WHATEVER THE MEDIA SAY, the skirmishes at this week’s Republican platform committee meetings in San Diego leading up to the GOP national convention won’t amount to much. The real battles have already been fought in Washington, behind closed doors, with conservatives, mostly congressional staffers, squaring off against a less conservative crowd allied with the Dole campaign.
The fights in Washington — some cordial, some nasty — were over the first draft of the platform, not the final version. But the draft is of immense importance: It’s the document the delegates on the platform committee work from. They will make cosmetic changes and perhaps add language to mollify Pat Buchanan, but most of the final draft will parallel the first.
So the struggle over the draft language — on abortion in particular — was about real stakes. And the conservatives succeeded in securing rhetoric a few clicks to the right of what top Dole officials would have liked. Credit Bill Gribbin, deputy chief of staff for policy to Senate majority leader Trent Lott.
Gribbin was responsible for writing the draft and adjudicating the disputes. He’s an old hand at this, having drafted the platform in 1992, 1988, and 1984. With his expertise and institutional memory, Gribbin drove the process, said a Dole aide. He’s also been a good soldier in dealing with Dole people, despite his ideological instincts. A former history professor, Gribbin has worked for conservative senators John Tower, William Armstrong, and James Buckley (not to mention President Reagan and Vice President Quayle). He is staunchly pro-life and maintains close ties with outfits like the National Right to Life Committee. In April, he wrote an article for this magazine about harassment of pro-life groups by the Internal Revenue Service.
Even with Gribbin in charge, Dole officials sought to leave their imprint on the platform. The Dole campaign assigned aides to hover over the congressional staffers who helped Gribbin in the drafting process. And Gribbin kept in close touch with top Dole aides Sheila Burke, Bob Lighthizer, Vin Weber, and particularly Paul Manafort, the veteran Republican fixer who is managing the GOP convention. Gribbin shared his platform language with this group before sending it to San Diego.
This honest effort at cooperation was not entirely successful. As Manafort tells anyone who asks — and even those who don’t — San Diego will not be a repeat of the 1992 Republican convention in Houston. That means deemphasizing abortion. But when Dole declared in June that he wanted a “tolerance” provision in the platform to refer only to abortion and not to other issues dividing Republicans, Rep. Henry Hyde, platform committee chairman and a pro- life stalwart, erupted. Hyde and Dole, with the assistance of Gribbin and Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager, hammered out a compromise a few weeks later that was temporarily acceptable to both sides. Hyde remained confident he could eventually make the abortion language more acceptable to pro-life forces, but he failed, and the compromise agreed to in July is what appears in the draft platform. A multi-paragraph hodge-podge, it includes both strong pro-life language calling for a human life amendment to the Constitution and bigtent language welcoming a diversity of views.
Hyde failed because Manafort, presumably acting with the knowledge of top Dole officials, dug in his heels. When Hyde named Kay James, a prominent pro- life advocate employed by Pat Robertson’s Regent University, to chair the subcommittee handling abortion, Manafort vetoed the appointment, then rejected numerous subsequent nominees because they weren’t suffciently pro- Dole.
Manafort’s attempt to stack the committee writing the abortion language angered Hyde, but the congressman opted not to protest publicly. Asked about James on July 31, Hyde demurred, pointing out that she had been given another position with the convention. Asked how much meddling there had been by Dole operatives in the drafting of the platform, Hyde replied, “An appropriate level.”
Others aren’t so sanguine about Manafort’s interference. “Paul’s problem is that he’s seeking some level of control over the process that’s not really achievable,” says a senior Dole adviser. Indeed, Manafort’s interventions may make it less likely that the Dole campaign will get everything it wants, if he alienates the platform committee. What Manafort must remember, says this adviser, is that presidential candidates never get their way on everything in the platform. In 1976, Reaganites wrote most of the platform even though Reagan wasn’t the nominee, and in 1992 conservatives inserted a repudiation of the Bush tax increase into the platform. Neither the Ford nor the Bush people were particularly happy with these developments, but they wisely kept quiet.
What does all of this add up to? A certain amount of infighting is inevitable, and probably healthy, when a party manifesto is being drafted. The silver lining for Dole and his party is that the pre-convention spats may preempt the bitter feuds most Republicans want to avoid in San Diego. A fight- free platform week will disappoint reporters, but it’s the kind of news the Dole campaign desperately needs.
by Matthew Rees
