Instead of “Opportunity with a Purpose,” organizers of the 2000 Republican National Convention, should have called their opening night “Niceness with a Purpose.”
Niceness is the convention’s unofficial theme. Nice people. Nice speeches. Nice smiles. Nice language. Nice attitudes.
And it is all about as convincing as the red-white-and-blue bunting Philadelphians thoughtfully have draped on some of the city’s junk yards, vacant lots and, according to CNN, at least one funeral home.
This is the Nice Convention because the party still is smarting over the Not-So-Nice image Pat Buchanan presented in 1992 when he declared “religious and cultural war” during his Mondaynight speech at the GOP convention in Houston.
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To counter the aroma of intolerance Buchanan left behind, the party eagerly pushed diversity during this year’s Monday night opening. Except for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, every other major speaker was either non-Christian, non-white, non-male or some combination of the above.
This from a party that decries quotas, timetables and other racial, gender or ethnic “bean counting.”
The party’s 1996 platform mentioned Bill Clinton more than 100 times in less than flattering terms. Its 2000 platform mentions Al Gore exactly twice.
The party’s platform language, under the chairmanship of Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, has been softened to sound nicer toward issues regarding gays, immigrants and, less noticeably, abortion. Even Sen. John McCain, who can be cantankerous sometimes, was straining to be nice. Retired Army Gen. Colin Powell, to his credit, did not let the niceness festival prevent him from taking his fellow Republicans to task for talking the talk of outreach but failing to walk the walk. They should not be surprised if black voters are cynical and mistrustful when “some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education,” he said. “But you hardly hear a whimper from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests.”
Right on, Colin.
But how well were Republicans and the rest of the country buying it? To get a little insight into that I spent the convention’s opening session in a nearby Holiday Inn conference room.
There, Republican consultant Frank Luntz had gathered 36 undecided voters, evenly divided between self-declared Republicans, Democrats and independents, for MS/NBC. Each was given an electronic dial with which to register approval or disapproval during the evening’s speeches. Their reactions showed up as red, green or white lines snaking up and down a television monitor that the focus group could not see.
The reaction to Powell was soaring, like a thermometer suddenly brought in from the cold. All three lines climbed quickly to the 80s and 90s as soon as Powell’s words came out and pretty much stayed there for the first half of his speech. None of the three groups quarreled with Powell’s sentiments that it was “time to stop building jails in America and get back to the task of building our children.” And even when he praised something as controversial as school vouchers (“What are we afraid of?” he said, as the delegates cheered), his reception among Democrats predictably dipped–but not to the negative zone. “It was the same in ’96,” Luntz gasped on the sidelines. “He’s amazing. He can say things that Bush can’t.”
True, but even Powell’s charisma has its limits. His big affirmative-action line produced the evening’s most startling reaction: the Republican support abruptly plunged to a 60 (50 was the neutral zone), while his independent and Democratic support so abruptly soared to 70 and 80, respectively, that the two lines crossed each other.
Hey, do you think maybe this guy’s at the wrong convention? I wonder what would have happened had Powell espoused some of his other controversial views, like his support for abortion rights and gun control. He did some of that at the ’96 convention and it looked gutsy. This time it apparently would not have been nice enough. Can there be too much nice? Yes, when it sounds phony. You might say that, but it wouldn’t be too nice.
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