New York
GEORGE BUSH’S acceptance speech managed not to be the high point of the Republican convention. Whether worn out by emotions or let down by the music arrangers or late for a party, most of the attendees didn’t hang around. They were out on the streets of New York 10 minutes after the balloons stopped dropping.
Was it the speech’s fault? Probably not. Few will remember it two weeks from now (although one line about Ground Zero–“Here buildings fell and here a nation rose”–will be on a plaque somewhere two centuries from now). The speech set simple goals for itself. The president does not want to show himself brilliant or unpredictable–two virtues that have made his more intellectually sophisticated opponent an unusually fat target for the past week. Rather, he wanted to come off the way he described the families of soldiers who fought in Iraq: “decent, idealistic, and strong.”
The speech was slow going in the early stages, in which President Bush laid out his domestic agenda. His plans were sensible and well-thought-out, but it was clear he was getting impatient slogging through the hinterlands of his achievement. In the perfunctoriness of his delivery, he resembled no one so much as John Edwards in Boston, droning through the foreign policy part of the Democratic platform while the gathered delegates traded business cards or gazed vacantly at the rafters.
But there was a method to the Bush speechwriters’ composition. What united the domestic policy prescriptions was the incisive summation: “Many of our most fundamental systems–the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training–were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow.” The president may not have taken his own rhetoric to heart–the Medicare program, which he boasts of expanding radically, is an archetypical old-economy system. But it’s nice rhetoric to campaign on, because it tars the other candidate as a hidebound reactionary clinging to old structures. (“His policies of tax and spend–of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity–are the policies of the past.”) Just where the president was going with this trope became clearest when he (finally) hit his stride on Iraq, and stated that “September 11 requires our country to think differently.”
Thereby hangs a campaign strategy we’ll see a lot of in the next nine weeks: the assertion that those who disagree with the president are not merely arguing on different principles but defending systems of thought that now lie in ashes.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
