Party in search of a theme

The Gipper's vision and the President's apology; Pat Buchanan's shot in the cultural war and Dan Quayle's genial good humor many fine notes were sounded. The campaign's task is to turn them into a tune.

REPUBLICANS have been so used to bad news that there were some in Houston who saw the travails of Woody Allen as yet another setback, in that they competed with the Convention for the media spotlight. On the other hand, the story proved that untraditional families are at least as crazy as traditional ones. Allen and Mia Farrow don't even have the excuse of poverty, though she does live in a rentcontrolled apartment.

The Republicans had only their own long-windedness to blame for bumping Ronald Reagan out of prime time on Monday night. It was an autumnal performance, and he ended by bidding the delegates "good-bye." Yet the text was all youth and hope, quoting--and believing-Emerson, on America as "the country of tomorrow." Reagan's optimism was all the more striking, coming off the speech of one of the pretenders to his mantle, Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan formally ended his revolt against George Bush as he began it in Concord, New Hampshire, nine months earlier, with personal grace toward his foe. All the intervening bites on Bush's hams were forgotten. For the rest, Buchanan drew on the dark images he loves so well: of a stolid paper-mill worker in Graveton, New Hampshire, telling him, "Save our jobs"; of soldiers on riot duty in burning Los Angeles, taking back the city block by block---a fit metaphor, Buchanan said, for the cultural and religious warfare facing America in the Nineties. This saturnine temper, more than the Jewish Question, or any other issue squall, will be what keeps him from ever grasping a nomination. He is the kind of person democracies want to have on call, not making the calls.

Jack Kemp, alone of the would-be Conservatives of Tomorrow, showed something of Reagan's expansive sunniness, though his speech was relatively subdued, perhaps from a consciousness that the issues for which he was praising Bush, such as enterprise zones, were issues which he had discovered, and which, because of bad luck and political incapacity, he has been forced for four years to push from a subordinate position. Pat Robertson favored us with his keening sing-song, though he did get off one of the best shots on the social issues: Bill Clinton told People that he wouldn't let his 13-year-old daughter get her ears pierced, but "he wants to give your 13-year-old daughter the choice, without parental consent, to destroy her own unborn baby." But the worst speech among the pretenders, without question, was Phil Gramm's keynote. Gramm looked like a tortoise flown in from some remote island where the species has swollen to gigantic and lumbering size, and he talked like one. He should not give up hope, though: the biggest egg of the Democratic Convention four years ago was laid by Bill Clinton.

Scattered Themes

FOUR THEMES were scattered through the week's oratory, though sometimes you needed a Geiger counter to detect them. The first was peace through strength and experience. The collapse of Communism was much celebrated, most simply and perhaps most effectively by Gerald Ford: "Our long international nightmare is over." Speakers had to temper their relief over this victory, however, with warnings that other threats to regional and world stability would arise. Saddam Hussein was cited as an example of such a post-Communist threat, albeit gingerly, since he has become a post-Desert Storm threat as well. Whatever the need for experience, everyone agreed that Bill Clinton didn't have any ("mail clerk for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," was how Senator Mitch McConnell summarized his foreign-policy resume).

Skating carefully over the recession, the Republicans argued that a second Bush Administration would be as successful at home as it had been abroad, so long as it worsted three enemies. Enemy number one was all the special-interest groups devoted to dysfunctional status quos. Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson told of teachers' union resistance to school choice, and Education Secretary Lamar Alexander said that Clinton seemed to be running for president of the NEA. Vice President Quayle assailed the "litigation explosion" and the folks who brought it to you, the trial lawyers. Enemy number two was Congress, especially the 38year-old Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Robertson got off another good line, after noting that the average jail term for murderers was six and a half years, while the average tenure of a congressman was thirteen years: "We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class." The GOP's assault on Congress was enfeebled, however, by the support of such pillars of the Capitol Hill establishment as Bob Michel and Guy Vander Jagt, the latter fresh from a primary loss to an anti-incumbent insurgent.