GOP’s Appeal to Women Voters at Risk : Politics: Backing Clarence Thomas has become high-stakes gamble. Party could face widened ‘gender gap.’

WASHINGTON —  The controversy over Judge Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court has become a high stakes political gamble for President Bush and his party, threatening to sweep away three years of hard-won Republican gains among women voters.

Republicans worry that if the Senate Judiciary Committee’s impending inquiry into whether Thomas sexually harassed a woman subordinate turns out the wrong way, it could aggravate the party’s long-standing problem with the “gender gap”--the difference between female and male support for the GOP and its candidates as measured in opinion polls. The gap, which had widened during the Ronald Reagan presidency, has shrunk during the tenure of Bush, who is viewed as a less polarizing personality.

The gap’s revival, just as Bush is gearing up to announce his candidacy for reelection, would be particularly unwelcome to the President and his supporters.

“This doesn’t mean that when women get into the voting booth they are going to vote on this issue alone,” says Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for American Women in Politics of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute. “But it is going to combine with other issues to feed the gender gap.”

“To the extent that a splurge of publicity is focused on issues on which Democrats are seen as more sensitive than Republicans, it helps Democrats and hurts Republicans,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Republican strategists, while expressing hope that the controversy will turn to their advantage, concede the risk.

“Right now I think most people see this as a personal conflict between two people,” Thomas and his former aide, University of Oklahoma Law School professor Anita Faye Hill, says Fred Steeper, who polls for the Republican National Committee and the White House. But Steeper concedes that the situation could change if Hill makes a strong case against Thomas at the hearings and if--as expected--party lines harden during the next few days.

“If the result of these hearings are no better than ambiguous,” he says, “and the Republicans all come down in favor of Thomas, and the Democrats are all on the other side it could hurt the (Republican) party’s image.”

The potential impact of this case is heightened because the charges brought by Hill have served to dramatize and personalize an issue of deep concern, yet one that is rarely discused openly between men and women, let alone publicly before the Senate and the world.

“This isn’t like some new law to lower the budget deficit,” Steeper points out.

Up to now Democrats have caught plenty of heat on the case because the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and controlled by other members of their party, seemed not to put great weight in Hill’s allegations.

And if Thomas can maintain his credibility, past experience suggests that Bush’s political stature will be greatly enhanced. The President’s backers could claim that he had the wisdom, confidence and courage to stick up for his choice for the high court, while women around the country were voicing outraged protests against his merely alleged conduct.

Indeed, Democrats might then come under fire for being overly compliant to pressure from feminist and civil rights interest groups.

In the long run, however, if Thomas’ nomination turns sour, Democrats claim that it is the Republicans who will bear the brunt of resentment from both females and males. They point out that Republican White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater labeled Hill’s charges a “smear” when they were first made public. And they add that Republicans agreed to postpone the vote on the nomination, and allow Hill to testify, only because they feared the nomination would otherwise be defeated--by Democratic votes.

Moreover, Democrats believe that they can persuade women to view the issue of sexual harassment as linked to a range of other issues affecting women, ranging from job discrimination to equal pay and abortion rights. On all of these issues, they say, the polls show them to have an advantage with women voters.

“Women are angry and there is power in that anger,” says former Republican National Committee co-chair Mary Dent Crisp. Crisp, who now chairs the National Republican Coalition for Choice, sees the Thomas case as a possible precursor to a floor fight at the Republican National Convention over abortion rights.

The Republican Party has flatly opposed abortion in its platform since it first nominated Reagan in 1980. Trying to avoid an embarrassing floor fight on the issue at next year’s national convention in Houston, Vice President Dan Quayle publicly suggested this week that the party might find some way to take into account the viewpoint of abortion rights advocates without actually changing its anti-abortion plank.

But Democratic pollster Mellman contends that by hardening the tension between the White House and feminist groups, “the Thomas case will make it harder for him (Quayle) to negotiate that kind of deal.”

Though on the surface the current Thomas controversy appears to have more to do with the nominee’s character and behavior than with partisan politics, Supreme Court watchers see this as really another round in the ideological struggle for control of the high tribunal that has been waged for nearly four decades.

This battle was touched off when the court began moving aggressively into areas that directly affect the lives of large numbers of citizens--particularly the civil rights of minorities and later women’s right to abortion.

Many contend that the inquiry into the personal allegations against Thomas has direct bearing on what his judicial performance would be on the high court, particularly when dealing with civil rights and women’s rights.

Says former Republican National Chairwoman Mary Louise Smith, a feminist leader who says that she has an open mind on the Thomas nomination: “I think the degree to which he is or is not insensitive to the issue of sexual harassment reflects on the decisions he would make as a justice.”