Gary Bauer - one of America's most well-known and leading voices for conservatism; chairman, American Values; president, Campaign for Working Families; former president, Family Research Council, one of Washington's most well-respected centers for public policy; past chairman, The Campaign for Working Families, America's second largest political action committee with more than 90,000 individual contributors; former domestic policy advisor, President Reagan, served in the Reagan Administration for eight years; chairman, President Reagan's special Working Group on the Family; frequent guest on a wide variety of political and news talk shows; author, Our Journey Home and Our Hopes, Our Dreams: A Vision for America; co-author with Dr. James Dobson, Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids; former under secretary, Department of Education; senior policy analyst, Reagan-Bush Campaign; B.A., Georgetown College; J.D., Georgetown University Law Center; father of three. Spouse - Carol. Arlington, VA.

 It's really good to be with all of you this morning and to have a chance to talk with you about the election, the aftermath of the election and where we go from here.

Some of you, when we were chatting before we ate this morning, asked me how I could possibly stay in Washington all these years and not have it wear me down, not have any particular impact on me. I pointed out that when I first went to Washington back in 1969 that I was 6 foot 2.

As you can see, this city has an impact on everyone, in many different ways.

I was asked this morning to talk to you about the future of American conservatism. And what I've been asked to speak about presupposes that I know the answer to the future of American conservatism. I don't. I have probably as many questions as you do about where we go from here. And I hope we can begin today and in the weeks and months ahead to have a national conversation in the conservative movement about what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, what the Republican party is doing right and wrong, and where we do go from here to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

I'd like to go over with you today some of the things that have happened over the last eighteen months. Before we begin this conversation, we need to reflect back on some of the scenes that played out, some of them very well-known scenes that were written up in the newspapers and other scenes behind closed doors. All of these things, over the last eighteen months to two years, when you look at them, tell us something about how we got to the place we are today.

Let me remind you of a meeting that took place about a year and a half ago. Jim Dobson and I met in Washington, D.C., with Senator Phil Gramm, who was then just beginning his public effort to seek the Republican presidential nomination. We had the meeting because Dr. Dobson and I were both concerned that Senator Gramm, while he was talking very articulately about economic issues, wasn't really saying much about the social issues, the issues of values. And that concerned us, so we wanted to clear the air with him.

Now, I need to tell you that Phil Gramm is one of my heroes. I celebrated, as I'm sure you did, a couple of days ago when he won reelection in Texas.

I think back to when Bill and Hillary Clinton introduced their health care plan in the United States Congress. Many people have forgotten how many Republicans were ready to sign-on to that health care bill. The polls overwhelmingly showed that Americans wanted health care reform. But not Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm took to the floor of the United States Senate and said, "This is socialized medicine. And if I can't vote against socialized medicine, then there's no reason for me to be in Washington, D.C."

Largely because Phil Gramm planted that standard, other senators eventually rallied to him. And we all know that, ultimately, Hillary Clinton's health care plan was defeated. So this is not a man who lacks courage. This is a man who, time and time again on issues like that, planted the flag, took his stand and won. So why, Jim Dobson and I asked ourselves, why did he seem to be hesitating over issues about the family, about abortion, etc.?

So we went into his office for that meeting and exchanged some pleasantries. Dr. Dobson then urged Senator Gramm to talk more about the abortion issue. The Senator made it absolutely clear that although his voting record is pro-life, it just wasn't going to be an issue he was going to emphasize.

So Dr. Dobson tried a different tack. He said, "Well, Senator, certainly you understand that millions of Americans desperately want somebody in the political arena to talk about the breakdown of values, the decline of reliable standards of right and wrong and what's happening to our children. Our virtue deficit."

And Senator Gramm said, "Well, Jim, I'm not running for preacher. I'm running for president. It's your job to talk about those things."

Now, I believed then that Phil Gramm's presidential effort had the best chance of succeeding of all the candidates' campaigns. I believed that Phil Gramm could inherit the Reagan mantle of economic conservatism and social conservatism.

I now believe Phil Gramm's campaign ended that day, in his office. Not because I'm a king-maker or because Jim Dobson's a king-maker, but because in the weeks and months that followed, the message went out through the network all over America -- to men and women of faith -- that Phil Gramm was not willing to argue on those issues.

