Bush's Uphill Campaign

...Quayle, thesuddenly blunted cutting edge of the Republican thrust, was now saying that his definition of family values went beyond tying it to personal responsibility...

...Iraqgate hangs over the campaign more than Irangate...

...The slogans stressing "change" and "trust" have become metaphors for the untried and the tried-and-found-want-ing...

...That was still the law of the land, he observed, and considerable reflection would be in order before any decision was made to change it...

...Its fund-raising letters, printed in the millions, talk of being dedicated to opposing a " feminist agenda" that "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians...

...This past September 16, Fidel Castro was allowed, for face-saving reasons, to make his own announcement of the withdrawal of the Russian infantry brigade that has been stationed on his island since the 1962 missile crisis...

...Largely unnoticed until a relatively short timeago, theCoalition has amassed 250,000 members in 49 states, controls the Republican committees in a half-dozen states and had some 300 delegates at the Houston convention, including more than a quarter of the platform committee...

...If history is any guide, there will be a delayed reaction to both Irangate and Iraqgate, but eventually each will be a source of new revelations and perceptions about the way willful politicians cut constitutional corners to accomplish their purposes...

...It sits well, too, with the organized Cuban exile community, dedicated to lobbying fiercely against any easing up on its native land...

...A year ago Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, acceding to a demand of the Bush Administration, announced that Soviet troops would be pulled out of Cuba...

...From Watergate to Iraqgate, experience indicates that they are often too complicated to have a timely political impact...

...That kind of rhetoric, familiar in evangelical churches, may soon enter the lexicon of American politics as the religious Right tries to take over and redirect a national political party...

...Maybe the country will get around to all this after November 3. The Cuban Menace One piece of history that is not in campaign contention, but perhaps should be, is Cuba...

...representative to the Organization of American States Sol M. Lino-witz, and former White House National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy—has issued a report declaring the ongoing isolation of Cuba "unnecessary, damaging and perhaps dangerous...

...But it used computerized lists and direct mail more effectively than similar groups in the past...

...Moreover, economic reports in grim succession confirm what they have already discerned—that they have fewer decent jobs open to them, less income available to them, and more poor people among them...

...Only a nonpartisan study group is willing to call attention to the anachronism of a Castro "menace...

...Her little book, The Measure of Our Success—A Letter to My Children and Yours, speaks of children growing up in an ethically polluted nation, of instant sex without responsibility, of instant gratification without effort, and of the demand for instant solutions without sacrifice...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Bush's Uphill Campaign At this writing the Presidential election contest seems to be simmering down to, essentially, a dispirited choice between an incumbent with whom the voters are disenchanted and a challenger with whom they are unenchant-ed...

...That, of course, is the big IF that makes the opinion polls so unstable...

...No good evidence exists, the report points out, that a hard-line policy will provoke positive change in Cuba...

...Meg Greenfield, in Newsweek, also expressed the belief that people have come to resent political figures lecturing them about moral behavior...

...The matter of how he responded to the military draft persists, and the marital fidelity issue hovers on the periphery...

...President Richard M. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972 after Watergate, because its implications were not yet widely perceived...

...It did not seek national attention...

...The trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger may help to show why he and Secretary of State George P. Shultz were so flabbergasted at Bush's claim that he was not involved...

...In this campaign season that sits well with those dependent on the base economically...

...The Christian Coalition, led by television evangelist Pat Robertson, has set its sights on achieving "working" control of the GOP by the 1996 elections...

...When Vice President Dan Quayle talked about family values, as in a visit to Los Angeles, it was mainly to protest that his views had been misinterpreted, that he was not against single mothers or homosexuals, nor even categorically against the right to abortion...

...Deserted by Moscow, under heavy economic pressure, Cuba's Communist regime seems headed for the ash-heap of history...

...And that the White House discouraged effective investigation of the role of the Atlanta branch of an Iraqi bank in laundering the money for Baghdad...

...Rise of the Religious Right The wavering of the Bush campaign on the Republican platform has revealed tensions with the religious Right, which was instrumental in writing it...

...Many voters were in the bewildering position of having signed off on President Bush without yet having signed on to his opponent...

...Social issues" are simply not proving very effective any more...

...It even sits well with the Democratic Presidential candidate, who has said "it is time to put the hammer down on Castro...

...Vice President Quayle, visiting hurricane-battered South Florida, said that one reason to rebuild Homestead Air Force Base, apart from retaining jobs, was its "strategic location" to deal with any problem from Cuba...

...It has been a long time since Americans could vote enthusiastically for a candidate rather than dejectedly against a candidate—or just stay away from the polls...

...The Coalition also had itself classified as a tax-exempt nonpartisan "citizen action" organization and raised more than $13 million...

...As 1 have had occasion to tell Haig, I remain unconvinced that he did not mean to imply linkage...

...Nor, despite the efforts of Governor Clinton, do voters seem to care much today whether Bush, while he was Vice President, was in or out of "the loop," to use his term, during White House discussions of arms for Iran and for the Nicaraguan contras...

...The book became a publishing surprise this summer, climbing near the top of the best-seller list...

...Thus the question appears to be whether voters will be more put of f by a "slick Willy" or a sick economy...

...Under the management of James A. Baker III, the first Secretary of State ever to flout the tradition of nonpartisan foreign policy by switching to partisan politics, the Bush campaign has displayed not so much a sense of a firm hand at the rudder as a tendency to engage in experimental tacking...

...They know how it feels...

...President Bush has not been implicated in any illegal act, yet it may develop—after the election—that he was more "in the loop" than he has admitted...

