ELLEN GOODMAN

Big-tent talk by Dole and the GOP

By Ellen Goodman, Globe Staff, April 18, 1999

Ah yes, spring. The birds are on the wing, the buds are on the dogwood tree, and the Republicans are in the back yard trying to hoist up their Big Tent. They do this every few years when it occurs to them that the GOP has gotten just a bit too cozy for electoral comfort.

I admire this sort of scouting activity though I've never figured out whether this Big Tent is for a revival meeting or a circus. This year the big names on the marquee -- Dan "I'm-Not-Murphy-Brown" Quayle, George "I'm-Not-Dad" Bush and Elizabeth "I'm-Not-Bob" Dole -- seem to be competing for the center ring.

On the issue of abortion, they are trying to juggle the conservative voters they need in the primaries without dropping the moderate voters they'll need in the election. Bush and Quayle already look like contortionists. But Dole has a tighter rope to walk.

To have any chance at all, she has to maintain some balance in front of women who seem energized by the possibility of having a skirt among the suits in this race. They may love the Dole stroll, but are wary of an antiabortion stance.

In a recent letter to a supporter, the Red Cross lady tried to position herself -- check that safety net -- as the moderate. "We must recognize that good and honorable people disagree on the subject of abortion," she wrote. "We should agree to respectfully disagree."

Well, that's my act, too. In fact, it's the prochoice act. It's the sentiment behind the bumper sticker that reads: "If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one."

But Dole is prolife. In her own words: "I am prolife, with exceptions in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother." The only time she wobbles from the hard line on this high-wire act is when she implies -- like George and Dan -- that we don't have to really worry about her beliefs because she wouldn't push for a constitutional ban.

This is the latest version of the Big Tent. There aren't any seats for prochoice Republicans under the big top. In fact, there isn't even room for the ambivalent middle.

At the risk of exposing myself as part of the nasty media that Dole so dislikes for harping on this subject, she is going to find it harder to stay balanced during a campaign when specific questions come up from both sides.

Never mind the amendment. What does it mean right now to be prolife with exceptions only for rape, incest, and the life of the mother?

What does it mean to a woman like Michelle Lee, a Louisiana woman on a waiting list for a heart transplant? She was denied an abortion after a hospital committee determined that her life wasn't actually, really, truly in jeopardy. She didn't have more than a 50 percent chance of dying from the pregnancy.

What would it mean to a woman looking for the "morning-after pill"? This week the Vatican opposed distributing it to rape victims among Kosovo refugees. Would Dole?

What does it mean to ban Medicaid funding? A pregnant cancer patient in Florida couldn't get chemo while she was pregnant. But Medicaid wouldn't pay for the abortion because the pregnancy itself wasn't threatening her life.

"Republican women can set the example," wrote Dole to her supporters. "We can refuse to be drawn into dead-end debates." I'd like to see her as a family peacemaker, and to see Republican women as mediators who can lead their party onto a landscape where they can agree to disagree.

But these debates play out in real life. Over the past several years, the antiabortion movement has changed strategies. It turned its effort from making abortion illegal to making it impossible. Or as Pat Robertson said, "We might as well take the incremental approach."

Dole, like Quayle and Bush, is "moderate" only in comparison to those pup-tenters like Pat Buchanan or Gary Bauer. But the abortion issue is crucial in a campaign that may ask many women to pick between a woman candidate and a woman's right.

Those other advocates of the Big Tent theory -- Barnum and Bailey -- once said, there's a sucker born every minute. That's a high number. I suspect a lot of would-be supporters are going to be wary of sharing the same roof.

If her Big Tent is just an antiabortion shelter: well, not in my back yard.