A certain tone was set, a certain standard was set, in the campaign.

A few months later Pat Buchanan came on the scene and really stirred things up. I think we can all agree on that. Now, I happen to disagree with Pat Buchanan on a number of issues. Probably, many of you disagree with him on a couple of issues. But he is a conservative, he argued the case on those issues -- I thought relatively well in a number of cases.

 In a movement and in a party that grows, there are going to be disagreements. You're going to have Pat Buchanans and Jack Kemps and Bill Bennetts and Phil Gramms, and you should want debate. But what was the nature of the debate against Pat Buchanan. Was it a debate among friends? No, I don't think it was.

I opened up the paper and saw people like my friend Jack Kemp using words like "fascism" to describe Pat Buchanan. I saw a number of Republican leaders use the curse words of the left not just to debate Pat Buchanan, but to try to destroy him. Millions of voters around the country who might have identified with Pat on one issue or another, got a very clear message about what the Republican party would tolerate in its ranks and what it wouldn't. I would suggest to you that the leadership of the Republican party was tougher on Pat Buchanan than it was in the last three months of this campaign on Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

What happened as the campaign went on and the process continued to play itself out over the last year and a half? If you go back into Lexis/Nexis and put in as key words "Republican leadership," what words do you think will come up? "Family values"? "Respect for life"? "Lowering taxes"? No. We went back to Lexis/Nexis and searched for key words "Republican leadership." And what came up most often for the eighteen months leading up to this election? The phrase, "The Big Tent." That was what Haley Barbour said every time he went on television. "The Republican party is a big tent." That's what almost every leading Republican figure chanted as if it was some sort of magical chant. That message was the main message sent for eighteen months to the American people.

A big tent in service of what? A big tent for what purpose? A big tent to take America where? None of those things were ever answered. It was a big tent as the goal, the purpose, the reason you ought to be a Republican.

We move on to San Diego, and the convention and the week of the platform decisions.

Most of you watched the convention, I'm sure. I got there a week ahead of time to be involved in the platform areas.

As you all remember, we had a bruising battle over whether the Republican party platform would continue to be unambiguously pro-life. Bob Dole and his operatives and many other people in the Republican party wanted to add a provision to the platform of so-called "tolerance." And they wanted to add it only in the abortion plank and nowhere else.

A number of us felt that was unacceptable, that it would send a terrible message around the country. The Republican party has been pro-life since 1976. Why would we, in 1996, suddenly want to send a different message on that issue?

And so I went out to San Diego, along with Ralph Reed and Bay Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly. We fought that particular battle and won on the issue of the words in that platform.

But why, when we'd won in San Diego, did I feel so uncomfortable, so bad, even though we had won the battle?

Suddenly, it hit me why I felt so bad.

In this pro-life party, in the weeks leading up to that convention, leading Republican figures like Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Governor William Weld of Massachusetts, Governor George Pataki of New York, and Governor Pete Wilson of California, all publicly announced that they intended to go to San Diego and rip the party away from its pro-life moorings.

Now, why was it, under those circumstances, that the people who resisted that were people like Paul Weyrich and me and Bay Buchanan and Ralph Reed? Why was there not one Republican pro-life governor? Not one Republican pro-life senator? Not more than one or two pro-life Republican congressmen? -- who had a light bulb go on in their head and said, "Wait a minute, they're trying to rip our party away from something we have believed for twenty years. I'm going to go out to San Diego and hold that flag up and fight for that plank."

One elected Republican official, for one week's work, would have been a hero to a million activists around the country. That would have driven me and Ralph Reed, Bay Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly right out of the news. We did non-stop interviews at San Diego. The press was all over us. An elected Republican official would have been all over the news. We would have been in the background. Why was it that the only elected Republican officials in the middle of that fight were on the pro-abortion side?

We won the platform battle. But one Republican leader after another -- Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole -- said, "Oh, I haven't read the platform. Doesn't really matter. We don't care about it." They went out of their way to send a signal to the viewers that that conservative platform meant nothing.

What about the speakers at the convention in this pro-life conservative party? How many conservative speeches did you hear from the podium of that convention?

I was with Dan Quayle the day before he spoke. He said, "You know, Gary, I was supposed to turn in my speech last night, but I didn't do it because I was going to mention the Right-to-Life issue. They're censoring that out of all the speeches. So I'm going to wait to the last minute to give them my speech. They'll probably still censor it out."