...The President has sought to shift attention from the present to the future with a program looking ahead to the next millennium...

...Pat Robertson lost his own bid for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1988 and seemed for a while to disappear from view...

...I was fascinated most, though, by Haig's tortured insistence that he had no intention of suggesting a tacit Presidency-for-pardon deal to Vice President Ford on August 1,1974...

...It urges the United States to open contact with Cuba and join Latin American governments in pressing for reform there...

...Irangate had no noticeable effect on George Bush's election in 1988...

...That was when he raised the possibility of Nixon resigning instead of toughing it out to impeachment, and proceeded to explain to Ford, with the help of a prepared memorandum, how once he moved into the Oval Office he could pardon his predecessor and forestall an indictment...

...Nevertheless, his final report to Congress will give him the latitude to detail his findings to a greater extent than he could in a courtroom...

...Alexander M. Haig Jr., who succeeded the deposed Nixon Chief of Staff H. R. Haldemanin May 1973, in the middle of the mess, contributes some new tidbits in his just published memoir, Inner Circles...

...But, in Florida, electoral votes and political contributions sustain the myth of Cuba as a clear and present danger...

...As documented in the Nation and more recently in the Washington Post, however, Robertson began to quietly organize the Christian Coalition at the grassroots precinct level, in effect establishing a successor to Falwell's Moral Majority...

...The Reagan-Bush era apparently represents merely a transitional stage for the religious Right...

...What with Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker in eclipse, that was not the best of times for an evangelist...

...At the sentencing of the Atlanta bank manager, it was disclosed that some of the money went to finance an improved version of the Iraqi Scud missile —the model that killed 28 American soldiers in the Persian Gulf War...

...Evidence keeps accumulating that the Bush Administration, under a Presidential directive to pamper Saddam Hussein, helped to finance his arms buildup with loans and grain credits...

...With the Christian Coalition's anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-liberal precepts, the fundamentalists would move America away from its tradition of secular politics and closer to the European idea of parties with "Christian" in their name...

...He settled for Ford only after being persuaded that Connally faced a bruising confirmation battle and the White House might still fall to the Democrats...

...The reason for fudgingwhat has served the GOP well in three previous Presidential campaigns was not hard to find...

...Irangate has drawn to an end in terms of additional indictments, but it remains a subject of political controversy...

...on thecontrary, executivedirector Ralph Reed said, "We're flying below radar...

...The President, for example, chose the minimum media exposure time of Friday evening to address the Coalition's convention in Virginia Beach...

...It included better education, better housing and crime control—and indeed extended to cheaper airline fares and telephone tolls to help families stay in touch...

...In this context it is noteworthy that when a nonpolitician like child advocate Marian Wright Edelman talks about family values, the reaction is quite different...

...Perhaps that explains why the Christian fundamentalists remain officially committed to supporting the Bush-Quayle ticket, though aware of being held at a distance...

...Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh has concluded that he lacks sufficient evidence to prosecute former President Ronald Reagan and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III for a cover-up of the dealings with Iran and the contras...

...Usually when zealots lay siege to a political party the effect is to take it out of the mainstream where the voting majority is, and that can cost elections...

...Although in mid-September the incumbent seemed to be fighting an uphill battle, this may not mean very much...

...Suddenly there has come into view something that has been going on for a long time outside the Beltway and outside the headlines—a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party...

...Barry Goldwater was the darling of the Republican activists in 1964 and George McGovern of the Democratic activists in 1972...

...Haig also devotes a whole chapter to arguing that he was not Bob Woodward's source on Watergate, known as Deep Throat...

...Further, according to Haig, Nixon wanted former Governor John Connally of Texas to succeed Agnew as Vice President and ultimately to become President, not Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan...

...Interviewed on NBC by Tom Brokaw, the President, talking about family values, put his emphasis on not trying to be holier than thou, not wanting to argue with single mothers and only wanting to stress the importance of stable families...

...Each won a party convention victory over more moderate candidates, only to lose decisively at the polls...

...Yet official American policy, locked in the Cold War language of isolation and strangulation, continues to treat Cuba as a menace...

...The Bush campaign has pretty well given up on trying to persuade voters that the economy is in better shape than it looks...

...The scandals, starting with Watergate —the mother, or daddy, of all "gates"— have not lost their fascination...

...A task force of the Inter-American Dialogue headed by former Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson—including former Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, former U.S...

...But recent election history, from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter, suggests that an incumbent presiding over a depressed economy will find it difficult to win re-election if the voters think they have a reasonable alternative...

...Governor Bill Clinton appears to have established his credentials in policy terms, but not in personal terms...

...Richard Viguer-ie, an arch-conservative, once told me, "Direct mail is the media of the Right, since television is controlled by the Left...

...The "family values" issue, a central theme of the Republican platform and the Houston convention, was muted when it ran into an unexpected negative reaction...

...Trouble at the / 'Gates' What have not figured prominently in the campaign so far are government scandals...

...In interviews these vote switchers said such things as, "I just feel like the family values issue was clouding everything, all those other problems," and, "You can't take family values to the bank...

...The Democratic National Committee had appealed to him not to appear in a Coalition-dominated hotel that has a "Christians Only" hiring policy...

...He tells us that President Nixon, fearing a double impeachment that would hand the Presidency to Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma, worked hard to get a resistant Vice President Spiro T. Ag-new, facing an indictment for bribery, to resign earlier than he did...

...The Washington Post surveyed Republicans who said they were switching from Bush to Clinton and found only 29 per cent of them were concerned about family values, while 69 per cent were worried about the economy...

...The Truman mantle, or bow-tie, was donned and quickly doffed when it inspired little more than ridicule...