Heartburn from GOP’s menu

The unfolding story of the Republican presidential race has become a maddening maze of uncomfortable choices for the Republican Party’s increasingly fractured conservative base.

Each of the front-runners hold positions on bedrock issues that most conservatives agree with 90 percent of the time, but all of them also have something else in their background or record that is a deal-breaker.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the hawkish champion of the Iraq war and anti-pork barrel crusader, hits all the right buttons on issue after issue, until you get to the party’s core economic issue of tax cuts. He opposed all of the Bush tax reduction bills, making him a political pariah among the party’s dominant economic conservatives.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, has a record of tax cuts and slashing the city’s bureaucracy, fighting crime, and leading a besieged city out of the abyss of September 11, 2001, in a career that has made his name synonymous with executive leadership.

But Mr. Giuliani is out of step with the GOP’s long-held position on abortion, gun controls, gay marriage and other social issues that triggers opposition to his candidacy from the party’s social conservatives.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has cloaked himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, vowing to carrying on the tax cut revolution and slay costly Big Government with his veto pen. But he is a late convert to the pro-life agenda, raising persistent questions about the sincerity of his newly-held positions.

Nowhere is the conservative angst over its choices in 2008 more amply demonstrated than with former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, the star of the “Law and Order” TV drama.

Mr. Thompson, who has yet to say whether he will be a candidate, has all the attributes that diehard conservatives can love: hawkish on defense, tough on spending, a Reagan tax-cutter to the core, and good on social issues.

But there are disturbing parts in his record, too, that bother many if not most conservatives, especially his support of the McCain-Feingold bill that prohibits issue advocacy groups from running TV or radio ads to express their opposition or support in the midst of an election.

On this issue, Mr. Thompson was joined at the hip with Mr. McCain, despite the bill’s questionable constitutionality that is now being litigated in the courts. It strikes at the heart of one of our most precious freedoms — the freedom to advocate and promote one’s beliefs in the marketplace of public opinion.

Dubbed the “incumbent protection act,” this law strikes at the very rights of all advocacy groups, especially the social and religious conservatives, that were in many ways one of Mr. McCain’s key targets, the people he called “agents of intolerance.”

The other disturbing part of Thompson’s record is what else he did in the Senate: virtually nothing. He led no great crusades, nor did he win any medals for leadership. In fact, when he was called to lead the investigation into illegal campaign contributions from China to President Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, Mr. Thompson was rolled by the Democrats.

Instead of tenaciously digging into the Chinagate scandal, following the money trail wherever it led, Mr. Thompson caved into Democratic demands for a strict time limit on the probe which ended prematurely, with little to show for it. So much for his leadership abilities.

All of this has turned the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes into a wide open horse race where the dominant but deeply divided conservative wing is no longer in full control of the party’s nominating process.

The most recent manifestation of the party’s political balkanization can be seen in the primary calendar battles that I reported in a recent column.

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