Excuse me, Mr. Vice President, but in all due respect, you're an American citizen. When you go up to that podium and you're standing at that mike, you can say exactly what you want to say.

Did you realize that the word "life" was mentioned only twice from the podium of the pro-life Republican party's convention?

Let's go on to the campaign, which we could spend a whole morning talking about.

What happened at the presidential debates? What happened when Jack Kemp was asked about the decline of American civility, about the decline of our cultural values. He responded with a dissertation about income inequality.

Excuse me? Jack Kemp, one of our heroes, a friend of mine, didn't have the intellectual firepower to answer a question about values with a response about values? Somebody needs to tell Jack that the philosophical position that says that men and women are driven by economics and economics alone is not called "conservatism." It is called "Marxism." Yet to every question he was asked in that debate, he gave a purely economic answer.

What happened in the presidential debates? Bob Dole got the slowest pitch of all thrown across the plate. Somebody out in San Diego said, "Senator Dole, this country was founded on Christian principles, Judeo-Christian principles. We've obviously gone a long way away from them. What are you going to do to restore those principles?" Bob Dole pulled out a copy of the Constitution and started talking about the Tenth Amendment, states rights. And Bill Clinton, in response, talked about religious liberty.

What about the last question of the debate when the woman stood up and asked a question about gay rights? It was the second question in the San Diego debate about gay rights. The first thought that came to my mind was, "How can you have a hundred undecided voters and two of them have, as their number one issue, gay rights?" Bob Dole answered that question by chanting over and over and over again, "I don't believe in discrimination. I'm not in favor of discrimination about lifestyles."

What if Bob Dole would have said, "Well, ma'am, in all due respect, I'm surprised that two people here tonight have gay rights as their number one priority. And I'm going to violate all the rules of politics"? He could have said, "For those of you whose number one priority is the demands of the gay rights agenda, that's your man right there to vote for, Bill Clinton. I will argue with Bill Clinton about many, many things, but I'm not going to argue with him about this. He has said in his own words that he is the most gay rights president in the history of the United States. I agree with him. If that is your issue, he is your man. Now, if you're interested in the breakdown of the family, reliable standards of right and wrong, teaching our children the values that we need to preserve our democracy, then I'm your man. Next question."

There wouldn't have been anything hateful about that. There wouldn't have been anything bigoted about that. That would have been the minimum -- the minimum -- that a party that counts on our votes should have been required to do.

What I want to suggest this morning is that something much worse is at work here than a slightly disappointing election this week. There is something wrong at the heart and soul of the party that we have made our home in. Something is wrong when Newt Gingrich goes out to Las Vegas, holds a fund raiser in a casino and walks out with $400,000 for the Republican party. There's something wrong when that can be done without any sensitivity to where they get their support.

There's something wrong when Trent Lott puts, on a gambling commission, a doctor in Louisiana who promptly holds a press conference and says, "Oh, I gamble every weekend."

There's something wrong when we have to fight Newt Gingrich to get the gambling commission through the Congress in the first place. Because Republican consultants -- not Democratic consultants -- because Republican consultants were telling him that the commission ought to be killed because it will offend the gambling industry.

Look, we don't have thirty years any more. It's not 1964, with Barry Goldwater, where we had thirty years to build a movement. We may have, in my view, four, five, six years, before America is changed in a way that will never be retrievable.

We now have crossed the line into infanticide. There's no two ways about it. Partial birth abortion is infanticide. When you take a child out of the womb except for its head, in the seventh, eighth, or ninth month of pregnancy, and then suck its brains out in order to deliver a dead baby, that is not abortion.

On the floor of the Senate when the issue was being debated, one Senator turned to the Democrats and said, "Well, what if the head slips out ahead of time? Do you have to put it back in before you can kill it or can you kill it afterwards? Is that an abortion?" Nobody would respond to the question.

 We're probably eighteen months away from a Supreme Court decision authorizing same sex marriages.

We may be twelve to 24 months away from court decisions saying, "Euthanasia is now the law of the land."

We are in a four or five-year period where every profound question about who we are, what kind of nation this is, what is the purpose of this experiment, is going to be settled, unless we can do something more dramatic and more aggressive and more creative than we've been able to do up until now.

