Not His Father’s Convention
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

President Bush knows his family history. Twelve years ago, his father made the final, fatal mistake of his administration by turning over the reins of his re-nominating convention to the far right. Mr. Bush is determined not to let history repeat itself, and the Republican convention in our city in 10 days is set to be surprisingly, studiously, centrist.
The marquee speakers – Rudolph Giuliani, Senator McCain, and Governor Schwarzenegger – are all reform Republicans: fiscal conservatives but moderate on social issues. Not coincidentally, they appeal strongly across party lines to independents and Democrats as well as Republicans. They are the Republican Party’s best ambassadors, and their selection is a belated recognition that not only does the party need these voices to get elected, but they represent the next generation of leadership in the party.
In 1992,President George H.W. Bush found himself boxed in by the religious right. Ever since the elder Mr. Bush campaigned as a moderate in the 1980 race for the presidency, famously describing supply-siders as practicing “voodoo economics,” the right wing considered him suspect: a country club Rockefeller Republican wrapped up in the Texas state flag, chomping on pork rinds. Mr. Bush courted their support, but refused to give himself entirely over to their enthusiasms, saying, “I’m conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.” In 1988, Mr. Bush had to fend off an Iowa primary victory by the Rev. Pat Robertson and his right-to-life forces. Four years later, hard-core conservatives were still not impressed despite the fall of communism, and the White House had to contend with the conservative insurgent campaign of Patrick Buchanan. By the time the Republican Convention rolled around, Mr. Bush overcompensated in his attempts to unify the party by allowing the radical right to run the show. Politics is perception and the results were predictably disastrous.
On the first night, Mr. Buchanan spoke to the nation in prime time, warning that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” He fired up the troops with talk of a “culture war” and the influence of “radical feminism,” ending with a vignette that compared his fellow Christian soldiers with the Los Angeles Police force after the Rodney King riots, armed with “M-16s at the ready,” taking back their city and nation “block by block.” Many conservatives inside the Houston Astrodome cheered Mr. Buchanan’s speech, but all the partisan red meat proved poisonous when digested by moderate Republicans and the American people.
One Republican delegate confided to an ABC news correspondent, “I don’t really feel welcome here tonight,” while another said “I am offended, as a woman and a Republican, that Bush could let these fundamentalist Christian crazies become so prominent in our party.” Republicans for Clinton-Gore clubs began springing up in swing states. Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon adviser, warned in the Los Angeles Times of “negative public reaction to the farthest-right GOP convention since 1964…Bush may find that he made a fatal error in rallying the hard right at the expense of the center.” Even Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri – an ordained minister and currently George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations – characterized the convention as “a total disaster.”
Of course, George H.W. Bush went on to lose the election with the lowest popular support for an incumbent since Herbert Hoover, as Bill Clinton’s centrist campaign reclaimed the allegiance of moderates and the middle class while Ross Perot’s independent candidacy gave disaffected, reform minded Republicans another outlet for their vote.
George W. Bush has been given a rare second chance to redeem his family’s political legacy in the White House, and he has been relentless about applying the lessons of his father’s mistakes. Whereas the religious right never trusted his father, the current President Bush has gone out of his way since day one to make them feel that they have a personal friend in the Oval Office by supporting socially conservative causes. Likewise, tax cutters have seen an abundance of activity on their behalf, without concern for the rising deficits his father fretted so much about. Consequently, the conservative vote has been sewn up without a revolt, and the president is free to conduct the centrist convention his father was denied.
It is in many ways a return to the centrist “compassionate conservative” campaign theme that got him elected in the first place. In 2000, George W. Bush won over a crucial percentage of moderates and independents who had voted for Mr. Clinton in the past. But with a four-year conservative track record in office, Mr. Bush realizes that he is making up for some lost ground, relying on the popularity of Mr. McCain – a frequent foe over the past four years, whose maverick squad of moderate senators denied the administration victories on an imbalanced budget and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Nonetheless, there will be Messrs. McCain and Giuliani speaking to the nation on opening night, occupying the space Mr. Buchanan held 12 years before in Houston. Mr. Schwarzennegger and Bush Democrat Zell Miller will follow on subsequent nights. Even the location, New York City, looks beyond the party’s base and takes the campaign to urban America even as it recalls the first front in the war on terrorism.
Religious-right Republicans realize they have been written out of the script in New York, with some going quietly in return for future spoils, while Mr. Robertson sniffs to the Associated Press, “I’ve had no request from anybody to be there….In the last convention, the thought was to keep all the conservatives out of sight. The general thrust will be to entice the so-called independent moderates.” Exactly.