A specter haunts Republicans as they finish preparations for Bob Dole’s forthcoming presidential nominating ceremony in San Diego. And they freely admit it. “Every meeting on planning this convention,” a senior Dole aide tells the New York Times, “begins with what went wrong in 1992.”
Ah, yes: Houston. Strident, preachy, extremist Houston. In 1992, “the whole tone of the convention turned the American people off,” says GOP consultant Paul Manafort — and as manager of this year’s convention he’s charged with making sure that it doesn’t happen again. Dole himself has insisted on a ” different kind of convention.”
But it looks like Dole’s not going to get one. Judging from the scheduling information that’s dribbled into the press so far, San Diego will probably be an even balder and less attractive display of Houstonismo, properly understood, than Houston was. And this, not despite the GOP high command’s obsessive preventive efforts, but because of them.
These days, of course, hardly any news gets made at a major-party convention. Like a poorly constructed detective novel, the candidate- selection process now reveals its secret very early, during state primaries in the spring of each presidential election year. Endless months of ritualized campaigning later, the summer convention is no longer a dramatic event, but instead a highly scripted four-day lifestyle advertisement for the nominee and his supporters. The biggest question left for media analysts and viewing audiences to ponder, ad nauseam, is whether the spectacle makes them feel its intended mood: unity, confidence, connection to the Zeitgeist.
For its organizers, then, the modern political convention is a challenge curiously typical of American postmodernism: Their thinly plotted text must guide mountains of self-indulgent interpretation. George Bush’s lieutenants badly botched this mission in 1992. Their ideological base was embittered by the president’s “read my lips” betrayal. The rest of the country was discombobulated in the aftermath of a prolonged recession. So the GOP arrived in Houston far behind in the polls. And it arrived in Houston empty-handed.
To the nation as a whole, the Houston convention offered very little in the way of reassurance. There were half-disguised apologies; a weakly articulated, shopworn agenda; a desperate plea for voters to be gentle with good ol’ George. To conservatives in particular, Houston spoke in the loud, crude, patronizing pidgin a cartoon missionary employs with benighted savages. True, there wasn’t all that much of this — a few lines of exaggerated right- wingery in a small handful of speeches. But since they were the only discordant notes in the score, and the rest of the music was so dull, they did stand out. In the end, the Houston convention was not “too conservative.” It was simply too dumb. And if the press and public missed this distinction, the Republicans who controlled Houston had mostly themselves to blame. Because they missed it, too.
Will Bob Dole’s San Diego be any better? There’s every reason to doubt it. The party’s animating conservatism will not be made more eloquent and intelligent. Quite the opposite: Every effort will be made to hide explicit conservatism like an embarrassing uncle. The keynote address will go to moderate, pro-choice representative Susan Molinari of New York’s Staten Island. And not for anything she might actually say. “She assumed the Dole campaign would give her a speechwriter,” Newsday reports, but instead she’s been told to draft whatever she wants. No, Molinari’s attraction to Dole’s managers is exclusively demographic. Here’s Paul Manafort again: “Catholics are a target, ethnics are a target, women are a target, women under 45 who are professionals, working women, are a target. So she represents a lot of the various voters we’re going after.” The GOP’s more conservative congressional notables, by contrast, will be all but invisible in San Diego. “This is not a ‘reelect the Republican Congress’ convention,” Manafort sniffs.
Sorry: The Republican party’s philosophical controversies cannot be so easily swept under the rug. Pat Buchanan, this year as in 1992 the GOP’s populistright bad boy, is under an official convention banishment order. Dole and Buchanan representatives aren’t even speaking to one another. But Pat will hold a San Diego counter-rally. It will no doubt be a humdinger. If Colin Powell uses his speech during the convention’s opening evening to defend affirmative action against efforts like the California Civil Rights Initiative, CCRI chairman (and Dole delegate) Ward Connerly will, he has told friends, walk off the floor. These and other eruptions are inevitable so long as bedrock Republican ideas — conservative ideas — are given no more productive role at the convention. And if the convention has no larger, countervailing message for America, the eruptions will become the major story.
In this respect, too, San Diego is beginning to look just like Houston, only worse. GOP event planners say their survey research indicates that more than 60 percent of American voters no longer watch national conventions live on television. And to compete for the attention of the remaining 40 percent — against what one convention spokesman calls “too many alternative modes of entertainment in the age of the remote control” — Dole’s men believe San Diego must radically deemphasize political conversation. Traditional convention podium addresses? Too boring. “One politician following another: speak, speak, speak,” Dole says with disgust. Susan Molinari will have ten minutes for her keynote. No one else but Dole will be allowed to talk for more than five.
And into the attendant air-time vacuum will march Internet web sites, colorful graphics, interviews with “real Americans,” satellite hook-ups, talk- radio feeds — all the dumbed-down schlock that cuttingedge technology allows. And all for naught. Unless Republicans intend to have bikini babes and gunfire on their San Diego stage, after all, they can never really compete with those “alternative modes of entertainment.” Politicians are supposed to speak, speak, speak. It’s their job to make people listen. And if they don’t even bother to try, if the Republican convention turns into yet another festival of vacuousness, why shouldn’t voters turn off their TVs? And their minds.
Houston was bad, and because they have failed to understand the reasons why, Bob Dole’s Republicans now seem inclined to repeat and compound the badness in San Diego. But it’s not too late for them to correct their course. The Republican convention needn’t be a substance-free zone. Serious people should be invited to address the delegates and the country about serious issues — Ward Connerly on equal opportunity, for instance, and maybe for more than five minutes.
After Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980, Pat Moynihan honored Republicans as “the party of ideas.” The GOP took control of Congress in 1994 as a party of ideas. And in 1996 it is as a party of ideas that Republicans must stand. Or they will surely fall.
David Tell, for the Editors
