Bush bash

A kinder, gentler Papa Smurf tries to reach out to those left out, laments the failed potential of President Clinton and knocks Al Gore upside the head.

By Jake Tapper

Aug 4, 2000 | Though the convention halls were filled with second- and third-tier celebrities like the Rock, Ted Nugent and Ben Stein, it was Gov. George W. Bush who was the real superstar here, on the closing night of the Republican Convention. All the more so after feeding the crowd an image of himself as a man of both steely conviction and open love -- kind of like a yuppie Papa Smurf.

"When I act, you will know my reasons," Bush said. "When I speak, you will know my heart."

Slamming the Clinton-Gore administration for a lack of ethics, for squandering American world leadership, as well as wasting opportunities to reform the Social Security and educational systems, Bush promised the salivating crowd that "we can begin again."

Somewhat strangely, he said that prosperity "can be a tool in our hands ... or it can be a drug in our system -- dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty."

Prosperity may well be a drug, but it's one every president has pushed on the country whenever possible -- and the reference called to mind Bush's own remarkable campaign-trail promise that he hasn't used drugs ... at least in the last 25 years.

Throughout the four-day convention, the rougher edges of the GOP and Bush's politics have been largely relegated to the sidelines, and Thursday night's 53-minute oration was no exception. Bush -- the man repeatedly slammed for appearing at Bob Jones University and for never expending one iota of political capital to condemn any of his various racist allies -- painted himself as a racial healer.

He said that racial progress "is still too slow." He used "We shall overcome" as an applause line. He called for after-school programs that teach that "bigotry disfigures the heart."

In perhaps the most moving moment of his speech, Bush recalled a visit to a juvenile prison where a teenage African-American boy asked him, "What do you think of me?" Somewhat boldly, Bush said he interpreted this to mean, in part, "Do you, a white man in a suit, really care what happens to me?"

In keeping with his billing as a "new kind of Republican," Bush -- instead of denigrating the poor -- expressed understanding of them. "Children without fathers in neighborhoods where gangs seem like friendship, where drugs promise peace and where sex, sadly, seems like the closest thing to belonging -- we are their country, too," he said.

He made his share of new-Republican promises. Head Start -- a program that his running mate, Dick Cheney, voted against funding while in Congress -- should be made "an early learning program," Bush said. In fact, kids and children were mentioned 18 times; "the unborn" only once. And even then, he allowed that "good people disagree on this issue," an observation that was rejected by the GOP platform committee.

Between the lines of his exhortations lay his conservative views. The plethora of gun shootings in the country was the fault of a failure to "finally and strictly enforc(e) our nation's gun laws." The one specific tax rate he called to lower was the bottom one, from 15 percent to 10 percent. Though "every bracket" would see a lowering, he noted -- not quite acknowledging that 60 percent of the cash in his tax cut proposal would go towards the richest 10 percent of the country.

And while making implicit sneering barbs at the Lewinsky scandal -- for having "disillusioned" children -- Bush tried to act as if he hadn't had a horse in the impeachment mess. "I don't have enemies to fight," he said. "And I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect."

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