THE SAN DIEGO REPUBLICANS
The San Diego Republicans Republican party officials leave their San Diego convention in ostentatious good cheer. And they are not faking it. Their satisfaction is real. For maybe six hours of...
...And then he left the podium to his running mate...
...But the beauty and power were mostly a function of thematic mood—they were gravy, not meat...
...Some Mr...
...Elizabeth Dole’s Wednesday night tribute to her husband was a signal moment in the long slide of American political discourse into high-gloss kitsch...
...They had better be...
...He was impressive, just as the convention had already promised he would be...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...And the rest of the platform is really nothing new—and nothing scary, for that matter...
...The choice of affect over argument may be enough to close half the distance by which Bob Dole has trailed Bill Clinton over all these past many months...
...The Republican answer in San Diego was best expressed in the convention’s three most important speeches...
...After it was formally adopted by the convention, most leading Republicans treated the document as a trifle—a party favor for the party’s conservative foot soldiers...
...Dole’s surprise choice of Kemp for veep made sense on a number of grounds: Kemp’s continued appeal across factional lines within the Republican party...
...She asked her audience to feel warmth and admiration for her husband—and they did...
...But before that time arrives each day, they face print deadlines and camera calls...
...And the long, flatly inflected central section of the speech, where serious ideological and policy advocacy was hinted at but never fully voiced, was a disappointing blur...
...And if you dared to disagree, you were obliging yourself to reject the heartfelt TV-screen entreaties of a truly astonishing succession of people with physical and neurological disabilities...
...Each defines itself by the negative example of its most recent painful failure: the Democrats by 1994, and the Republicans by 1995...
...They are even Newt Gingrich in the worst and most embarrassing speech of his career, locating the spirit of American freedom in Olympic beach volleyball and a well-trained helper-canine...
...It is not perfect, to be sure...
...You cad...
...And, most important, the GOP is happy and enthused: Finally, after months of waiting, they have good news...
...The question is: what...
...They emote instead...
...They are perky Rep...
...his famously irrepressible energy...
...He’s for a tax cut...
...For now at least, the GOP appears to have precious little else...
...This idea, Steve Forbes’s exclusive property during the presidential primaries earlier this year, has now been adopted by Dole as the substantive centerpiece of the Republican campaign for the fall...
...It worked (or didn’t fail, at least), this image-transformation effort...
...She sauntered down from the speakers’ podium and wandered across the floor with a wireless microphone, instantly substituting the emotional immediacy of the family breakfast table for the physical remove at which traditional convention audiences have listened—and thought about what they heard...
...Neither are they the callow, tantrum-throwing young men suggested by the party’s failed congressional budget strategy of 1995...
...And the plank on immigration, symbolized by the proposed withdrawal of citizenship privileges for U.S.-born children of illegals, is foolish...
...They are Kim Alexis, supermodel with a heart of gold...
...First of all, there is nothing fundamentally Buchananite about the new GOP platform, despite Buchanan’s predictable assertions to the contrary...
...This charge is bogus...
...Hyde...
...If the rhetoric of that party’s nominating convention does not seriously and consistently reflect the arguments in its platform—and as the media said, this convention’s rhetoric didn’t—there must be a reason...
...The party must mean to be saying something else...
...That good news is only grudgingly acknowledged by the 12,000 journalists who have just finished covering the activities of 4,000 convention delegates...
...In American politics, the “out” party challenging for the White House is, more than anything else, what it says it is...
...But she didn’t really say anything...
...The GOP was on its best, Dr...
...Neither speaks in any meaningful sense...
...The gain seems to come, delightfully enough, mostly from three groups of essential voters: the more affluent elderly, women, and 1992 Perot supporters...
...Jekyll behavior during prime time...
...Kind, honorable, persevering Bob Dole...
...They must report what’s happening and tell us what it means...
...Are tax cuts, in an otherwise healthy economy, argument enough...
...There are seven proposed constitutional amendments, which is five or six too many...
...And how completely can the platform be said to reflect “hidden” Republican intentions, in any case...
...But these are hardly extremist attitudes in either major party at the moment...
...The document was Houston all over again, the story went: frighteningly conservative, “Buchananite,” even...
...Republicans are no longer the grumpy, do-nothing old men on display at the Houston convention in 1992...
...The 20-or-so-point polling advantage President Clinton enjoyed over Bob Dole two weeks ago—before public opinion could register the combined effect of the Dole economic plan, the Jack Kemp vicepresidential selection, and the convention— has been cut in half...
...Republicans running for Congress in the fall also stand to benefit, in some general, generic sense, from this uptick...
...But Kemp is also associated with an actual idea...
...For most reporters, truth be told, a modern convention’s highest purpose is the late-evening time they spend schmoozing one another in hotel bars and lobbies...
...That much was impressive...
...Both major parties now, as a matter of apparent official strategy, decline to promote any but a small fraction of their most cherished ideas...
...Kemp did the tax-cut standard proud...
...This, too, we must assume, was done on purpose...
...For maybe six hours of network television time over a four-day period, the GOP looked just as the convention organizers wished it to look—which is to say, different...
...Today, instead, Republicans are the world, as the 1980s feel-good anthem had it...
...And Republicans are also, of course, Bob Dole...
...And a good one: the universal benefits of pro-growth tax reduction...
...In his vice-presidential acceptance speech the following night, Jack Kemp said one thing, and said it well...
...Susan Molinari of ethnic Staten Island, high school cheerleader cum keynote speaker—attagirl, Susie...
...But a real argument will assuredly be required to close the rest...
...The media grow irritable...
...and the openarmed “inclusiveness” with which the man has courted traditionally Democratic constituencies for many (largely thankless) years...
...To our ears, at least, Bob Dole spoke many passages of unusual beauty and power...
...It is a pretty well-written, intelligent expression of bedrock Reagan and pre-volleyball Gingrich conservatism...
...It must be by design...
...The mike went dead...
...And when there isn’t much of anything happening, and its meaning seems so vaporous, this work is especially difficult...
...she grabbed another and continued on her course, with a thoroughly dazzling, just-like-real-life smile...
...And he was there, in the party platform...
...The platform’s abortion language, otherwise practically indistinguishable from past years’ editions, adds a provision opposing legal penalties against women who undergo the procedure...
...But the Republicans, most reporters complained, were hiding Mr...
...The document does a bit too much preemptive populist pandering on trade and global diplomacy— so as to protect a basic free-trade, internationalist position...
...Hyde...
...Haley Barbour, Jack Kemp, and Bob Dole each went out of his way to insist he hadn’t even read the damn thing...
...We’re good folks, just like you, the convention’s commentary on itself made clear...
...They’ve even added some sweetener: references to Americans as a “diverse and tolerant people,” concessions that Republicans have “deeply held and sometimes differing views,” promises that those views will be resolved “in a spirit of civility, hope, and mutual respect...
...At the San Diego convention, this media irritability took the form of high-minded disgust at the alleged “dishonesty” of Republican self-presentation...
...They are a black child who has been infected with AIDS...
Vol. 1 • August 1996 • No. 48
