Convention notes

THE GENERAL assumption was that the issue of "character," for a while defined as how many extra-marital liaisons Bill Clinton had had, was out of the way; settled; resjudicata. It was very evident on Monday that this isn't the case, not at all. And it is also plain that the ticket-leaders, Bush-Quayle, are not depending on lesser lights to stress the point. They are thoroughly engaged themselves in the practice of saying to the American voter: "Forget everything else, if you like. Forget the Democrats' predilection for the lousewort over the American worker. Forget their sullen dislike for a strong American military. But do not forget this, that we are fit to lead, they are not."

Mr. Quayle began it quite early when he said, "Did you notice how much time Bill Clinton spent on the subject of American values? The first 15 minutes of his hour-long speech was on the subject. Well, it's a great thing for America when Bill Clinton comes out for family values." That statement has only a single meaning. It places, in the center of the political ring, Clinton's spotted personal record.

George Bush came on. He attempted to provide his own cover in respect of his renowned weakness as an orator. "I am no wordsmith," he said, slightly mispronouncing the word. "For me, eloquence is action." (Rambo becomes more eloquent than Socrates.) But the President was en route to what appears to be gestating as the planted axiom of the Republican Convention: the proposition that Republican leaders are better people. Mr. Bush did not go as far as GOP chief Rich Bond, who attempted an extraordinary disjunction--"We are America, they are not America"--but he said it: "Who do you trust to do what is right for the U.S.A.?"

Speaker after speaker chimed in. Alan Simpson repeated five words Clinton had used to open his letter to his mentor at age 23: "To maintain my political viability" the letter in which he proposed to join the Reserves as a means of avoiding the draft. Pat Buchanan (in a masterly address) said it directly: George Bush volunteered and "at 17 was the youngest fighter pilot in the war. When Bill Clinton's time came, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford and figured out how to dodge the draft. Which of these two men has won the moral authority to send American young men to battle?"

The point here is not idle. William Bennett, tackled on the subject on Crossfire, reminded the interlocutor that character was the only qualification enumerated by the Founding Fathers for serving in public office. But along the way at Houston one got the idea that character was surfacing in part because other matters were not. The only public issue that got genuine ventilation was free trade, ably handled by Carla Hills and Governor Jim Edgar of Illinois. Abortion was kept behind the scenes, with the illusory recommendation of a Constitutional Amendment. Taxes were not stressed for the obvious reason that President Bush was rendered forever vulnerable on the subject in 1990.

A kind of dreamy optimism was the hallmark of an eloquent plea by Ronald Reagan, enlivened by his singular aptitude to amuse while deriding ("They kept telling us with straight faces that they were for family values, and they call me an actor!"). But what Mr. Reagan was saying was that all the beauties we have experienced in the past in America are as nothing beside those that lie ahead for us. This is an unadorned Biblical metaphor ("Eyes have not seen, nor ears heard, the wonders the Lord has prepared for us"). Ronald Reagan did not give the impression that he was programmed to end the evening with this wistful vision of an even greater America. Reagan's voice was nothing, if not heartfelt. He has been around a very long time--after all, he reminded us, he and Thomas Jefferson were friends, and Clinton is no Thomas Jefferson. He has addressed six conventions, and the laws of probability suggested that this would be his final appearance, and he wished to leave his fingerprint indelibly in the memory of his flock: America is unique. America was born to be exceptionalist. But you know, folks, this does require character.

How big a tent should a political party have? Pat Buchanan was roundly condemned in various accents. John Chancellor said that the convention floor was abuzz with concern over Buchanan's tribute to force. What Buchanan said was that in the last analysis it was "force" that stayed the hand of the marauders of Los Angeles. The militia, using "force, rooted in courage, backed by justice," protected the old people's home. Chancellor didn't say it in exactly these words, but listeners knew what he was thinking: that we had been listening to Mussolini.

Senator John Chafee said that the Republican Party of Pat Buchanan was one that desired gay-bashing and holding up to obloquy women who chose to have an abortion, and he thought this "distasteful." Barbara Bush, reiterating her previously announced position that she didn't think abortion should figure in the Republican platform in any way, confessed that she found certain aspects of Pat Buchanan's speech to be "judgmental." That word, by the way, has acquired a negative meaning of a kind that leaves the language without an appropriate word to describe opposition based on moral grounds. The result is that we become a nation of moral castrates, "afraid to say a good word about Camels, for fear of offending Lucky Strikes," as the late Willi Schlamm once termed the creeping relativism of the 1950s.