PERSPECTIVE ON ‘VALUES’ DEBATE : Clinton’s Success Stalls His Agenda : As economic fears calm, voters are newly open to GOP proselytizing on such issues as gays in military service.

One political axiom that seemed to have emerged from the 1992 presidential election was that the use of “family values” had been a loser for the GOP. The numbers were there to support the argument: The exit polls conducted on behalf of the major TV news organizations reported that only about 15% of those questioned considered family values the most important in determining their vote. Topping the list at 42% was the economy; add such related issues as the budget deficit and taxes to the voters’ professed concerns and virtually every other issue--family values among them--recedes into insignificance. For instance, only 5% of those polled cited environmental concerns, once an issue of major importance.

Even among those most likely to be receptive to the GOP’s campaign attack on moral relativism and unconventional lifestyles, family values were not very prominent in steering voters. Indeed, only 30% of people who described themselves as “born-again” Christians claimed to have had their vote determined by issues related to family values. The overwhelming preoccupation of voters with the economy and with their apprehension over jobs and health care drove all other issues to the margins.

Thus has it always been in American politics. Prohibition, the family-values issue of the 1920s, was not only swept aside by concern over the effects of the Great Depression, but actually discarded as public policy with the repeal of the 18th Amendment. It was in the prosperous times in the 1970s and 1980s that morality-based “social issues” (as we called them at the time) came out of hiding over a complex of problems having to do with drugs, race, abortion and crime. The Republicans used these issues to devastating effect on a succession of Democratic presidential candidates, from George McGovern to Michael Dukakis, and were poised to do so with Bill Clinton or any other Democratic nominee in 1992, but a recession foiled their plans. The economy was the transcendent issue in 1992, and all Republican efforts to make the contest a referendum on the morality of the Democratic nominee or his supporters foundered on the rocks of public indifference.

Rather than vanishing from the screen altogether, however, family-values issues were only temporarily occluded, as can be seen from the outburst of public indignation over newly elected President Clinton’s announcement that he would issue an executive order rescinding the ban on gays in the military.

While many observers expressed puzzlement over the haste with which Clinton proposed lifting the ban, he was really a prisoner of political timing. So controversial a move could be made only when citizens were still preoccupied with the economy.

Paradoxically, the very improvement in the economy that Clinton was elected to attain would free up the attention of voters to other sorts of issues, such as those of lifestyle and personal morality. To the extent that Clinton is successful in freeing Americans from the threat of joblessness, he simultaneously renders them more attentive to messages that play to the advantage of Republicans.

In normal times--that is, periods of economic prosperity--Americans are among the most conservative people in the Western World. Americans express greater confidence in churches than people in any other industrial society. Americans are highest in support of prayer in public schools. Americans are more than twice as likely as, for example, Germans to argue that people who do not believe in God should be disqualified from public office. Almost three-quarters of Americans believe in hell as a real place where sinners go. And in the realm of family values, 98% of Americans surveyed in a 1992 Roper poll consider a married couple living with their children a family, while only 20% consider two gay men living together as a family.

These morally conservative Americans are, for the most part, not wild-eyed, right-wing zealots, as some advocates of allowing gays to serve openly in the military claim. They are, however, susceptible of being lured away from President Clinton’s electoral coalition and back into the ranks of what we once called Reagan Democrats if he stakes out a social position closer to Vanity Fair than to People magazine.

Wily Republicans such as Sen. Bob Dole know that they cannot defeat the President on economic issues so long as he is attempting to set right the problems of unemployment and the deficit. They also know that he is on the wrong side of the wall when he pushes a social agenda that alarms a fundamentally conservative electorate. Nothing would make congressional Republicans happier than a real scrap over gays in the military. History tells them that even an economic upswing does not immunize a President against issues that touch the exposed nerve of morality.