Republicans know how dangerous it is to say what you mean
FRANK JOHNSON
0 ne of the amusements which any Republican convention offers is the spectacle of a party, in the coveted prime time of the television evening, pretending to be what it is not. That is, in the Republicans' case, a party comprising normal people inhabiting the centre ground.
All parties, either right or left, in all democracies do it too. But right-of-centre parties do it with what could be described as a deeper shallowness. At the last Republican convention, which nominated Mr Bush as its presidential candidate in 2000, the platform was studded with blacks and Hispanics. But there were hardly any in the hall, and few voted for Mr Bush come that November.
In 2000, Mr Bush, as he had been when winning the Texas governorship, was presented as the 'compassionate conservative'. That was a code for a Republican for whom Democrats, especially Democrat women, could safely vote. Hardly any such voters did so; otherwise the result would not have been so close. Such voters voted for Mr Gore. That is because Americans who think of themselves as compassionate conservatives comprise the Democratic party.
Mr Bush's 'core vote', in 2000 and now, is comprised of people who think that 'compassionate conservative' means 'liberal'. Correctly or not, they vote for Mr Bush because they do not believe what his campaign managers put on in prime time. They could well be wrong about that. To me, he is a compassionate soul who blundered into Iraq because the conservatives, neoand otherwise, told him that the Iraqis would not put up much of a resistance to the American presence in their country. If he knew then what he knows now, he would not have done it. If he wins a second term, Iran — whatever the Left predicts — will therefore be safe from him. He will not want to go through all this again.
This Republican pretence that they are something that they are not has been going on for years. But only one example comes to mind, when it probably won Democrat votes. That is in the always interesting case of Ronald Reagan. Accepting the Republican nomination in Detroit against President Carter in 1980, he evoked the Democrats Roosevelt and Truman as two of his inspirations. He certainly did not men
tion Herbert Hoover. The hall heaved with ideologues for whom Roosevelt was a semisocialist, and Truman someone who — contrary to what most other people think — did not stand up to communism.
But Reagan's use of these names probably reassured blue-collar Democrat voters that he would not cut welfare and would not bring them mass unemployment. Nor did he. Otherwise they would not have voted for him, as they did, when he was reelected by a landslide in 1984. Reagan would not have been able to win them over, however, simply by mentioning those Democrat presidents' names approvingly. He did so because he was himself a former Democrat; moreover, one with parents who had not been wealthy. He had voted for Roosevelt and Truman. George Bush Snr, his rival for the 1980 Republican nomination, would not have been able to get away with it. He too would probably have evoked Roosevelt and Truman — if he had not come from a Republican family that never voted for them.
Not that there is nothing at this convention for the non-compassionate conservatives. The document, known as the party 'platform', pronounces against abortion and gay marriage. But hardly anyone reads party platforms. The convention managers take care not to have them mentioned in prime time. Instead, Rudolph Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator John McCain dominated this week's prime time. Most of the delegates regard all three as suspect liberals. Especially the former New York City mayor, Mr Giuliani. Anyone capable of being elected and then re-elected New York mayor must be unsound, from the true Republicans' point of view, on gays, and much else besides.
It is as if Hezbollah, or some Islamic fundamentalist party, wishing to win over moderates, gave prominence in prime time to, for example, Jesus Christ. Does not Islam recognise Him as a prophet? The Islamic party managers' reasoning would be identical to that of the Republican strategists in New York this week.
'Jesus is very much what Hezbollah is all about. He reaches out to moderate voters. After all, our party is all about turning the other cheek.'
A television interviewer: 'Er, yes. But don't the Christians say that Jesus was God incarnate? Isn't that contrary to your party's policy, which says that there is only one God and it isn't Jesus?'
'Sure, that's what some of us think. But we Islamicists are a broad church, if you take my meaning.'
Those neoconservatives were once a boon and a force for good. They emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were mainly former Democrats, and in some cases still are Democrats, who were enraged at the rise of anti-Israel feeling in the Democratic party after the occupation of the Israeli West Bank which followed the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Their objections extended to what they thought was the Democratic party's tolerant attitude towards the Soviet Union during the period when the party nominated Mr George McGovern as their presidential candidate.
They played an admirable part in alerting American and British politicians to the continuing Soviet threat in the 1970s. But since their victory in the Cold War, they have continued to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as in 1821 John Quincy Adams warned that citizens of the new republic should not do. President Bush translated this into what he thought were beatable monsters. He therefore invaded Iraq, instead of the much more culpable but bigger Iran, in response to September 11. It was as if in response to Hitler invading Poland in 1939, Britain had invaded Spain. Iran, with its looming nuclear weapons, remains the bigger threat to the West. The neoconservatives still cry out against Iran, just as they cried Out against Iraq. But because of America's Iraq policy going wrong, nearly everyone else — including whoever is American president after November — will assume that they are crying wolf.
Previous page
