Good thing for Rep. Henry Bonilla of Texas that he was asked to give a nominating speech for Bob Dole on Wednesday night–it’s the only way he could get to the convention floor.
Bonilla was nominated by Dole as a convention delegate, but was knocked off the state’s list because he didn’t share party activists’ hard-line opposition to abortion.
None of that was evident when Bonilla placed Dole’s name in nomination to be the Republican candidate for president. Like so many others who preceded him to the podium, Bonilla was wearing a mask to this political costume party, where few things are as they appear.
The party in which social conservatives are the most potent force is being marketed to the American people as the party of inclusion and moderation.
The candidate with a long record as a deficit hawk is backing a tax cut.
His running mate, who only days before was at odds with the candidate over affirmative action and immigration, nimbly and quickly reversed his field. Kemp now embraces a tough California proposal that would expel children of illegal immigrants from public schools and a proposal to repeal the state’s affirmative-action programs.
Whether voters will accept the picture as a genuine portrait of the Republican Party or a cynical attempt at manipulation could go a long way toward determining whether Bob Dole prevails in his run for the White House.
For the remainder of the campaign, it is Bob Dole’s Republican Party, not Pat Buchanan’s nor Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed’s. Parties often have to go through grand compromise, even image makeovers, to win a general election, and Dole must orchestrate this one.
A lot of people were wearing masks to be part of the play.
Also nominating Dole was Wendy Lee Gramm, whose husband, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, spent the better part of a year as a Republican presidential candidate arguing that Dole should not be president. She was followed by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who managed Gramm’s presidential campaign.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, accompanied by a video showing him building low-cost housing for the poor, presented himself as a non-partisan ambassador of compassion. He didn’t utter the words Congress, revolution or Bill Clinton.
New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, whose mention as a vice presidential candidate sparked talk of open revolt by abortion opponents, served as the party’s pleasant, modulated convention host.
In shooting footage for the campaign film that will air Thursday on prime-time television, Dole’s advisers traveled to his hometown of Russell, Kan., which they plan to use as a metaphor for Dole’s campaign. They made sure to shepherd a black family next to Dole while the camera rolled.
“It was done for the cameras because we are black,” said 22-year-old Natonya Cullors, a Democrat, unwed mother and welfare recipient. It was not known if she will appear in the finished product.
Stage management is hardly the province of Republicans. Hollywood producers introduced President Clinton four years ago as a “man from Hope,” even though Clinton had spent his formative years in the far less quaint Hot Springs.
During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Clinton campaign will make sure there are plenty of Democrats to praise a welfare bill that many in the party view as a callous repudiation of more than 60 years of social policy.
Republican Gov. Mark Racicot of Montana, who enjoys enormous popularity in his state, said the process was not as cynical as it seemed.
“There are a core set of principles that people subscribe to when they affiliate themselves with a certain political party,” Racicot said. “There may be disagreement, but you still have a feeling those core principles most closely align with your philosophy. You still subscribe to the party that most represents you.”
The Democrats in Chicago will have a different sort of problem. The Clinton campaign will try to exert as least as much control as Dole’s in what the American people see on television. The Democrats, being Democrats, will likely find a way to have a conflict or three.
For the Republicans, the tenor and pitch of the convention has followed a remarkably disciplined script. But will it be remembered as real? And will it matter in November?
Dole’s choice of Kemp was praised inside and outside the convention center. It not only will help to energize Dole’s political base, it will keep the party money machine humming with donations.
But in the last nine presidential elections, only one vice presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson in 1960, has been credited with affecting a result–putting Texas in John F. Kennedy’s column.
The use of retired Army Gen. Colin Powell and Rep. Susan Molinari of New York to send messages of inclusion and conciliation no doubt helped. But how much Powell actually campaigns for the Dole-Kemp ticket remains an open question.
For all its careful, calibrated choreography, there can be a price in trying to be all things.
The conservative Weekly Standard, an organ of the so-called Movement Conservatives like Gingrich, provided this assessment in a special daily edition Wednesday:
“The Republican Party’s current PR campaign, which requires it to abandon political substance and disguise its core conservatism, has reached a new nadir. . . . Ideas are dangerous: Some people disagree with them. So this year’s convention goes out of its way to hide the very existence of Republican ideas in fluff and glop and human interest pseudo drama.”
Bonilla, Gramm and others played their roles in that drama Wednesday, using theirs as the archetype immigrant’s tale. “We are living the American dream,” Bonilla said. “Restoring that American dream not only for our children and grandchildren, but for all those who missed it first time around. That is what Bob Dole has been fighting for, is fighting for.”
For Dole, the convention activity has been like the behavior of a schoolboy meeting his date’s parents for the first time. It’s probably not the real thing, but he hopes they think it is.
