Attorney General Ed Meese is taking the social issues—abortion, crime, busing, quotas—off the back burner and, in so doing, turning up the heat in Ronald Reagan’s political kitchen. Meese’s Supreme Court challenge will be the long-postponed catalytic confrontation within the GOP, between those who want the conservative social agenda to be the centerpiece of future Republican outreach, and those who don’t even want it on the table.
The GOP dilemma is this: Southern and Midwestern evangelicals and urban ethnics (many Catholics) have been quitting the Democrats and joining the GOP, largely because of the Republicans’ conservative social agenda. Without social issues, the GOP today commands about 40 per cent of the electorate; with social issues, it has a majority. Numbers aren’t the whole story. “The New Right and the Christian Right are the voters who get most turned on,” notes one conservative political analyst. “Their power as campaigners far exceeds their numbers.”
Comments