Wednesday, Dec. 9, 1998 | 11:39 a.m.
INDIANAPOLIS -- It could have been a lugubrious occasion -- a symposium on a feeble institution, the two-party system, honoring a political leader with an incurable illness.
Instead, the inaugural Bulen Symposium on the Indiana University-Purdue University campus was as bracing as my end-of-the day visit with L. Keith Bulen, the storied GOP power broker to whom this day was dedicated.
As the longtime Marion County (Indianapolis) chairman and Indiana Republican National committeeman, Bulen helped launch and sustain the notable career of Sen. Dick Lugar and sponsored a succession of successful mayors and governors. He was a key national strategist for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Throughout his career, Bulen demonstrated a talent for organization, a shrewd appreciation of human nature and an understanding that great changes (such as the creation of city-county regional government) demand strong parties.
Parties like that are hard to find in these days of individualized campaigns built around TV messages. Most of the out-of-state scholars, operatives and political journalists who came to the day-long seminar at the invitation of Mitch Daniels, a former Reagan White House political director, cited evidence of ever-weaker parties at the national level and in their states.
Paul Allen Beck of Ohio State University said that the parties had no one to blame but themselves. As they have become more centralized and more professionalized, he said, "they have changed from labor-intensive to capital-intensive structures."
That is, they find it easier to raise money to buy TV ads than to work on face-to-face contact with the voters. And that, of course, is one of the main reasons voter turnout continues to decline. But Indiana is an exception -- and perhaps, because of the Bulen legacy, a harbinger of better days ahead for both parties.
Wabash College political scientist David J. Hadley, writing earlier this year in a publication of Indianapolis' Sycamore Institute, said Indiana elections are notable for "pitting two well-organized, competitive parties against each other." Republicans have dominated at the presidential level, but Democrats have won the last three gubernatorial elections and match up well in Senate, House and legislative races.
Republican state Chairman Mike McDaniel, a Bulen protege, and Democratic state Chairman Joe Andrew explained how they do it. The testimony from Andrew, a lawyer who is currently under discussion for the vacant post of national Democratic chairman, was particularly impressive, because the state has many more Republican-inclined voters than Democrats.
In his four years in the job, he has recruited volunteer precinct chairmen for virtually every neighborhood and "empowered every one of our 4,800 chairmen as the campaign manager for his or her precinct." On computer printouts or CD-ROMs, they receive from state headquarters walking lists of the voters to see in their precincts, each identified by party inclination and issue interests, and a suggestion of talking points to use in urging them to vote.
Andrew said he is convinced that with the splintering of the TV audience into 90 cable channels and the skepticism about 30-second spots, "the personal message from a neighbor or a peer is the only thing that gets through to people."
It works. Last month, in addition to giving ex-Gov. Evan Bayh the biggest Senate victory margin ever achieved by an Indiana Democrat, his party broke a tie in the state House of Representatives and gained a 53-47 majority.
Andrew told me, "There's a direct line from what Keith Bulen did in his time to what I'm trying to do now. We're just doing the old-fashioned things with new tools."
Bulen was too weakened by cancer to attend the symposium, but when I drove out to his house, I found him as engaged in the politics of the day as ever. As his life comes to an end, he knows that his legacy remains in the strong parties of his home state -- an example to the nation.
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