It started on Monday with a Hispanic girl singing the national anthem, a black Baptist minister preaching by video from the pulpit of his church, an Asian-American woman celebrating the virtues of voluntarism, and a black retired general defending affirmative action. It concluded on Thursday with a California politician delivering a speech in Spanish, a Mexican dancer in a big sombrero crooning Latin tunes that were cliches back in the day of Ricky Ricardo, and the African-American singer Chaka Khan singing a final number as the delegates walked out into the night. This wasn’t a normal political convention. This was reparative therapy for Caucasians. The people in the stands were mostly white, while the people performing were mostly minority, just like at a Utah Jazz basketball game.
The Philadelphia convention, in other words, was unlike any other in party history. The Democratic view of it is that the Republicans built a Potemkin image of multicultural inclusiveness to mask what is still a white, intolerant party. And it’s true that the convention program did not reflect the party as it really exists. The GOP is not intolerant; still, normal party gatherings don’t look and feel like this. But the more generous interpretation is that the televised show represented the party of George W. Bush’s aspirations. In other words, he’s trying to transform the party to make it fit the happy multi-hued image that we saw up on stage.
And if that’s true, then this convention was not just a big puddle of pabulum. It was a substantive political act disguised as pabulum. It was an effort to reengineer the party as ambitious as Bill Clinton’s earlier effort to transform the Democratic party.
From what is Bush transforming the party? And into what? To put it simply, from a work party to a home party. Traditionally, the Republicans have celebrated freedom and capitalism. Since at least Herbert Hoover — and in truth all the way back to Lincoln and the party’s Whig progenitors — Republicans have celebrated work and business. Reagan held up the entrepreneurial ideal — the person who takes risks, works hard, and creates companies and opportunity, and so did Steve Forbes in his campaign. The Republicans have traditionally celebrated the heroic individualist.
But this convention didn’t worship the entrepreneur or the worker. Those characters scarcely put in an appearance. This convention worshipped the child-rearer. This convention worshipped the people who adopt kids, who mentor youth, who teach. Laura Bush gave her convention speech in front of a bank of school desks, with immobile kids behind her, their hands all neatly folded across the desk top. This convention was about the children who are — maybe you’ve heard — our future. And it was about the wonderful people who nurture them.
The convention therefore went off in odd directions. In the first place, the nurturing theme made the convention pacifist. The emotional aura in the First Union Center resembled that of a kindergarten classroom. You should always be upbeat. You should always stress the positive. You should never fight in front of the kids. This convention was so relentlessly cheerful and peaceful it made a Quaker meeting seem like a Buchanan rally.
But this transformation amounts to more than atmospherics. There’s been a shift in ways of thinking. Mario Cuomo gave a speech in 1984 in which he said America should be a family. Conservatives derided that. Families are sacred private things, built by intimate love, they said. Public figures can’t take the place of parents. We are members of a nation, but we are not all members of one family, they said, and there is a difference between the two. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child, it takes parents. But on Monday night Colin Powell sounded very much like Mario Cuomo when he said we are all responsible for each other’s children. Similarly, Democrats used to talk about getting at the “root causes” of crime, and Republicans derided that. They said that was a fruitless approach to disorder and the correct response to crime was to enforce laws and punish criminals. Rudy Giuliani, a non-pacifist who would not have been at home at the Philadelphia convention, did not go after root causes. He tackled crime by going after criminals — with cops. But again, there was Colin Powell talking about root causes. He said that we should be “building children, not building jails.” The answer to crime is child-rearing.
In Philadelphia, everything was child-rearing. This has policy consequences. George W. Bush still believes in limited government. But not so much when it comes to policies aimed at children. Laura Bush said Monday night that her husband would spend more money on Head Start. She continued, “That’s why he’s proposed a $ 5 billion Reading First initiative with a great American purpose . . . to make sure every child in every neighborhood learns to read at grade level by third grade.” When Colin Powell followed her, he sketched out more Bush education policies, and he prefaced them by saying that of course we have to spend more on education.
In George Bush’s Republican party, building healthy communities and healthy families becomes the core national mission. Bush put the challenge in generational terms. First he invoked his father’s generation, “a generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps, and delivered us from evil.” That was a generation that faced epic challenges. Then he turned to his own generation. He pointed out that his generation was “given the gift of the best education in American history.” It is a generation rich in talent, charm, and skill. But under Clinton/Gore all that has been squandered, and he vowed to redeem it.
The crucial part of the speech came when Bush defined the challenges facing his generation. His generation, he implied, will not be defined by war — not by Vietnam. It will be defined by its ability to rebuild families and communities; the “nation’s greatness” will be preserved through “small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial.” The crucial word there is “small.” Bush didn’t evoke epic battles. He described small acts of caring that would be accomplished intimately, one by one. The people he singled out for praise were people like Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry, “Sharing and Caring Hands,” serves meals to the homeless. Small compassionate acts, one by one.
In other words, this is not a generation asked to fight for freedom, it is a generation called to compassion.
One of the things Bush did do in his speech was explain how this vision of small, local caring could be applied on a national level from the White House. He did so by invoking the cause of one-nation conservatism. Like Disraeli over a century ago, who used the phrase to broaden the appeal of Britain’s Tory party and bring it back to power, Bush said that the affluent must bond with the needy and become again members of one nation. “We are their country, too,” he said of the poor children of single parents. National unity should be as warm and caring as the intimacy of community. He also vowed to reduce the heat of partisanship in Washington, and so join together Democrats and Republicans. “I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years,” he declared, referring to the impeachment fight and other conflicts, “I want to change the tone in Washington to one of civility and respect.” He went on in the speech to describe his talent for working with Democrats to get things done.
This tone was undercut somewhat by the repetitive attacks on the Clinton/Gore administration. Someone who preaches the values of nurturing and uniting the country can get away with two or three attacks on his political opponent, but Bush’s speech had seven such passages. Dick Cheney was better on the attack, bolstering his insults with the gravity of his delivery. Bush veered away from his best self — which all his friends say is his good heart.
Chris Matthews once observed that the Democratic party is the mommy party and the Republican party is the daddy party. The Democrats are soft and nurturing, while the Republicans are stern and bracing. But George Bush’s Republicans are a nurturing party. And who knows, in Los Angeles the Democrats may emerge as the daddy party, the party that lectures us about fiscal rectitude and the imprudence of large tax cuts. Whatever happens in L.A., George Bush has recast the Republican party. Beneath all the Up With People sap, something significant happened in Philadelphia.
David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.
