Politics / Coverdell's Winning Formula
Norquist, Grover
any Republicans were quick to M ' ask whether they lost November's election on the explosive social issues, abortion in particular. Maybe the abortion issue helped Reagan in 1980 and 1984, the...
...NFIB established a phone treehighlighting the importance of this campaign to small businessmen) The U.S...
...All the expected organs of Main Street Republicanism did their part in Georgia...
...And Georgia had always been a rock-solid exception to the recent history of Republican successes in the South...
...Poll numbers tell a different story...
...Bush's positions won him neither support nor money nor even civility from the side he was trying to placate...
...Bill Clinton's signing of the FOCA is about to change the entire terrain upon which the abortion wars will be fought...
...On election day they had other things to do...
...Six campaign activists came into the state to help thirty volunteer activists run a phone bank for the final six nights that called all 90,000 NRA members in Georgia...
...In 1980, Mack Mattingly was swept into office by the Reagan landslide, against an incumbent weakened by alcohol and ethics charges...
...Chamber of Commerce weighed in for Coverdell...
...Mutual suspicion could have continued for years, but the party was quickly put to a real challenge—the November 24 runoff for Georgia's U.S...
...Should the party purge Pat Robertson, evangelicals, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan...
...First, the conservative coalition of small businesses, taxpayers, gun owners, pro-lifers, right-to-work supporters, and pro-family activists can defeat the get out the vote efforts of politicized black churches and labor unions...
...Third, the Coverdell election was the first where the discussion of abortion centered on a Freedom of Choice Act rather than a possible Human Life Amendment...
...Maybe the abortion issue helped Reagan in 1980 and 1984, the reasoning went, but now that Roe v. Wade was cracking up, the pro-choicers were getting as active and agitated as the pro-lifers had been in reaction to Roe v. Wade itself...
...The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) mailed to its 17,000 Georgia members a piece that contrasted the stands of Coverdell, himself a successful small businessman, and Fowler...
...Coverdell's 17,000-vote victory in the runoff—in the face of visits on Fowler's behalf by Clinton and Gore—was a defining moment for Republicans: it showed that the entire governing Reagan coalition can be reassembled, even as the issues change...
...Seven days later, after Reagan, Buchanan, and Pat Robertson spooked America, the Bush campaign had closed the gap by fifteen points...
...in a narrow sense, the establishment press was insistent that the Christian right—particularly its performance at the Houston convention—hurt Republicans overall...
...Charlton Heston flew into Georgia, his boyhood home, for a day of non-stop campaigning...
...With only forty-two seats in the Senate and Oregon's Bob Packwood in trouble, the Republicans were in danger of falling below the forty-one votes necessary to maintain a filibuster...
...The runoff, made necessary by the failure of either candidate to win an absolute majority on November 3 (Fowler had polled 49 percent, Coverdell 48), was important by any calculation...
...As soon as those Republicans who have always been pro-choice "with exceptions" find themselves on the other side of the barricades from NOW and NARAL, pro-lifers will become willing and welcome allies...
...The real comparison is between 17 million union members—many of them belonging only because of compulsory union laws—and 11 million small business owners...
...If George Bush was Darman's first victim, Wyche Fowler was his second, and Congress is full of such targets...
...Second, the tax issue is back, and cutting for the Republicans...
...Prior to 1992, only one Georgia Republican had been elected U.S...
...Fowler tried to point out that the 1990 tax hike was, after all, a Bush proposal, but Coverdell hammered away...
...Senate seat held by Democrat Wyche Fowler and contested by Republican Paul Coverdell...
...He simply convinced two parts of his natural base—gun owners and union opponents—that he could not he trusted to protect them...
...For the last four days of the runoff, the NRA ran ads on sixty-eight radio stations ten times a day...
...In past years, a candidate was accepted as pro-life if he supported a Human Life Amendment that would outlaw almost all abortions...
...Senator, and that had been under unusual circumstances...
...The scramble by "moderate" Republicans to try and change the party's abortion language is silly, for the hard-line Democratic language on abortion is now at odds with 88 percent of the electorate...
...Now a candidate is objectively pro-life if he opposes FOCA, which contains a pro-choice position supported by only 12 percent of the American people...
...Such sustained and targeted professional campaigns were denied to President Bush, whose administration made concessions to union bosses in key cases and banned the importation of some assault rifles...
...The small business community was active for Coverdell...
...The ABC News/Washington Post poll taken on the Sunday before the convention found George Bush trailing Bill Clinton 57 to 36 percent...
...The National Right to Work Committee, with 2 million members nationwide, took out newspaper ads, and sent two mailings to their Georgia membership highlighting the fact that Coverdell supported Right to Work laws, and Fowler did not...
...Would the Republican presidential primary contest for 1996 be a civil war...
...Coverdell campaign manager Tom Perdue made Fowler's vote in favor of the 1990 budget deal central to the campaign...
...The National Rifle Association mailed three times to its Georgia membership of 90,000 (who also were sent NRA bumper stickers reading "Sportsmen for Coverdell...
...he Coverdell race bodes well for T the upcoming Senate race in Texas and the 1994 elections, where the Democrats must defend twenty-two seats to the Republicans' .twelve...
...Georgia is the only state in the nation that has not elected a Republican governor in the last hundred years...
...Senators Phil Gramm, Bob 'Political hacks in Washington foolishly compare the political clout of labor unions and Fortune 500 businesses...
...The NRA also sent out 250,000 flyers to gun dealers and gun clubs so that they could share factual information on the stands of Coverdell and Fowler the gun-grabber...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
