7/28/00 11:00 a.m.
The Preliminary Platform
A conservative platform Gov. Bush can live with.

By NR's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he Republican platform is set to be debated on Friday and Saturday, but the first draft has been completed. It's been changed in several ways from the 1996 platform. Some changes have been made to update it, others to conform it to George W. Bush's campaign strategy. In general, however, it's the same conservative platform as in years past, and the remaining debates will concern relatively narrow topics.

The new platform was designed to be less strident than the last one, and this goal has been met by omitting any reference to Bill Clinton or Al Gore. "They've corrupted enough," RNC chairman Jim Nicholson told the platform writers, arguing that they should not also corrupt the GOP platform. The real reason for the silence about Clinton and Gore, of course, is the aversion by the public to "negative campaigning."

The platform has been updated to reflect — and condemn — the Supreme Court's decision to strike down bans on partial-birth abortion. It also calls for maintaining the Vatican's permanent observer status at the UN, an issue which divides liberals and helps the Republicans appeal to the Catholic swing vote. Another departure from the past is the platform's call for private investment options within Social Security (accompanied by a condemnation of Democratic proposals for the federal government to invest Social Security funds).

In keeping with Bush's campaign, the platform no longer calls for abolition of the Education Department. It also no longer calls for term limits, which reflects the diminished political power of that cause.

The platform expresses Republican orthodoxy on campaign-finance reform. It condemns the soft-money abuses of the 1996 campaign, but defends the right to voice political opinions and advocates letting individuals contribute more money to campaigns.

What's left to fight over? Some conservatives are worried that Republican governors will try to get the platform to endorse new tax arrangements to capture revenues from the Internet. These conservatives aren't asking for the platform to reflect their own views, but merely to remain silent on the issue. There will, as usual, be a fight over abortion, but this will be a rather tame affair. Advocates of legal abortion have neither a majority of the relevant platform committee nor the majority of six state delegations necessary to force a floor vote on the subject. As of now, the only close call is the question of stem-cell research.

Finally, the so-called "Delaware plan" for the presidential primaries — in which states would be grouped into four categories by size, and the smaller states would hold their primaries first — has passed its first two hurdles intact.

Republicans are not in a mood to cause problems for Gov. Bush, and he has wisely decided not to cause problems for himself by fiddling too much with the platform. Don't expect the final version of the platform to be much different from that sketched here.