By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

Since Ronald Reagan first united social and fiscal conservatives on the way to winning the presidency in 1980, the two wings of the Republican Party have maintained a successful, if strained, partnership.

But a recent blow-up between former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins indicates just how much the current presidential campaign is testing that rapport.

Perkins and most social conservatives have long been leery of John McCain , the presumed Republican nominee, because the Arizona senator has supported campaign finance restrictions and stem cell research, which they oppose, and because he harshly criticized some religious conservative leaders when he first ran for the presidency in 2000. Fiscal conservatives don’t usually gush about McCain either, but they have found common ground with him in opposing earmarked funding for local projects in appropriations bills.

Now Perkins is shopping a potential solution to the religious conservatives’ McCain alienation. The candidate, he says, should retract his support for tight campaign finance rules and stem cell research and commit to appointing a “family czar” if elected. Perkins says the czar would review proposed policy changes with an eye toward their impact on families — whether they affect “the strength of the marital commitment, the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit or the family’s budget,” he wrote recently on his Family Research Council blog.

Perkins raised the idea as a kind of olive branch for McCain in two February interviews on CNN and one with The Associated Press.

It hasn’t sat well with Armey, though. This month he sent an e-mail to supporters of his fiscally conservative group FreedomWorks saying the idea “feels suspiciously like liberal identity politics.”

Armey, who represented suburban Dallas for nine terms, retired in 2002 and is now a lobbyist at DLA Piper, says Perkins’ idea would end up expanding government bureaucracy in ways that conservatives might later regret, if their chosen candidate weren’t in control of it.

“What I think Perkins is missing is, he legitimizes an idea that could result in a President Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama putting in a family czar to represent conduct and behavior that he himself would find disturbing,” Armey says.

For his part, Perkins says he simply has in mind a post like that filled by former Reagan domestic policy adviser Gary Bauer, who went on to be the Family Research Council's president from 1988 to 1999. Bauer's role, Perkins wrote, was to block "intrusive federal action" and "slow the growth of government." A new family czar, in Perkins' view, would do much the same, pushing "authority and financial resources back to the smallest government of all, the home."