KINDER'S COMMENTARY: RESULTS SUGGEST A MORE RIGHTWARD COURSE APPEALS TO VOTERS

"To get the nomination" of the Republican Party, said that great trimmer, Richard Nixon, "you go to the right. Thereafter, for the general election you've got to go left."

The ever-cagey Nixon might have added, but never did, that he intended to govern left as well, but that's another (depressing) column. Tuesday's election results from Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere suggest a different, more rightward course. A centrist political friend who is distinctly more of a "pragmatist" than this writer recently confessed, "The right is where it's at."

One can hope, probably forlornly, that the astonishingly weak, razor-thin re-election of New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman will put to rest all the media chatter about how moderate Republicans stand a better chance of November wins than mainstream conservatives. One might also have hoped the stunning success of Ronald Wilson Reagan would have taught the same lesson, but then what is it the Catholic scholars teach about certain folks' "invincible ignorance"?

Compare Whitman's sagging, 47 percent squeaker over an unknown state senator with the landslide victory of conservative former Virginia Attorney General Jim Gilmore in the race for governor of the Old Dominion. Whitman vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortion. She is so aggressively pro-choice on that issue that it amounted to a sharp stick-in-the-eye for the social conservatives who comprise her party's base, its most loyal cadre of volunteers. Whitman cut state income taxes by 30 percent, fulfilling a 1993 campaign pledge that rescued her floundering campaign that year. Still, she seemed clueless, in the manner of moderate GOPers and Bushies everywhere, that she needed an encore in a state with brutally high property taxes.

Ah, but her pro-choice stand and status as a woman will help her with the famous GOP "gender gap," right? Wrong. In a brilliant Wall Street Journal column, Paul Gigot reports: "Whitman's share of the women's vote was no larger than in 1993 -- 46 percent. ... Her share of the black vote actually fell -- to 17 percent from 25 percent."

Hmmm. Now for a look at Virginia's Gilmore ("deliberately dull," according to Gigot), whose campaign is being noted as the new GOP model. Gilmore is to the right of Whitman on abortion and, unapologetically, forged early ties to the Religious Right. He hammered relentlessly on taxes, organizing street demonstrations against the hated car tax. When his Democratic opponent attacked him, saying elimination of this levy would hurt essential services, Gilmore never wavered, knowing the trap was sprung, his quarry inside its jaws. For good measure, Gilmore inoculated himself on education, pledging to spend some of the state's tax windfall on 4,000 new teachers.

Result: A landslide 58 percent that pulled in Republicans for lieutenant governor and attorney general. The latter, by the way, was the most ardent pro-lifer on the ballot. Gender gap? Well, Virginia's Gilmore pulled 51 percent of all women, and 57 percent of white women voters. Seems the fairer sex hates that car tax, too.

True, Virginia is more conservative than New Jersey, but the latter is heavily Catholic and full of a species we took to calling "Reagan Democrats" back in the '80s. In two landslides the Gipper carried the Garden State twice, no problem, in no small part because he never gave a rip for the contents of a New York Times editorial.

Just as there are no "Bush Democrats," history will record no sightings of a "Christie Whitman Democrat." Yet again, a lesson there, for any who will heed it.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.