Two weeks before an Election Day on which Republicans could win big, Whitman has become perhaps the trendiest name in politics. A 48-year-old former horse-country housewife, she’s been governor for less than a year. But she’s on the road for the party, showing up for photo ops from coast to coast. In style and strategy, she embodies an emerging new version of the GOP’s sales pitch to fickle suburban voters. In sum, it’s this: we’ll cut your taxes, jail your crooks – and stay out of your bedroom.
While the religious right generates ink and angst, Whitman and her gubernatorial colleagues – call them the Volvo Republicans – are the real banquet-circuit news. Whitman is the purest example. But others include Govs. William Weld of Massachusetts, Pete Wilson of California, John Engler of Michigan and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. New candidates include Pataki in New York, John Rowland in Connecticut and Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania. Many are expected to win in November.
Targeting suburbs isn’t new: they’ve been a battleground since Levittown was platted after World War II. And Republicans often have prospered in suburban areas since Richard Nixon’s ““law and order’’ campaign of 1968. But now the suburbs mean even more. They are home to the famous ““swing’’ voters, to legions of Perot supporters and, in the ’90s, to more than half the American electorate.
Unlike Nixon, most Volvo Republicans seem too bland and aloof to be paranoid about a threatening Them. Unlike George Bush, they haven’t tried to learn to look nasty – or to munch pork rinds – for the cameras. Pataki eviscerates Cuomo in ads, yet radiates a gangly geniality in person. Weld affects a prep-school nonchalance, which allows him to seem aloof while his campaign rakes in contributions from state contractors. ““This is the green-pants crowd,’’ says Democratic polltaker Harrison Hickman. ““They’re the kind of Republican that has always been less frightening to Democrats looking for an alternative.''
Though they may frequent a country club or even live in the East, these aren’t big-government ““Rockefeller Republicans.’’ Unlike Bush, the new crowd is likely to take its cues from Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. Most of them promise tax cuts – the deeper the better. ““This is the supply-side revival,’’ declares a founder of that movement, Jude Wanni-ski. The ““revival’’ began in 1990 – the year Bush moved his lips and raised federal taxes. A shrewd new crop of GOP governors elected in ‘90 – including Weld and Engler – cut taxes instead. Wilson would have, too, but couldn’t: his state budget deficit was overwhelming. So he focused on cutting spending instead, and now, with a modest recovery underway in California, he can at least boast of business-tax cuts he pushed through last year.
Unlike Wilson, Whitman stuck to tax-cut gospel. Plotting her 1993 campaign, she huddled with Steve Forbes (of Forbes magazine), whom she knew from prep school. Working on the dining table of her house on Pontefract Farm, they drew up a plan to cut state income taxes by 30 percent over three years. Though she inherited millions, the Democrats’ class-warfare attack on her as the self-interested daughter of privilege didn’t work: voters evidently didn’t mind as long as they got a slice, too. Now her tax-cut strategy is being mimicked, with variations, in GOP campaigns in New York, Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The suburban Republicans exude a tolerant, vaguely libertarian aura. They’re for tough welfare reform, but sell it as a way to nurture individual initiative, not just to save taxpayer money. Wilson and Weld have supported gay rights; Weld, in particular, is regarded almost as a hero in the gay and lesbian community. The ““Three W’s’’ – Whitman, Wilson and Weld – all call on the GOP to remove the strict anti-abortion plank from the party platform. ““We just can’t be burdened by that issue,’’ Whitman told Newsweek. ““We can’t make it a litmus test.’'
It’s not accidental that most of the Volvo Republicans are governors. It’s easier to develop a pitch if you’re outside the Beltway. Three of the last four presidents, after all, prepped in statehouses. But the new crew has a long way to go before it takes over the party, let alone the country. The tax-cut numbers may not add up (page 28). Whitman is halfway to her 30 percent goal. ““Revenues are up, and so is job creation,’’ she says. But she has stretched the timetable for the rest, property taxes continue to edge upward and critics allege that she’s fiddling with the books. Weld started his tenure by chopping taxes and spending, but has slowed down on both. He has loaded recent budgets with items that look, to some critics, suspiciously like pork.
Volvo Republicans remain mostly a bicoastal phenomenon. The GOP’s internal center of gravity is the South, and religious conservatives control the grass roots. Weld is a Boston ultra-Brahmin who wrote his Harvard thesis on an ancient Roman poet named Sextus Propertius – not a favorite at the Grand Ole Opry. Gay rights is a nonstarter in the Bible belt, suburbs or otherwise. ““There are still regional traditions,’’ says author Kevin Phillips, ““and they still mean something.''
More important, the Volvo Republicans are sending contradictory messages. In the GOP, says Wanniski, there are two wings: ““risk-taking’’ and ““security.’’ One stresses freedom, the other fear. It’s hard to appeal to both. Whitman wants a party defined by laissez faire and ““social moderation.’’ But she and others also want to beef up the government’s role as a source of retribution and provider of physical security.
The contradiction is on vivid display in California. Once known for mild-mannered moderation, Wilson now stokes resentment of illegal immigrants – the Far West version of the Them that suburbanites dread. In doing so, he’s sounding Nixonian: harsh, retributive. In fact, his most enthusiastic new ally is columnist (and old Nixon hand) Pat Buchanan, who made a career of political intolerance. At the ‘92 GOP convention in Houston, Buchanan happily (and disastrously) declared the existence of a ““religious war.’’ If you’re a Volvo Republican trying to befriend disillusioned baby-boomer Democrats, Buchanan’s probably not the guy you want to organize the car pool.