So my message here today is, we've got to stop politics as usual. We've got to stop having nice meetings where we all have a lot of fun with each other and that's all we do. We've got to get down to brass tacks.

We are producing the growth in the Republican party. I'm a supply-sider, but when Republican meetings are held all over the country, it's not supply-siders who stream by the millions into the Republican party.

It is men and women of faith. It is Catholics and evangelicals who know that something has gone wrong with the heart and soul of America. And if we can't get the Republican party to deal with those issues with as much verve and enthusiasm as they deal with issues of crunching numbers, then this whole enterprise is worth nothing.

Let me end my part of this and have a conversation, get some reaction from you. Let me end with one other story from the campaign that I thought summarized it all.

I don't know how many of you saw this. Bill Clinton was down in Louisiana, campaigning. He's walking along a rope line to shake hands. He comes across a high school girl who is crying. And the President naturally looks at her and says, "Young woman, what's wrong? Why are you crying?"

This young woman tells the President that she is crying because of partial birth abortion. She believes in the sanctity of human life, and she could not believe that the President of the United States would veto a bill to stop that horrible procedure.

What did the president do? Keep on moving down the rope line? No. He stopped. And he spent five minutes to turn that little girl around. He lied to her, he told her that he had vetoed the bill because he was concerned about the life of the mother, when the bill had an exception for the life of the mother. But he spent five minutes with a Catholic high school student, in front of all the cameras, to defend a position that 80 percent of the American people disagree with him on.

I watched that on the evening news that night, and I was angry. I thought to myself, "Well, I'm angry at President Clinton because he lied to that young woman." Then I thought, "No, that's to be expected."

Then I got mad at the young woman. "Well, why did she cave in so easily?" But I thought, "Wait a minute, this is a high school girl. At least she confronted him. She did more than our candidates did."

Then it hit me what I was mad about. Who among our leaders would have walked along that line and did what Bill Clinton did, if the roles were reversed? What if they had come across a young high school girl crying, who said to them, "I'm in favor of choice. Why don't you trust me to control my own body?"

Which of our leaders would have stopped, with the cameras running, to make the case for life to a high school girl who was in favor of abortion?

My friends, go down the list. I won't mention the names. You go down the list of those who are our heroes or who would be our heroes. You tell me which one of them, with the cameras rolling, would have made the case.

There is something wrong with a party that stands for death. Does it boldly and aggressively. And the party that stands for life and for our values acts embarrassed and ashamed. It cannot be allowed to continue one more day.

 

QUESTION: Gary, I was talking to somebody about Howard Phillips and the U.S. Taxpayers Party. I don't particularly like that name so much. But nonetheless they were saying, "Well, it's kind of a burnt earth approach, a little bit, with Howie. At least you know where he stands." I've not been in that thinking very much. Are you thinking a little bit in that direction in saying what you're saying today? Or are you saying, "No, not now but maybe in four years from now if we don't change things around ---"

MR. BAUER: Yeah.

QUESTION: Do you understand my question?

MR. BAUER: Sure. Sure, I do. I took some heat over the last couple of months from some of the Howard Phillips supporters because I was not, in their view, promoting him enough, and I understand their frustration.

I do not want to walk out of the Republican party. We have been at this for over thirty years, and there are a lot of really good things happening at the grassroots level.

My druthers, my number one goal, is still to make this party a vehicle for our values. But I also believe we can't wait much longer. I do think that we're probably in a cycle where we either clarify and get the kind of candidates we want, or we do have to be prepared to walk. They count on us not walking. That is central to their calculations. They believe, at the end of the day, we will always find the Democrats to be marginally worse, we will always swallow hard, always rationalize the choice and always vote for the lesser of two evils.

As long as they think that of us, we are condemned to a losing game of constantly retreating. It's a matter of how much we're willing to take before we eventually break, so I want to fight to take over the party. I would hate to give it to a Christie Todd Whitman and Pete Wilson and those folks, who really do want to take the party in a totally different direction.

I think we've got a couple years to find a candidate who will represent us and try to get that candidate through the process. If we get the same sort of reaction from the Republican establishment then, I think in four years, the year 2000, we've got to be prepared to do something pretty dramatic.

 

QUESTION: The church is not doing enough to get Christians involved. They don't use the Democrat and Republican party platforms.

