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Republican  Woes Lead to Feuding by Conservatives  
By _DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/david_d_kirkpatrick/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  
Published:  October 20, 2006, NY TIMES 
Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say 
_Republicans_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  in Congress have let them down. 
Hawks fault President Bush as bungling  the war in Iraq. And many 
conservatives blame _Representative Mark  Foley_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/mark_a_foley/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s sexual 
messages to teenage  pages. 
With polls  showing Republican control of Congress in jeopardy, conservative 
leaders are  pointing fingers at one other in an increasingly testy circle of 
blame for  potential Republican losses this fall. 
“It is one  of those rare defeats that will have many fathers,” said David 
Keene, chairman  of the American Conservative Union, expressing the gloomy view 
of many  conservatives about the outcome on Election Day. “And they will all 
be somebody  else.” 
Whether  the election will bear out their pessimism remains to be seen, and 
the factors  that contribute to an electoral defeat are often complex and even 
contradictory.  But the post-mortem recriminations can influence politics and 
policy for years  after the fact. After 1992, Republicans shunned tax 
increases. After 1994, _Democrats_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  avoided gun 
control and health care reform. And 2004 led some Democrats  to start quoting 
Scripture and rethinking _abortion_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/abortion/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)  rights, while 
others opened an intraparty debate about the national  security that is not yet 
resolved.  
In the  case of the Republican Party this year, the skirmish among 
conservatives over  what is going wrong has begun unusually early— well before the 
election is  decided — and has turned unusually personal. 
But almost  regardless of the outcome on Nov. 7, many conservatives express 
frustration that  the party has lost its ideological focus. And after six years 
of nearly  continuous control over the White House and both houses of 
Congress,  conservatives are having a hard time finding anyone but themselves to 
blame.   
“It is  pre-criminations,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the 
conservative  magazine. “If a party looks like it is going to take a real 
pounding, this sort  of debate is healthy. What is unusual is that it is happening  
beforehand.” 
Some  conservative leaders have often been quicker in the past to turn on 
Republican  officials and one another than their rank-and-file supporters. But 
this year  polls show broad disaffection at the grass roots, prompting some 
Republicans —  including former Speaker _Newt Gingrich_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/newt_gingrich/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  —
 to worry that the public sparring could dampen turnout.   
This  year’s antagonists also include some new critics, including Mr. Gingrich
’s  one-time lieutenant, _Dick Armey_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/dick_armey/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , the former 
House Republican majority leader.   
In recent  weeks, Mr. Armey has stepped up a public campaign against the 
influence of Dr.  James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and an 
influential voice among  evangelical protestants. In an interview published last month 
in “The Elephant  in the Room,” a book by Ryan Sager about splits among 
conservatives, Mr. Armey  accused Congressional Republicans of “blatant pandering 
to James Dobson” and  “his gang of thugs,” whom Mr. Armey called “real nasty 
bullies” — arguments he  reprised on the editorial page of The Wall Street 
Journal and in an open letter  on the Web site organization FreedomWorks. 
In an  interview this week, Mr. Armey said catering to Dr. Dobson and his 
allies had  led the party to abandon budget-cutting. And he said Christian 
conservatives  could cost Republicans seats around the country, especially in Ohio. 
“The  Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, 
and the  Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I 
pay my  bills?” he said.  
Mr. Armey  also pinned some of the blame on _Tom DeLay_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/tom_delay/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 
, the former Republican House majority leader, who “was always more  
comfortable with the social conservatives, the evangelical wing of the party,  than he 
was with the business wing.” 
Mr. Armey,  who identifies himself as an evangelical, said he was tired of 
Christian  conservative leaders threatening that their supporters would stay 
away from the  ballot box unless they got what they wanted.  
“Economic  conservatives,” he argued, were emerging as the swing voters in 
need of  attention, in part because they had become more likely to vote 
Democratic in the  years since President _Bill Clinton_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  was 
in office. “A lot of people believe he brought us from deficits to  surpluses, 
and there is a certain empirical evidence there,” Mr. Armey  acknowledged. 
