A GOP reinvention: new face on old package

George W. Bush may have given the appearance of a softer, more compassionate Republican Party with more commitment to diversity, but the party position on abortion, gays, gun control and education hasn't really changed.

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

PHILADELPHIA -- George W. Bush left his Philadelphia coronation with everything he had come for -- the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain's solid endorsement, a somewhat less harsh party platform, a unified party and a convention meticulously choreographed to send the message to independent voters that the Gingrich Revolution is over, that establishment Republicans again rule.

And most important, Bush delivered a politically effective acceptance speech that gave him his first presidential moment in the campaign. He presented himself as a confident, resolute leader who will seek bipartisan solutions to tough problems and put the nation's prosperity to high purpose.

Like Bush's speech, the nurturing themes of the 2000 GOP convention -- inclusion, tolerance, education, children -- were intended not so much to convert voters as to reassure them they have nothing to fear from a Bush presidency or from the party he now leads. Now comes the hard part -- closing the sale in what promises to be a hard-fought fall campaign against Democrat Al Gore, whose challenge will be to convince voters that the Philadelphia convention was clever stagecraft to create the illusion of a different kind of Republican Party.

The ghosts of discordant conventions past were banished from the convention program. Newt Gingrich was sighted visiting a local anti-poverty center, while the Rev. Jerry Falwell was telling his flock to count their blessings and lay low. Falwell said religious conservatives should be happy to leave the City of Brotherly Love with a pro-life ticket and a pro-life platform.

"Our crowd," he added, "needs to get into battle, keep their mouths shut and help this man (Bush) win."

The voices heard in Philadelphia were temperate, optimistic, earnest and empathetic. Diversity was in political fashion here. Spanish was the second language. Although the delegates were overwhelmingly white and male, opening night displayed perhaps the greatest pageant of diversity ever seen on a GOP convention stage. A Hispanic woman sang the national anthem. A black Baptist minister preached and a black gospel choir sang on a large video screen. There were black break-dancers on stage, and delegates picked up the beat of hip-hop. A woman with Down's Syndrome shared a letter Bush had written her, and a gay congressman spoke -- on trade. Delegates also heard from a ghetto teacher and a children's advocate.

It was enough to make even some Republicans wonder if they had stumbled into the wrong convention. Actually, they had. This was a Bush convention, not a Republican convention. Was it for real? Or was Philadelphia the greatest con job in modern convention history? Those are questions still to be answered, and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The soaring rhetoric about inclusion and tolerance at this disciplined gathering of the nation's conservative political party may turn out to be just what President Clinton called it -- "a pretty package" of moderation designed to confuse the voters.

Indeed, there is a striking disconnect between the soft, inclusive themes of this convention and the work of the Republican Congress in Washington and the party's platform, which mostly still reflects the positions of the party's right wing, despite the Bush campaign's efforts to smooth some of its jagged edges on such issues as education and immigration.

This is a party that still opposes all abortions, even in cases of rape, incest or in which the life of the mother is at stake. This is a party that still clings to a platform studded with language hostile to gays. When Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe spoke to the convention on trade, some members of the Texas delegation removed their hats and prayed in silent protest. This is a party that has little use for family-planning programs, and, despite the passionate rhetoric about leaving no child behind, is more committed to charter schools and vouchers than to Title I, the main federal program for disadvantaged schoolchildren. This is a party that still opposes most gun-control measures.

Bush has given the party a friendlier face, a softer voice. This fall, Americans will be asked to overlook the party platform (even Bush differs with some of its harsher planks) and the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill and trust Bush, who presents himself as "a different kind of Republican." In many ways, Bush is more compassionate than his party, more committed to diversity and more willing to reorient the GOP toward the political center. His challenge now is to convince voters alienated by the shrill, right-wing demagoguery of past conventions that the gauzy Philadelphia show was the real thing.

On the issue of diversity, Bush appears to be sincere, even though only 4 percent of the delegates were black and 3 percent Latino. He is reaching out to minority voters and acknowledging that his party has not always shouldered the mantle of Lincoln. His convention showcased two prominent African-Americans who he has signaled would play a major role in a Bush administration -- retired Army General Colin Powell, perhaps the most popular Republican in the nation, and Condoleezza Rice, one of Bush's foreign policy advisers. Both were given prime-time speaking slots.

If Bush wins in November, Powell is expected to be named secretary of state and Rice White House national security adviser. That would be a first, and the Democrats would be hard-pressed to match.

Bush may not realize it, but Powell did him a service by giving the convention one of its few reality checks. He didn't exactly say it takes a village to raise a child, but he said it is everyone's responsibility. He called for more investments in the nation's youth and said "we should be building children, not building jails."

In one of the convention's few awkward moments, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff scolded his party on affirmative action. Republicans, he said, must understand "the cynicism that exists in the black community" when some in his party "miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action, but hardly a whimper is heard from them for affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests."

That Powell was cheered instead of booed for those words underscores the extent to which the Bush campaign controlled this convention, right down to the behavior of delegates.

The Republican love-in in Philadelphia apparently was more than President Clinton could stand. While Al Gore was lying low on vacation, Clinton couldn't resist trying to rattle Bush with goading remarks he ad-libbed at a series of Democratic fundraisers around the country.

Clinton's name had not been spoken from the convention dais until Dick Cheney, Bush's vice presidential running mate, ripped into the Clinton-Gore administration in his acceptance speech Wednesday night. But throughout the week there was no mistaking the message of speakers who used such code words as "dignity," "trust," "honor," "integrity" and "respect" to remind listeners of Clinton's ethical problems. The president decided to let the Republicans know he was listening.

Republicans tried to stay positive as Clinton belittled Bush's "compassionate conservative" campaign theme. Then Clinton got personal, suggesting the Texas governor was seeking the presidency out of a sense of entitlement, the way he would run for president of a college fraternity.

This is how Clinton described Bush's campaign message: "How bad can I be? I've been governor of Texas. My daddy was president. I own a baseball team. They like me down there . . . Everything is rocking along hunky-dory. Their fraternity had it for eight years, give it to ours for eight years."

These were fighting words. Bush fired back from the campaign trail, and by mid-week, even the father, former President George Bush, was threatening to wade into the fight. Just let Clinton keep it up, the elder Bush warned, and "I'm going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person." By the next day, the former president had cooled down and wanted to drop the subject.

It's not much of a secret what he thinks about the man who ousted him from the White House eight years ago, but until now he has felt it wouldn't be prudent to say it. Clinton's needling of the Bushes reminded Republicans of why they loathe him so much, enough to put aside their differences and rally behind the man they believe can deprive Clinton of the third term a Gore victory would represent, at least in their minds.

Democrats were gleeful even though they recognize that Gore, who has yet to gain his political footing against Bush, is taking a political risk in allowing Clinton to be seen as fighting his political battles for him. If Clinton seemed to be relishing his combative role, it may be because he sees this election as a referendum on his presidency, and he has no intention of sitting it out while Gore stumbles and Bush steals a page from his own campaign playbook.

In his campaign and here in Philadelphia, Bush is trying to do exactly what Clinton did in 1992: He is softening his party's ideological image and moving it closer to the political center, just as Clinton did with his party. He is blurring the differences between the two parties, just as Clinton did. And he is stealing Democratic issues and themes, just as Clinton appropriated Republican ideas for his political purposes.

Clinton, a man not known for putting principle ahead of politics, must find it galling to watch the Republicans reinvent themselves in Philadelphia. He, of all people, knows what is really going on. After all, he wrote the book on it.

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