The Christian Coalition put out one about four years ago, and it was very effective. I've used it, I've given out thousands of them in San Diego.

Pastors are afraid. They're afraid for their tax status. They're afraid to get involved. Thank God for people like Tim LaHaye. But the fellow that took his place -- I can't go to his church and speak to a group, even a Sunday school class, because he's scared to death of politics. He's afraid to get involved. I've had over 500 pastors come to a free lunch or breakfast or dinner that we sponsored. However, what do we do with the other thousand pastors in San Diego? We just can't get them involved.

If the church was doing its job, if they had registered their people, we would control the Republican party. We'd have a Pat Buchanan or a Phil Gramm or maybe a Howard Phillips in the Republican party or maybe Alan Keyes would be president today. But with only 50 percent or 60 percent registered, and only half of them voting, we're not doing our job in the church. And you know, if you sent out the platform, maybe in a concise form like the Christian Coalition did about four years ago, to all of the pastors and the Christians you work with, and ask them to copy it and give it to their friends, maybe we would take over the Republican party. But until we do that, which I've been trying to do in San Diego ... thank God, it voted for Dole, but not by much.

MR. BAUER: Right. Well, I don't disagree with anything that you said. You know, it's really astonishing how much the issue of abortion, particularly, mimics the issue of slavery. If you go back and look at the Lincoln/Douglas debates, the parallels are unbelievable. When you go back and look at the slavery issue, what pastors of churches said at the time was, "We really shouldn't talk about slavery from the pulpit because that would be bringing politics into the church." When the politicians were confronted with the issue, a lot of them said, "Well, we shouldn't be talking about slavery in political campaigns because that's a religious issue about what's a man and what isn't. That would be bringing religion into politics." That's exactly what happens now in many of our issues. Pastors won't talk about them because they're too political. You go to politicians and they won't talk about them because that's religious. The result is that nobody talks about it.

Jim Dobson had a briefing in Washington a few weeks ago and we had about 500 people there, including many good evangelicals. Dr. Dobson asked everybody in the audience to raise their hands if their pastor, the weekend before that, had even mentioned partial birth abortion on the Sunday before the vote was to take place in Washington. That audience was composed of people attending some of the most live churches in America. Two people in an audience of 500 raised their hands to say that the issue had even been mentioned. So you're right, the church is falling down in many, many ways.

What an amazing thing -- that a church that survived in the catacombs of Rome would tremble in fear at the prospect of losing its tax deduction.

Do we need any more evidence of a fallen world than that?

You know what happens in inner-city churches, routinely? And there's nothing wrong with it. On the Sunday before election day in inner-city churches, the pastor stands up and says, "I hope everybody votes. Many of you have asked me who I'm going to vote for. Here's who I'm going to vote for." He reads out the list. All he does is say who he's going to personally vote for. He's an American, he can say that. He can say it on the rooftops and from the pulpit, wherever he wants. Of course, everybody in that congregation, many of them too busy to follow every detail, count on their pastor to tell them who he's going to vote for so they know when they go to the polls who they ought to vote for. It is amazing that we can't, after all these years, get even the evangelical churches, in most cases, to go that far.

 QUESTION: When the question you mentioned was asked of Bob Dole -- I believe by a pastor in San Diego -- I said to myself, "This is it." But during the three debates it was almost as if they were abiding by pre-arranged agreement among the candidates that certain things were off limits.

Did you get that feeling?

Everybody in this room could have answered those questions better than Kemp and Dole, and everybody here knows those two people well, and their families. Elizabeth Dole is a committed Christian; Jack's wife is a committed Christian, a Bible study teacher. Yet the lack of any type of answer that made any sense from our perspective. Do you think there was, like a prenuptial agreement to this thing?

MR. BAUER: Well, I don't know. Are you specifically referring to questions about Whitewater and so forth? Or these moral and social issues?

 

QUESTION: Moral issues and the rest.

MR. BAUER: First let me answer about Whitewater.

I don't know if you all caught it, but in the first presidential debate Dole turned to Clinton and he said, "Now, I'm not going to bring up things in the past." I can't remember the exact word he used -- "because I promised you that I wouldn't do that." And I remember turning to my wife and saying, "Really? When did that happen?" Where was I when that meeting was held? I mean, that would be something useful for us to know, that Bob Dole and Bill Clinton got together, and Bob Dole told him he wasn't going to bring up Whitewater? That's not a minor matter. I would have liked to have been in on that.

