THE GOP TILT: RIGHTEOUS OR EXTREMIST?

   In 1988, two preachers ran for president. One was Pat Robertson, the other
Jesse Jackson. Both lost in the primaries, but not before they scared the
bejabbers out of Republican and Democratic leaders.
   Later, Robertson and Jackson sent similar tactical messages to their
supporters. Each said, in effect: Be fruitful and multiply. Recruit others to
the cause. Learn the political rules and use them. Take over the precinct,
the ward, the central committee.
   Six years later, it appears that Robertson has had some success. Allies of
his Christian Coalition either control, or strongly influence, as many as a
dozen state Republican Party organizations. They played major roles in
securing the GOP Senate nomination in Virginia for Oliver North and in
dumping the incumbent governor of Minnesota at a party convention. Their
presence has influenced several recent legislative campaigns in Illinois.
   Now Democrats are citing these events as evidence the "religious right"
has infiltrated the Republican Party. Democratic Rep. Vic Fazio of
California, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
claimed that Christian conservatives were employing "subterranean tactics"
and promoting "stealth candidates" who don't divulge their religious
connections.
   Stealth candidates? If Republicans had accused Jackson of "subterranean
tactics" for pushing his supporters into party leadership, they would have
been accused of racial prejudice. Yet Democrats apparently see no bigotry in
their attempts to paint the Christian conservatives as underhanded.
   In fact, the Christian conservatives are exercising their right to be
involved in American politics, and they're gaining influence in the GOP by
playing by the party's rules.
   They oppose higher taxes, abortion and gay rights; they favor prayer in
schools and school vouchers. They champion the right of parents to teach
their children at home. Right or wrong, wise or unwise, their policy
positions fall largely within the broad mainstream of political debate.
   To be sure, there are extremists within their ranks, and the extremists
are likely to sink themselves. When, for example, a Jerry Falwell hawks
videotapes alleging, without evidence, that President Clinton engaged in a
murder plot, he looks less like a legitimate religious or political leader
than a McCarthyite kook.
   But extremists aside, the rise of the religious right presents more
problems for the Republicans than it does for the republic. They have built
influence within their party but have yet to prove they can win general
elections. This autumn may be the test.
   The Democrats know how focused, well-organized interest groups can claim
victory within a party apparatus while alienating much of the general public.
The 1972 capture of the Democratic Party by special-interest forces who
promoted presidential nominee George McGovern started the party's 20-year
exile from the hearts and minds of mainstream Democrats, who felt their party
had abandoned them.
   Indeed, GOP moderates worry that their party will lose faith with moderate
and independent voters when it appears to be captive of zealots, much as it
did at its 1992 convention. But it also can't afford to lose such a highly
organized, and deeply involved, constituency.
   The religious right poses the same threat to the GOP that Jesse Jackson
once presented to the Democrats: Accommodate us, or we'll go our own way.
   But if religious conservatives really want to influence politics, they
need the GOP as much as the GOP needs them. If they are to gain influence
beyond the inner circles of the party, their more extreme members will have
to moderate their message and quit acting as if they have cornered the market
on virtue.

QUINDLEN: POLITICS AS UNUSUAL: THE CHRISTIAN COALITION

GOP MUST FACE UP TO WHAT IT BELIEVES

By ANNA QUINDLEN


BOB DOLE appears to be running for president. This is scarcely notable; Dole
always seems to be running for president or preparing to run or thinking
about running. He is this generation's Harold Stassen, a man known more for
what he seeks than for what he believes.

But what Dole and his fellow Republicans really believe will soon become
critical, not only for their party but for all of America.

Moderates were quietly confident that a move to the middle would follow the
incendiary and exclusionary rhetoric of the 1992 Republican Convention. But
they were wrong. The Christian Coalition, the religious right group that
coalesced around Pat Robertson's failed bid for the presidency, has emerged a
powerful phoenix from the ashes of that debacle, fielding candidates for
everything from school boards to Congress.

And with the quiet acquiescence of such as Dole, Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm and
other Republican leaders, Christian Coalition members, who oppose sex
education, feminism and legal abortion, who espouse school prayer and the
teaching of creationism, could move the party and its platform sharply to the
right.

At the convention in Texas at which conservative Christians seized control of
the state Republican Party organization, Gramm said he was ''offended at
those who seem to believe that if you do hold strongly religious positions,
you ought to be precluded from the political process.''

This is a red herring. Leaving aside the fact that the Christian Coalition
wants to have it both ways, keeping the tax-exempt status of a religious
organization while behaving like a political one, the question is not whether
it will be part of the political process but who will embrace it.

Republican leaders will surely espouse a big-tent principle. But how far will
they spread the canvas? Allen Quist, who was chosen over the incumbent, Arne
Carlson, as the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, says men
have a ''genetic predisposition'' to be heads of the household. Would the
Republicans rally round a candidate who said whites were genetically
predisposed to run corporations or Congress?

What's the difference between demonizing gay men and lesbians as sexual
predators today and demonizing black Americans in the same fashion a
generation or two ago?

When Pat Buchanan brought his bombast to a Christian Coalition conference
last year, saying ''Our culture is superior because our religion is
Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free,'' did that not make
America's Jews inferior? What of the opposition to women who step outside the
circle of home and hearth that is the hallmark of much religious-right
ideology?

If silence gives consent, are these the principles of the Republican Party?

Several party stalwarts describe an organization in which many are fearful of
alienating the religious right and equally fearful of embracing them.

Dole won the Iowa straw poll. He is both the man whose voice broke while
delivering a eulogy at the Nixon funeral and the one who once described
Presidents Carter, Ford and Nixon as ''see no evil, hear no evil, and evil.''

If Dole and other candidates to come wish to show that they stand for more
than self-interest, they will have to articulate their principles, and be
judged by their companions. --