SALON, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, July 26, 2000

    "Just once I'd like to see a ticket that I could be excited about," said Susan Cullman, national co-chair of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition. Settled in front of the television in a hotel suite, surrounded by her pro-abortion troops, Cullman had just watched pro-life Gov. George W. Bush debut Dick Cheney as the Republican vice presidential candidate -- the very same Dick Cheney who, as a six-term congressman from Wyoming, boasted one of the most stalwart pro-life records on Capitol Hill.

    For Cullman and the rest of the pro-abortion group, Bush's decision to tap Cheney served as the disappointing end to a running mate search that had the media and pundits wrongly speculating Bush would pick an abortion advocate.

    "[Cheney] even voted for a bill that would have defined a fetus as a person from the moment of conception!" said Lynn Grefe, the group's national director, from one corner of the pink couch she shared with Cullman.

    "From conception!" Cullman exclaimed. "That's not even a fetus. Isn't that a zygote?"

    "What I want to know," asked Mary Wright, a local Republican activist, "is, if a fetus is a person, can it own property?" Laughter erupted from the group of 12 or so people who crowded the room. From there, the list of potential fetal rights grew to the absurd as the group grew giddy, while LeRoy Carhart, the plaintiff in the case involving a Nebraska partial-birth abortion law which went to the U.S. Supreme Court last month, tried to suppress a smile.

    Camped in Philadelphia as the GOP begins deliberations over its party platform, Cullman, Grefe and their comrades have come to town to lobby delegates to the platform committee in the false hope of removing the party's pro-life platform, which calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion. Though they'd prefer that their party simply take no position on abortion, they'd be happy to settle for a plank that stated the party's respect for a range of positions, including pro-life and pro-abortion. But even that seems a quixotic quest, since Bush appears poised to keep the pro-life language.

    Opinion polls suggest that Bush has less to lose by leaving the plank alone. They show that about one in four pro-life advocates base their vote solely on the issue, while only one in 10 abortion supporters do so, according to Linda DiVall, a leading Republican pollster.

    "The bottom line still remains that single-issue pro-life voters are about three times more significant as a bloc than single-issue pro-choice voters," DiVall said.

    "This is one reason why pro-choice Republicans keep losing," said Mary Dent Crisp, 77, a Republican feminist and former RNC chairwoman who was nudged out of the leadership in the early 1980s.

    Quixotic or not, says Grefe, Bush's choice of Cheney has invigorated her group for doing battle on the platform.

    When a pro-life plank was first inserted in the platform in 1976, it had been just three years since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Reagan led the Republican embrace of the nascent right-to-life movement in the late 1970s, forging a loose alliance that helped keep him in office for two terms and launch the GOP on a comeback course after the disgraces of Richard Nixon.

    "Probably it is true that Reagan would not have won without the issue," said his former senior adviser and attorney general, Edwin Meese. "But what is a movement but a collection of people? It was a strong contributing factor; it brought over a lot of Catholics, the so-called Reagan Democrats."

    Surveys over the years have found the number of party members who support abortion steadily declining. This year, almost half of the 2,066 delegates and possibly even more platform committee members say they want the pro-life plank to remain as is, according to an Associated Press survey of delegates.

    "I think it's been an effective alliance," said Lyn Nofziger, a former Reagan aide and now Republican consultant.

    As the result of a merger between Cullman's Republican Coalition for Choice in Washington and Grefe's Republican Pro-Choice Alliance of New York, the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition has raised $1 million so far this year, which she says will be used to spread the pro-choice gospel within the GOP.

    It's not just the pro-abortion group's newfound fundraising prowess that sets Republican leaders on edge; there's also Cullman's reputation as a strategist. At the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Cullman came close to pulling off a floor fight over the platform language on abortion, which would have made for a messy scene on national television.

    In order to bring an issue to the convention floor, six state delegations must band together to move on it. In '96, Cullman had four delegations firmly in her camp -- Maine, Massachusetts, California and Wyoming. Prior to the convention, pro-abortion New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who led her state's delegation, had made noises that seemed to indicate her willingness to jump into the fray. Smoke signals from Albany at the time indicated that, as went Whitman, so would go pro-abortion Gov. Pataki of New York.

    But at the last minute, Whitman pulled back. Though she denied forbidding her delegates to join in the fight, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Keane told a different story. When I interviewed him on the convention floor during Jack Kemp's acceptance speech, Keane told me that the Jersey delegation had folded "because of the governor's leadership."

    But Grefe is hoping to bring the fight to the floor of the convention this year. With a pro-life ticket, she says, "the platform offers the party its last chance" to show that it cares about the rights of women.

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