On the other questions, the moral questions, I've got a less attractive explanation. I don't believe Bob Dole or Jack Kemp feel comfortable making the case for these issues. I think that when people talk, they talk about the things that they get up in the morning thinking about.

I think when Jack gets up out in the morning, when his feet hit the floor, he's thinking about economics. And that's a wonderful thing to think about, you know. I want lower taxes. I want smaller government. Obviously, I'm a Reagan conservative.

But America's not going down the tubes because the marginal tax rate is 39 percent and it really ought to be 36 percent. We all know that. We know that what's happening is a lot bigger than the marginal tax rate.

People in public life talk about what they feel comfortable with. You can't graft it onto them.

I often run into people saying, "Well, just give them a briefing, Gary." Well, we briefed them. When you brief people who don't really feel it, what you get is that their first sentence ends up being okay. Then when their opponent fires back, they're a quivering mass of jelly. They have no response, and we lose the debate.

What I wouldn't have given for Bob Dole to turn to Bill Clinton and say, "Mr. President, you said you wanted abortions to be safe, rare and legal. 'Rare,' sir? Tell me one, out of one and a half million a year, that you're willing to stop. Just one."

"We already know you won't stop them in the ninth month. I assume you're not willing to stop them to pick the sex of the baby. Just give me one. Sir, you lied to the American people when you said you wanted them rare. Just like you misled them on your tax cut, just like you've misled them on your ethical background. Sir, you should be ashamed of yourself."

That's not a single-issue campaign, but it's using a powerful issue to tie everything else together.

Yesterday we went back and pulled the voting results from big counties around America where the Reagan Democrats live. You remember the Reagan Democrats? All those good people who bolted their party over these issues, over religious liberty, abortion, gay rights, etc. All the things that were ignored.

The figures are unbelievable. Look at South Philadelphia. Bill Clinton did not run in South Philadelphia much better than Mike Dukakis in 1988 or Walter Mondale in 1984. But Ronald Reagan, in 1984, got 240,000 votes in South Philadelphia. Bob Dole got 102,000.

Many stayed home. The people knew who Bill Clinton was. They couldn't bring themselves to vote for him. When they looked at the alternative, there was no compelling reason to go out there and actually cast a vote. It was the lowest turnout in a hundred years.

I've run into people, our kind of people around the country, even some of our leaders, who have bought into the notion that our issues are losing issues, that we've got to be quiet about them. That is a lie. They are winning issues. We don't have to hide them until we sneak into office and then try to do something with a stealth strategy.

Stealth strategies don't work with the American people. What works is when you go to them, tell them what you believe, tell them why you believe it and then you do it. That's what Ronald Reagan did, and that's what the Republican party is going to have to do if it's ever going to succeed.

 

QUESTION: Gary, let's talk a little bit about leadership. How important is the role of the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC)? What do we need in a chairman of the RNC? And how do we get one of our people to be chairman?

MR. BAUER: The chairmanship of the RNC is one of the important things which should be dealt with.

There are a lot of names being mentioned right now, about possible chairmen, including Elsa Prince's daughter, who I think would be a great chairman.

I've also heard other names -- Vin Weber, for example. There also are some really negative names. The state party chairman in New York, who is very much against us on most issues, has indicated that he's interested in running.

I think that, if we get one of our people as chairman, on the margins it will be a good thing. It would help improve things, but it's only one part of the problem. I get a little bit of disagreement with Jim Dobson about this. He really zeroed in on Haley Barbour as the problem. I saw Haley Barbour as one of the symptoms of the problem. It's not that there's one place where we're being shut out. It really is that the upper establishment of the Republican party is not comfortable with us and our values. I could see it out in San Diego. When I was with the delegates, I felt great. They were our kind of people. But having been in Washington so long, I got invited to all the cocktail parties of the party elite, too. And I went to all of them. I want to tell you, those people at those parties held us in disdain. Many of the women had pro-choice buttons on, others had pro-gay rights buttons on. They joked among themselves about these "unwashed evangelicals" who were causing all the problems in the party.

