Bob Dole's Timely Escape

Bob Dole had many good reasons to announce his departure from the Senate: to disassociate himself from the numbing technicalities of the legislative process, to shed his image as the ultimate Washington insider, to jolt voters who are bored with him. But the most basic explanation is that he no longer has to preside over a fractured Republican Party.

The party's main fissure is not over social issues like abortion. This is indeed a significant dispute, which party elders are eager to muffle before the August convention. But the battle is largely symbolic, since most voters do not agree with the party's anti-abortion position and there is little chance of any change in the status quo.

Rather, the fundamental conflict within contemporary conservatism is over the role of government. The division is a direct result of the chimerical revolution of the Reagan years, when Republicans declared an assault on Big Government but never made a serious attempt to execute it. On one side are those intent on drastically shrinking the public sector like the House majority leader, Dick Armey, and his freshmen acolytes. On the other are those like Mr. Dole who have accepted the basic functions of the New Deal welfare state and think President Reagan was shrewd to leave it alone.

The 1994 election made it appear as if the anti-Government radicals were finally in command of Congress, an interpretation bolstered by the Republicans' surprising unity in tough votes on cutting Medicare and student loans. But last summer the radicals found themselves foursquare in Mr. Reagan's old predicament: They couldn't convince the public of the need to cut popular Federal programs or even environmental and consumer-protection regulations.

This led to an increasingly open fight between those who remain determined to slash Government programs and pseudo-libertarians like Mr. Dole, who speak ill of the Government but recognize that drastically downsizing it is not desirable, for political as well as other reasons.

Republicans have been so good for so long at containing their internal differences, and the Democrats so bad at it, that it's hard to adjust to the reversal of roles. Moderates like Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who attacked House Speaker Newt Gingrich for lacking "compassion," are desperate to distance themselves from a radical anti-statist agenda that they think is hurting them with voters. But the revolutionaries are desperate not to miss another chance to take on the Federal leviathan, and they too believe that the voters are on their side.