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August 30, 2004
DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE
So you're an out of the mainstream political party with an extremist agenda that you know will alienate voters. How do you go about convincing them that you're not so "out there" after all? Never fear: the formula is out there, on display this week in New York City.
First, find the only three moderates in your entire party. These three must be people who have publicly espoused positions that are 180 degree opposite of your party platform. You have to trot them out on national television as your first three main speakers on the first two nights of the convention.
You do this as a subterfuge. By making show ponies of men whose positions are at odds with your platform, you can try and trick the public into believing that these men, and their less extreme positions, are the face of your party. You need to try and fool the public... no, you need to deceive the public into believing that you're actually moderate and not a bunch of wild-eyed extremists.
One thing you might want to avoid, however... you should probably not be so overtly insincere and duplicitous that even a newspaper that rubber stamps everything you do is pretty much forced to acknowledge it in a column -- forced to acknowledge that the leaders of your party are now being forced to turn in desperation to men that have been pariahs to the orthodoxy, men whom the leader himself has trashed.
See, that's what the Republicans did... trotting out Giuliani and McCain like show ponies to put a kinder, gentler face on their out of the mainstream platform. But even the Washington Times -- one of the most Republican papers in the country, basically the paper version of Fox "News" -- had to acknowledge that the very men the Republicans are trying to make their face this week are men that Bush has been trashing for years.
It is impossible to imagine any two figures in public life Bush would instinctively more wish to avoid. His 2000 presidential campaign trashed McCain in one of the dirtiest campaigns of smears, slander and attempted personal destruction the Republican Party has ever unleashed against one of its own in the South Carolina, New York and Michigan primaries. McCain, whose cherished sister had died of breast cancer, was even accused of opposing increased spending on cancer research through the highly creative twisting of his actual Senate voting record.
Embracing Giuliani and the moderate Northeastern Republicanism that he embodied through the decade before Sept.11 was not among them. Turning to Giuliani at all, but especially turning to him this late in the day, is an even greater mark of desperation than publicly hugging McCain. For Bush has coldly and calculatedly treated Giuliani as dirt ever since he stepped down on the completion of his second consecutive term as mayor of New York City.
For Giuliani had always been a genuinely moderate Northeastern Republican in the tradition of Thomas E. Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and the president's own father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush. And the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has always treated such people as worse than lepers -- or even Democrats.
Don't be fooled, friends. The Republicans are going to try to look and sound like a duck this week... but they still smell like skunks.
