The G.O.P.'s Troublemaker

For the Republican Party, the Christian right has been a blessing and a curse. It mobilizes millions of voters but alienates a lot of others. In Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, the G.O.P. had a baby-faced, backroom-working pol who wasn't averse to cutting deals with the party's more secular factions. The new leader of the party's Christian troops is Gary Bauer, the longtime president of the pro-life Family Research Council, and all he has in common with Reed is a baby face. "I'm more comfortable pushing from the outside," he says. Translation: he's not averse to bringing down the G.O.P. ship.

Which is what could happen in California this week. Bauer has inserted himself into a battle between two Republicans in a special election for a House seat in Santa Barbara. The district is made up mostly of fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republicans, which is why Speaker Newt Gingrich was backing Brooks Firestone, an heir to the family tire business who became a winemaker and, since 1994, a moderate, pro-choice state assemblyman. But a furious Bauer ponied up $100,000 for an ad campaign that zings Firestone for his refusal to back a ban on partial-birth abortions and promotes instead the more conservative underdog, state assemblyman Tom Bordonaro. (The ads created a stir when local network affiliates refused to run them, saying they described the procedure too graphically.) The Firestone-Bordonaro infighting has been so damaging that some Republicans fear that Lois Capps, the sole Democrat in Tuesday's open primary, could top 50% in the three-way race and take the once safe G.O.P. seat outright. To charges that he is spoiling the G.O.P.'s chances, Bauer rebuts, "Should Lincoln have supported a pro-slavery Republican in order to win a House seat?"

O.K., say Bauer's opponents, but what if the stakes are higher: the whole Congress? Abortion has long divided the Republican Party, and divided parties lose elections. When the 165 members of the Republican National Committee gather for their annual winter meeting this week in Palm Springs, Calif., they'll have a stink bomb on their hands--a resolution that would prohibit the R.N.C. from funding any candidate not opposed to partial-birth abortion. Bauer didn't write the resolution, but his politics inspired it. "This isn't a matter of ideology, it's a matter of human decency," says Colleen Parro, director of the Republican National Coalition for Life. "The Republican Party should only support candidates with a fundamental respect for human life."

That sounds sensible enough for a party with a pro-life plank in its platform, but G.O.P. leaders are worried that the resolution would set a precedent for imposing litmus tests on its candidates. It would be especially damaging to the G.O.P. in the Northeast, where pro-choicers like New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman, who vetoed a partial-birth abortion ban, are already struggling to be heard over the party's dominant wing of Southern conservatives. Concerned that the resolution might pass, R.N.C. chairman Jim Nicholson took the unusual step last week of publicly urging committee members to vote no. Quoting Ronald Reagan, Nicholson wrote, "Those who agree with us 80% of the time are our allies, not our foes."