Rift within GOP is widening over issue of abortion

By Mary Leonard, Globe Staff, 08/28/99

ASHINGTON - Internecine warfare over abortion is breaking out in Republican presidential politics.

The issue that GOP candidates George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole have been trying to douse flared up this week when the National Right to Life Committee, several leading conservative columnists, and some staunchly antiabortion rivals pounced on Arizona Senator John McCain for suggesting that abortion should remain legal.

''There is an impulse in the Republican Party to make its platform pro-life but be operationally pro-abortion,'' GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer said. A Christian conservative who headed the Family Research Council, Bauer pledged this week to fight that impulse and a growing public perception that Republicans have ''wobbly knees'' on abortion.

All nine GOP candidates oppose abortion rights. But they don't agree on the details, like exceptions for rape or incest, litmus tests for appointing judges, and a constitutional prohibition against abortion. And because a majority of Americans support abortion rights, the candidates also can't agree on how vocal to be in their views.

The attacks on McCain, who has a 16-year record of opposing abortion, looked like a shot across the bow from some social conservatives alarmed that the GOP is losing its spine on the issue.

McCain does not have a case of ''wobbly knees,'' said Howard Opinsky, his spokesman, who called Bauer's statement ''nonsense.''

But Carol Long Tobias, political director of the National Right to Life Committee, said McCain is deliberately softening his position to appeal to Republicans who support legal abortion. ''He is trying to straddle the fence,'' Tobias said. ''I could be cynical and say the reason why is that he is running for president.''

Campaigning this week in California, McCain declared he was ''prolife'' and ''unequivocal'' in his support for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. McCain clarified his remarks, reported in the San Francisco Chronicle last weekend and repeated on CNN, saying that before repealing Roe, measures had to be in place to reduce the demand for and risks of illegal abortion.

''I'd love to see a point where'' Roe ''is irrelevant and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary,'' McCain told the Chronicle. ''But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force ... women in America to illegal and dangerous operations.''

The flap is likely to have consequences beyond McCain's campaign, however, because the Arizona senator is not the only Republican candidate striking an accommodating chord on the abortion issue. Bush said the GOP should retain its ''pro-life tenor,'' but the Texas governor said he would not make antiabortion views a qualification for judicial appointees or commit to choosing a running mate who opposes abortion.

Like Bush and McCain, Dole would permit abortions in cases of rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother. Dole, the former president of the American Red Cross, said she considers herself ''pro-life'' but has intimated that as president she won't push an antiabortion agenda.

Greg Mueller, an adviser to publisher Steve Forbes, a candidate who has made opposing abortion a campaign centerpiece, said the issue ''cannot be finessed much longer'' because the Republican field is sharply divided between antiabortion activists and passivists.

''Outside the Washington Beltway, Republican rank-and-file voters want to know which candidate will use the bully pulpit to defend the unborn,'' Mueller said. ''If Bush, Dole, and McCain say they can't do anything about that, then people will want to know why they are running for president.''

Susan Cullman, cochairwoman of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, said that the GOP pendulum is slowly swinging ''in our direction,'' and that the harsh reaction to McCain's ''sensitive'' remarks means social conservatives know it and fear it.

''The Bauers and the Forbes and the Buchanans are getting eclipsed, and they are not scaring our mainstream candidates,'' Cullman said. ''There is an important shift this year, which is: It's OK to be more moderate.''

Forbes, who put little focus on abortion in his 1996 campaign, also is leading a drive to ensure that the GOP platform safeguards support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan has threatened to leave the GOP race and run as a third-party candidate if the party abandons the proposed ''Human Life Amendment,'' which is dear to antiabortion activists and Christian conservatives and has been part of the GOP platform since 1980.

McCain says that to be the ''inclusive'' party of all Republicans, the GOP must drop the prohibition language on abortion. Dole and Bush have said that because the Human Life Amendment has no chance of being enacted, the party should downplay it.

Curiously, the National Right to Life Committee, the capital's most powerful antiabortion lobbying group, has said little publicly on Bush and Dole's position, but it issued a news release calling McCain's statements an ''opportunistic flip-flop ... to curry favor with certain political elites.''

''Dole and Bush would both be better than McCain,'' Tobias said, adding, ''there is reason to be concerned'' about them, too. ''But I don't think the arguments of Bush and Dole sound like they were written by our opponents, and McCain's do.''

The National Right to Life Committee, which raises large amounts of unregulated ''soft money'' for its political action committee and is a leader in campaign issue-advocacy advertising, has been an ardent opponent of McCain's proposals to ban soft money and restrict issue ads. The committee, critics said, has more reasons than abortion to torpedo McCain's campaign.

''It's fair to say the National Right to Life Committee has been waiting to lurch at McCain over campaign finance reform, and so they seize on one quote on abortion, taken out of context, to do it,'' an aide to the Arizona senator said.

Tobias acknowledges the committee disagrees with McCain on campaign finance but says that has no bearing on the abortion issue. ''There's no legitimacy to that charge,'' she said.

''I love it,'' said an adviser to another GOP candidate, adding he had ''no doubt'' McCain's advocacy of overhauling campaign laws motivated the committee to attack him on abortion. ''Now that they have raised hell, I don't see how they are going to be able to go on saying Bush and Dole's positions on abortion are irrelevant.''