There is a cultural divide in the Republican party. It will help if we get a good chairman, but it's going to take a lot, lot more than that.

There's a lot of work going on right now to try to unite behind somebody without being the kiss of death to that candidate. If one of these candidates is known as "the evangelical candidate" for chairman of the Republican party, it probably would cause some difficulty. So we've got to play it astutely.

 QUESTION: I'm one of the 165 folks who has a vote at the election of the new Republican national chairman. I happen to be Virginia's Republican National Committeeman. It is not going to be easy to elect a good conservative chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Most members of the committee are elected in the process by which we nominate a presidential candidate. The more moderate Republicans, the Bob Dole Republicans, who dominated the election process, selected most of the state chairmen, the national committeemen and national committeewomen. Those who were holdovers from four years ago were selected when George Bush was re-nominated; those who were holdovers from eight years ago were elected when George Bush was first nominated. So if a conservative is elected as the new national chairman, it's not going to be because he's a conservative -- it could be despite the fact that he is a conservative.

It's important we understand that the upper establishment of the GOP is selected by a process which starts at the grassroots but in which many conservatives are not particularly comfortable.

You have to go to a lot of party meetings with people who are uncomfortable with you. You have to work with them because, in the final analysis, in order to take control of the party, you have to be elected to party committees and to party offices.

I am interested in your thoughts as to what might be done to encourage more conservatives to take part in these processes, to "pay their dues," to sit through those sometimes interminable meetings where people often give reports that are as boring as can be. How can we get people to do that? A great many of the current leaders of the Republican party are not educable. And the Samson solution of knocking down the pillars and having the temple crush them and us is one we want to avoid if we can.

So how do we get more good people to spend their time at this and to work themselves into these party organizations?

MR. BAUER: I actually feel that we've done pretty well at the grassroots level. If the San Diego convention had been thrown open as an open convention to select somebody, I think we would have been pretty happy about who came out. There are places, particularly in the Northeast, where it's harder for us to reach the critical mass we need in order to take over a party organization. But if you go throughout the South and part of the Midwest and out West, we've done very, very well.

I think the problem actually is with the funding level of the Republican party. If you're running for president or senator, you inevitably go out there and start having thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners. The people at those dinners almost uniformly don't like our agenda. So a guy like Phil Gramm is in Washington. He has people on his staff and advisors and consultants who say, "Stay away from these social issues. They'll kill you." And then you think, "Well, maybe it's different out in the country," so you go out to Philadelphia and have a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner. Five hundred people there come through the receiving line and say to Senator Gramm, "We really love you but you got to drop this pro-life thing. Quit talking about that gay rights issue." After a while, these guys just get domesticated. They begin to think there's no way they can get the money and the resources they need if they talk about those kinds of issues.

What we really need to do is figure out ways to more effectively fund the candidates who are willing to speak for our values. We're going to announce in a couple of days a new political action committee called The Fund for Working Families. Our goal is to raise, in the next three months, two or three million dollars. We're going to try to do what the liberals did to our Republican Congress as soon as it was elected.

Remember what happened? The liberals waited about two months to lick their wounds and then started on the attack against the new Republican Congress. They attacked it for the last twenty months.

Why give Bill Clinton a second-term honeymoon? Why give any of the new Democrats elected to this Congress a breathing spell? I want to get out there by the beginning of the year, start going after him and start going after some of these newly-elected Democrats.

Your grassroots point is important. It is important for all of us to be actively involved and to get people not just to complain but to show up for those meetings. It's amazing how few people on either side go to party meetings.

The great secret of American politics is that political parties are pretty slender reeds. If you go to a meeting with 25, 35, 40 people, you take over the local party. There aren't that many folks who show up. So if you just organize and continue to do it, it's certainly doable.

 

QUESTION: Gary, as you know, I've only been involved about three years now, but I've taken a hard look at what's been happening from the bottom up. I agree with you on the separation of the cultures within the Republican party, but I'm certainly encouraged by the people we've seen come in in 1994 and now the new ones in 1996. They do have these values.

Could you address that and, also, whether you see, over the years, these new people who come in with these values get discouraged and beat up in Washington. Do they start changing their values? Do you see any difference between the last two classes and what's happened before?

