For our taste, there was rather too much up-with-people gush at last week’s Republican National Convention — and too much pop-culture flash, and too much manipulative hypersentimentality. There were persons with disabilities. There was a Miss America. There was a professional wrestler. There was Florida congressman Joe Scarborough, bellowing the god-awfullest patriotic rock song ever written. There was even 1970s pin-up model Bo Derek, habla-ing espanol — as if to prove . . . well, we’re not sure what.
A bit of this mood — of a party happily at home in the street bazaar that is modern American life, meaning to change it only a tad, the better to, you know, help and share — extended into the acceptance speech delivered by presidential nominee George W. Bush. Bush went quite far indeed to establish that he is a man of vision and vigor, and a nice fellow to boot. Bush did not go quite far enough, we think, to establish that he has thought through the oft-celebrated “purpose” of his campaign, and knows precisely what that purpose is.
But he has time left in the coming campaign to do that. For now it must be said that Bush’s speech, on its own terms and on balance, was an ingenious blend of affect and political calculation. In other words, it worked. Like gang-busters. As did the entire convention, it appears. The Republican nominee enters his three-month stretch run nearly 20 points ahead of Al Gore in the national polls. It is hard to argue with success.
Nevertheless, Governor Bush’s enemies — Democrats and newsmen, that is to say — argued hard with success the whole week long.
They decried as plainly fraudulent, for one thing, the remarkable show of liquid-smooth unity the Republicans made in Philadelphia. It was the most placid GOP convention in decades, an achievement all the more notable for the fact that it did not involve an incumbent president for the delegates to rally around and renominate. Where were the disaffected moderates in all this conviviality? Where were the defeated McCain insurgents? Had they not been muscled into grudging submission? And was this not, behind the scenes, the same old fractious crowd Americans had lately come to so dislike?
No, actually. Here the analysis was forced and stupid, for last week’s unity was both less and more than met the eye.
General Colin Powell’s speech Monday night, for example. At the San Diego Republican convention in 1996, you will recall, Powell gave a pinched and awkward talk devoted almost entirely, and explicitly, to issues on which he disagreed with the party’s platform. Then, the general could hardly bring himself to mention the name of the party’s nominee, Bob Dole. Powell was booed a few times.
This time out, all was different. To be sure, Powell again was hardly shy about his not-so-Republican views, making a great (and incoherent) effort, for instance, to defend federally administered racial preferences. But he was applauded for it by the delegates. Confused, the New York Times — journalism’s Captain Ahab, where internecine Republican warfare is concerned — suggested that the general really could and should have tried harder to make trouble. Powell’s appearance, the paper reported, was “perhaps most striking . . . for what he did not say.”
Nope. Wrong. Backward, even. What Powell did not say, he did not say. What he did say was An Event. He was applauded by the conventioneers, during and despite his defense of affirmative action, because the most popular and respected public figure in the nation, a black man, was otherwise publicly embracing them. The embrace was so vigorous and apparently natural as to render the little discordancies in Powell’s speech all but irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. His praise of the Republican presidential nominee was positively fulsome: Bush is a patriot. Bush is a born leader. Bush is a man of the highest character, integrity, and principle. “Fellow Republicans,” let us elect him.
Yes, it is a curious and interesting thing that George W. Bush has this year managed, and so easily, to harmonize — even pacify — major and minor tendencies within his party that ordinarily regard one another with discomfort and mistrust, if not outright hostility. With Powell’s speech last Monday, one such tendency was heard from. It sounded happy. With John McCain’s speech last Tuesday, a very different, much larger, and politically more significant Republican tendency was heard from. It sounded even happier. Notwithstanding the senator’s bitter primary battle against Bush, McCain managed an almost fantastically eloquent and convincingly sincere paean to the victor.
All of which means — what? It speaks to Bush’s personal charm, to the technical and strategic skill of his campaign, and to the just-short-of-universal Republican lust to exorcise the Clinton-Gore demon and retake the White House. “Fraudulence” has nothing to do with it.
There is also the fact that, for all its periodic and super-exaggerated family mini-squabbles over ideology, the GOP has never truly failed in recent years to maintain at least a working unity. Honestly, now: The “new,” Bush-led Republicans are not that unusual in this respect. They are now, and have been for twenty years, a basically conservative party.
Conservatism, too, Bush’s critics tried last week to fashion into a liability for him. The platform the convention approved for its nominee is a piece of embarrassing John Birchery, “harsh and often unfair,” sayeth the Times. Dick Cheney, Bush’s running mate, is all this and worse: He years ago spent his time in Congress casting votes that would have made George Wallace blanch — or so Al Gore’s minions would have us believe. We will undoubtedly hear a great deal more of this argument throughout the fall.
But it is abject nonsense, and we wager it will draw little blood. Bush’s platform, as will be clear to anyone who troubles to read it, is a better written and more intelligent version of the same conservatism the GOP has been offering the country — and winning elections with — since 1980: low taxes, support for traditional social arrangements, welfare reform, military strength, aggressive international leadership. These things still poll well, you know. And if Democrats insist on making Dick Cheney the public face of these Republican ideas . . . well, so much the better for Republicans. Cheney’s acceptance speech last Wednesday was the best — and best delivered — of the week. He was every inch himself: smart, retiring but confident, level-headed, articulate. No normal person will ever be persuaded that Dick Cheney is a caveman.
So, then: It would seem Al Gore is in quite a pickle. If, at their own convention in Los Angeles next week, Democrats attempt to match the GOP for atmospherics, and run a presidential campaign based on image and personality, they will be taking an awful risk. Bush isn’t Bob Dole. And Gore isn’t Bill Clinton. Many people seem to like Bush — and like him better the more they get to see of him. Nobody seems to like Al Gore very much. Which makes perfect sense: Gore is a vain, brutish, patronizing clod. And he will only solidify that already widespread impression should he try to drag Bush down with screechy, hysterical warnings about an emerging right-wing Dark Ages.
We can think of only one potentially fruitful option for Gore and his party. And we would like to see them take it. Democrats might yet design a campaign of unusually rigorous policy argument, seriously addressing the whole national agenda for the next four years. And Gore might then spend three months challenging George W. Bush to follow suit — to describe and defend, fully down in the weeds of governance, the administration the Republican hopes to lead.
This is the place in our politics Bush has so far appeared least eager to go. In his Thursday acceptance speech, the Texas governor unaccountably announced that he has “no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years” — as if he were some Martian dropped suddenly from the sky into American life. He wants to lead our conversation, but he has few opinions about exactly the stuff we’ve been discussing all along? How can that be? And can he win if it proves true?
Maybe. The country has been narcotized by eight years of Clintonian empathy-politics, after all, ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent substance-free. But we would like to think it weren’t entirely so. We would like to think that American voters retain a residual desire to hear solid stuff — ideas, details — in their presidential campaigns. And we would like to think they might still be inclined to reward the party and candidate who better deliver this stuff.
Perhaps Al Gore will take this chance. And perhaps the front-running George W. Bush, who has made an excellent start of things and whom we wish well, should therefore be on guard, ready to respond. Perhaps, come to think of it, Bush should even go first.
David Tell, for the Editors
