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GOP closes ranks for Bush
By Jon Sawyer
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
09/05/2004
President George W. Bush waves after addressing delegates at the Republican National Convention.
(JEFF HAYNES/AFP/Getty Images)
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NEW YORK - Five weeks ago in Boston Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., began his convention address with a smart salute and the memorable phrase, "reporting for duty."
At Madison Square Garden on Thursday night the Republicans did him one better.
They had a salute too, only instead of President George W. Bush giving it he received it - a salute to the "commander in chief" from Gen. Tommy Franks, the commanding general in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who took a break from his retirement to endorse Bush's re-election.
Strategists in both parties have been quick to say the other side blew their convention moments. Republicans say Kerry spent far too much time on his military service in Vietnam. Democrats say Republicans alienated swing voters, devoting their four days more to bashing Kerry than laying out an agenda for the future.
But there were striking similarities too, not least a foretaste of heavy sniping to come in what is already one of the most polarized campaigns in decades.
Not 12 hours after Kerry had completed his address in Boston, Bush was on the ground in Missouri, assailing Kerry for "clever" speeches but "no significant record." When Bush finished his address Thursday, Kerry waited not one hour, going on air at a midnight Ohio rally to accuse Bush of "misleading" the country into war.
Both conventions, finally, shared a common assumption - that the other side is running an almost entirely negative campaign.
The Democrats' "entire organizing principle today is one of dislike," said Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign. "It's not one of policies. And it's not one of a candidate they love."
Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, came to New York along with top aides to tell reporters that in her view the Bush campaign's attacks on Kerry's fitness to lead constitute a "very risky strategy.
"The Republicans have decided that for the first time in history they're going to try to ignore the undecideds and amplify their base to a point that they can win the election," she said. "We think that's a bad idea."
Among actual Republicans attending the convention, however, enthusiastic thumbs up were very much the rule.
Sam Fox, a Republican rainmaker from Clayton, said: "I've come to every Republican convention since 1984 and I can't remember a convention that had the energy that this convention has. The strength. The enthusiasm. It's overwhelming."
Early post-convention polling suggests that the broader public may have agreed. A Time magazine survey taken convention week showed Bush opening up a 52-41 lead among likely voters, after weeks in which the two candidates were statistically tied.
Mark Mellman, Kerry's pollster, said a post-convention bounce was to be expected, particularly for an incumbent president who came to his convention with far lower than usual job approval ratings.
"History suggests that lead will evaporate in a few weeks and drop back to the natural state of this race - which is even," Mellman said.
Mellman said that in his view the Republicans had failed to lay out a credible agenda for Bush's second term, essentially leaving that task to Bush himself on the convention's last night, in a speech that was far more compelling when he turned to defense of his foreign policy.
Some of the president's proposals, like testing of high school students or funding health clinics for rural counties, were reminiscent of the relatively small-bore proposals that used to fill Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses. Others were undeniably big, like partial privatization of Social Security or the virtual elimination of capital gains and dividend taxation, but without the detail to give them substance at a time of record budget deficits.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, meeting with reporters shortly before Bush spoke, insisted that the proposals were serious and that the administration would follow up - but not soon, at least not in a form more detailed than 30-second ads and campaign booklets. "This is an agenda for 2005 and 2006," Card said, "not for 2004."
Democrats are banking that voters, especially swing voters, won't buy Bush's optimistic, glass-is-half-full read on an economy that remains decidedly mixed.
"There's a fundamental disconnect between George Bush's rhetoric and the reality that people live," said Mellman, the Democratic pollster. "When he goes out and talks about turning the economic corner people get angry and they get angry at him - because their lives have not turned the corner.
Division within ranks
There was talk at the Boston convention of hiding internal differences, of putting on a militaristic convention that played down deep antagonism toward the war in Iraq. On the domestic side, the convention's prime-time schedule played down the party's deep commitment to abortion rights and gay rights.
That determined papering over of differences was also evident in New York, most notably at the podium during prime time. The spotlight shone on pro-choice moderates like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave little clue as to the hard-line positions that had been hammered into the party platform.
There was also the difference between the triumphal presentation of Bush's achievements on stage at Madison Square Garden and how that record looks on the ground - as evident in conversations with two savvy Missouri Republicans, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, and Phyllis Schlafly, the longtime conservative activist from Ladue.
Emerson's district is in Bush's sights this week. He'll be at a rally in Poplar Bluff on Monday before heading west for a bus tour Tuesday that begins in Lee's Summit and continues on to stops at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia and the Boone County Fairgrounds in Columbia.
If Emerson is any gauge, the president had best be careful which achievements he touts.
She opposed him on the prescription drug bill and says constituents often stop to thank her because they haven't seen the discounts promised with the new drug discount card. She worries that the administration's trade negotiators are going to make a deal on agricultural that hurts farmers back home.
Emerson likes Bush's education reform overall but isn't happy with its imposition of uniform performance standards on urban and rural schools that are anything but. She isn't happy, period, with the big highway funding bill that has stalled for months over Bush's demand for lower spending.
"The administration is concerned about the costs," she said, "but I want the roads. I want the jobs that come with them."
Schlafly said she has issues with Bush as well. Too much of a free trader, she says, too free a spender of federal dollars, especially on education, and too quick to spread American forces abroad too thin.
Her biggest victories at the convention came before it began. She lobbied successfully to maintain the party's absolutist opposition to abortion and to toughen up its stand against gay marriage. The platform even backs a recent House-passed bill that would deny same-sex couples access to federal court in one state to enforce the marriage license they had obtained in another.
Keeping perspective
No one talked about those platform planks during the prime-time part of the convention. Administration officials quickly distanced themselves from some of the more controversial provisions.
White House Counsel Albert Gonzalez was asked in an interview Thursday about the proposed denial of federal court jurisdiction in gay-marriage cases.
The jurisdiction issue is "a decision for Congress to make," Gonzalez said. "I don't know if I want to get into a specific endorsement of that as such."
But isn't inclusion in the party platform tantamount to an endorsement? No, said Gonzalez, "the fact that it's in the platform does not mean it has been endorsed by the administration. That's up to the White House."
If Republicans like Schlafly and Emerson are prepared to swallow hard and go along it's because, as Schlafly put it, "it boils down to whether you want Bush or Kerry."
There's also the matter of particular interest to Gonzalez, as the administration official responsible for vetting judicial nominations and someone often mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee himself.
Gonzalez recalled that pundits had predicted during the 2000 presidential candidate that the winner would end up choosing several Supreme Court justices.
That didn't happen during Bush's first term because no justice retired or died. But this time around, he noted, "the odds are even better that we're going to have a vacancy on a court that is as closely divided as the country at large. Just one change could affect many issues that are really important to the American people."
To activists on both sides, it's issues like who determines the future Supreme Court that keeps their other disagreements in perspective.
Karen Branch-Brioso of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.
Reporter Jon Sawyer writes about national politics and foreign policy and is chief of the Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau.
Reporter Jon Sawyer
E-mail: jsawyer@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 202-298-6880
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