MR. BAUER: We can take some comfort in the fact that, after everything the liberals threw at this Congress, most of the freshmen survived. On the other hand, there has been slippage in this freshman class. I have found, looking at the list, that the ones who really have stuck to their guns are the ones who not only came to Washington as conservatives, but also the ones who had a faith basis of some sort. If they arrived in town as conservatives and also men and women of faith, they were able to withstand the pressures of that setting. As for the ones who just came as conservatives, you can already see a drift in how they're voting.

One big danger we have right now is to assume, because we elected the overwhelming majority of these freshmen, and re-elected them, that we're okay.

Several of us were talking before we gathered here for breakfast about whether or not the labor unions may have won anyway, in a certain way, in the sense that a lot of our candidates are shell-shocked. Even if they won, they went through a horrible experience. I can see it just in the tone of the last few days since the election. It is a very moderate tone. It's, "Well, we want to cooperate with the President. We certainly don't want to fight." Senator Alfonse D'Amato announced that he's not going to do any more hearings on Whitewater.

"The American people are tired of that," he said. "That was the lesson of this election." Really? I don't know any voters who said they were tired of hearing about Whitewater.

This is a very important time for us. Let's encourage the guys who won and tell them we expect them to stick to their guns. It would be a disaster, for example, if we see any Republicans going in to the Clinton administration or agreeing to head up this Medicare commission. I understand that Bob Dole said last night he would not do it. I'm glad to hear him say that. But there are rumors about others, that former Senator Bill Cohen might take a position in the Clinton administration. Several others have been mentioned, former senators and one current senator, who are being talked about as possibly taking positions.

There's a certain mood in the Republican party right now: "While we escaped by an eyelash here, it was probably because we were too conservative. So we'd better sort of pull back a little bit now." That would be the exact opposite of the message they ought to get from this election.

 

QUESTION: Gary, I'm just concerned about the time element of trying. I have worked with the other party. We don't have the time to work from the grassroots up any more. It's a matter of freedom, because if we're not free, we can't discuss any of these issues.

I'm concerned about the media, particularly radio media. I know of four individuals who've been taken off or shut down or altered on the radio within one week, a couple of weeks ago. Other than newsletters, radio is the only form of communication about these things. I feel as long as Rockefeller is backing both the Republican and the Democratic party, we have to be bold and step out somehow. I don't know -- if you can explain your view, I'd be very interested.

MR. BAUER: I agree with you about the lateness of the hour and how much is at stake here.

I still run into people who say, "Well, Gary, you know, it's a slow process. We've got to take it a day at a time," et cetera.

I really do believe that we are very close in this country to crossing lines, as I said earlier, that we will not be able to come back from. Ultimately, it's not just an argument over whether Republicans control the Congress or Democrats control the Congress.

It really does become an argument about whether or not this is still a free country in the sense that our Founding Fathers thought of that word.

For a man of faith like myself, it really gets to be a question of whether God's hand can still be on America, as I believe it was from the very founding of the nation, all through our history.

Most of us agree that the evidence is overwhelming. How do you explain, in a small country like ours at the beginning, that we had these giants on the scene who could form a government? I believe that was God's grace, that he gave those men and women to us.

You go right through our history, we could spend all morning talking about all the times in our history where God's blessings brought America through dark times.

I believe we are perilously close to the point where God would be certainly justified, if he has not already done so, to remove his hand from America and leave us to our own devices.

Much is at stake, much more is at stake than absentee ballots and who's the chairman of which committee.

We've got to have that attitude as we make our plans and decide what we're going to do. The hour is late and that much is at stake.

Let me close by saying to everyone that as I look around the room, you all are great friends, many of you have been with me and supported things I've done over the years and empowered me to have a voice in Washington. I thank you all for that. In the months ahead the one thing that I can't live with is if I don't hear from you. If I'm doing something you don't like, I need you to tell me that. If you think I'm using the wrong strategy, you need to pick up the phone or send me a fax. And even if I'm doing something right, I need to hear from you.

For those of us sentenced to work in Washington, D.C., the biggest occupational hazard is that we will become as out of touch with the values of the American people and of this movement as the rest of that city is.

Don't think you're bothering us. We need to know what's on your mind. The best ideas in this movement in the last twenty years have come up from the people, not down from Washington. I look forward to working with you in this great cause and making sure that America is and remains a shining city upon a hill.