, like me, have gotten poor. I'm a pro-lifer in principle, so it's not that issue that's driving me away. It's the economy. I know that higher taxes were necessary. I don't hold that against them. It's their insensitivity to its impact on people. George Bush is becoming the new Herbert Hoover."

Pyle says the Republican Party as a whole is as much to blame as George Bush. "The middle-class person doesn't have a voice in the party anymore," he says. "Before the special interests took control -- the PAC's, the wealthy contributors -- we did."

By embracing special interests, Pyle argues, the G.O.P. has betrayed its own philosophy. "We used to call a destitute person someone who was 'on the town,' " he recalls. "We solved our own problems at the local level. But today, the Federal Government takes over and does nothing for him. I would still prefer a system in which localities raise their own money and decide how to solve their own problems. We Mainers don't like to be interfered with. The best place to make a judgment about what is best for us begins with us. That was what Republicans used to believe. It was the Democrats who always favored a big central Government. I won't support four more years of the same."

Down the road at the Docksider Restaurant, Northeast Harbor's most popular seafood house, the air tingles with the aromas of boiling lobster and political defection. The Docksider's owners, sisters Brenda and Gail Webber, and two waitresses, Diana Leonaid and Ann Ritchie, are all "year-rounders," a designation that distinguishes them from the summer residents. They are also all registered Republicans who want a new Administration in Washington.

"It's time for some young blood, some new blood," Leonaid, a 47-year-old mother of two, says.

"We're all fiscal conservatives," says Brenda Webber, 49. "We don't like Government regulation and the soaring deficits and the tendency to look to Washington to solve problems. But we haven't lived up to our social responsibilities. Bush says things aren't that bad. Well, maybe they're not for him. But they are for us."

As the others nod their heads in fierce agreement, Ritchie, who has five children, chimes in: "George Bush and his party have total disregard for women. I mean none." All of the women, it turns out, favor abortion rights -- adamantly so.

Leonaid says she is a Republican today only because her parents were. "But being a Republican doesn't mean anything to me anymore."

IF THE REPUBLICAN bastion of Maine, which has only four electoral votes, were George Bush's only zone of geographic and ideological vulnerability, the Grand Old Party would have little cause for alarm. But on the eve of the Republican National Convention, which starts tomorrow in Houston, disenchantment with Bush can be heard all over the country -- from the very men and women who should be among his most ardent supporters.

Scores of interviews over the last six weeks with registered Republicans in four traditional G.O.P. strongholds -- Maine, Orange County, Calif., New Jersey and Mississippi, places that have almost invariably supported Republican national tickets since 1968 -- reflect not only bitter disappointment with George Bush, but also a party deeply divided against itself.

Under George Bush, the party that the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater dubbed the "big tent," is creaking and groaning from internal strains, contradictions and rivalries. According to Kevin Phillips, the Republican analyst, ever since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have captured the White House by building a coalition of ideologically diverse constituencies: first, Traditional Conservatives, sometimes called "country club" or "Rotary Club" Republicans (who represent about 25 percent of the party's voters); second, Ivy League Moderates, sometimes called Nelson Rockefeller Republicans (about 10 percent); third, the Religious Right, the fundamentalist true believers who seemed to worship Ronald Reagan as much as any deity (about 15 to 20 percent); fourth, the Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar workers who have voted Republican in the last three Presidential elections (20 percent); fifth, the Anti-Communist Ethnics, the Cubans, Vietnamese and other immigrant groups galvanized by this single issue (about 3 percent), and last but certainly not least, given their activism and influence, the Radical Right, a group that George Bush early in his political career called "the so-called nut fringe," but which he has assiduously courted ever since (about 5 percent). (The rest of the G.O.P. voters defy easy categorization.) For years these disparate constituencies were held together with the glue of prosperity and the common adversaries of cold war. But today they are bitterly at odds.