In a  statement on Thursday, Dr. Dobson said Mr. Armey was “still ticked” 
over a  long-ago House leadership race in which Dr. Dobson endorsed someone 
else, and he  restated his warnings to Republicans that social conservative voters 
“would  abandon them if they forgot the promises they had made.”   
In a  recent newsletter from Dr. Dobson’s organization, Representative Mark 
Souder, an  Indiana Republican counting on Christian conservatives to turn out 
for his  re-election, called Mr. Armey’s comments “disgusting” and insulting 
to “the many  Christians around the United  States who devoutly hold 
conservative moral  beliefs.” 
Christian  conservatives began complaining last year that the Republicans had 
put proposed  Social Security changes and tax changes ahead of issues like 
abortion and  same-sex marriage, risking the support of social-issue voters.   
Over the  summer, Congress held a rush of votes on just those issues — an 
election-year  ritual intended to motivate those voters — and in an interview 
last week Tony  Perkins, president of the Christian conservative Family Research 
Council, said  he believed it had begun to revive some grass-roots enthusiasm. 
  
“But the  Foley scandal just let the air out of the tires,” Mr. Perkins  
said. 
Others  dismissed the Foley scandal as largely irrelevant outside of Mr. Foley
’s  district. Several conservatives said Republican incumbents were using it 
as a  scapegoat.  
“It will  make you feel better to say, I didn’t lose the election; Foley 
lost it for me,”  said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax 
Reform. “Your wife and  kids will believe it.” 
Mr.  Norquist said the Iraq war was the biggest drag on  Republican 
candidates even before their big wins in 2004.   
“Some  people think we did it just to prove we could do it, like people who 
go running  with weights on their ankles,” he said.  
Many blame  neoconservatives who argued most vocally for the invasion of 
Iraq. “The  principal sin of the neoconservatives is overbearing arrogance,” Mr. 
Keene said.  Neoconservatives, in turn, blamed Defense Secretary _Donald H.  
Rumsfeld_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsfeld/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s insistence on holding down troop  
levels for the fouling up of the war 
“There is  a bit of a battle between people who say, Hey, your tax cuts 
wrecked our war and  people who say, Hey, your war wrecked our tax cuts,” said 
_David Frum_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/david_frum/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a former Bush speechwriter who was among the 
war’s  proponents. 
Mr. Frum  argued that the problem with the Iraq war was in its execution, not 
in  the idea behind it. “The war has to be seen through the prism of 
Hurricane  Katrina,” he argued, “because conservatives will support a tough war if 
they are  confident in the war’s management.” 
William  Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and another 
prominent  advocate of the invasion, said he doubted that soaring spending was 
turning off  as many voters as tax-cutters like Mr. Norquist or Mr. Armey  
suggested. 
“The  spending bill that was supposedly going to destroy the Republican Party 
was the  Medicare drug bill,” he said. “I have heard almost no one talk 
about it one way  or the other.”  
Mr.  Kristol argued that the Bush administration was suffering politically 
for  applying too little force, not too much. “I am struck that people have the 
sense  in North Korea and  Iran that things are spinning out of  control,” he 
said.  
Mr. Frum  and others blamed the Republican Senate’s support for the president’
s  guest-worker _immigration_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)  
proposal for angering the grass-roots talk-radio crowd. But Mr.  Norquist, who 
favored the immigration proposal, argued that the election would  provide a 
verdict on “restrictionism” in the fate of Randy Graf, a Republican  candidate 
in Arizona running on calls for tighter borders.  Polls show Mr. Graf faces 
long odds. 
Mr.  Gingrich, for his part, made the best of the fray, saying, “I would 
rather have  a movement active enough to bite itself rather than a movement so 
moribund it  didn’t realize it was irritated.” 


Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
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