Misanthropes Corner - anticipating the Republican convention, 2000 - Brief Article

By the time you read this, the GOP convention will be under way, but right now I'm getting ready for it. I've already made a run on the liquor store and hidden my guns; now all I have to do is buy a can of something called "DeeStickee," guaranteed to remove all gummy, sugary, syrupy residues, in case I have to wash down the TV.

I'm not looking forward to this. What I'd really like to do is go where no Republican has ever gone before, but they go practically everywhere now. The only way to avoid Republicans these days is to go to the one place where they wouldn't dare set foot, but I don't have a country-club membership.

I can tell what I'm in for by the key words in the convention program schedule. It defies reading; but you don't really have to read it: Just squeeze it and it squirts out enough Renewal, Progress, and Purpose to drown a double stack. It's shaping up like my Christmas visit years ago to the home of a beau made desperate by the strain of living with a repressed, suicidally conventional family who were determined to believe that people wanted to do the right thing, that everybody got along with everybody else, and that nothing was wrong when, in fact, everything was wrong.

Whenever anybody asked his mother what she wanted for Christmas, she smiled brightly and said, "All I want is a big box of love." When she said it for the twentieth time, I got an idea. I told my beau about it, and we drove out to Sears and went around back to the loading dock, where he persuaded them to sell him a crate that had contained a refrigerator. When we got back home, he hid it in the garage, and we went to work on it. When he unveiled it on Christmas morning, his mother took one look at what we intended as gibes-LOVE! THIS END UP! LOVE! POST NO BILLS!-and invited the whole neighborhood over to see the proof of her wonderful boy's dedication to family. "You can't win," he muttered. No, you can't. The world is full of people like this, and most of them are Republicans.

In most election years there's so much competition for the GOP Tunnel Vision Award that it's hard to decide on the winner, but this time it's a snap: Christie Todd Whitman, who allowed herself to be photographed frisking a black criminal suspect. It happened when she went out with the cops, which, said her damage-control people, was one of her gubernatorial duties: getting hands-on experience of the policeman's lot.

That's all cops need, some woman in the back seat chirping, "Ooh, can I do it?" Men welcome this sort of thing only when a woman is under 25 and wants to see what it feels like to hold a boat or a plane on course just for a minute, giving them an excuse to press against her and put their hand on hers to steady it. Substitute a gaunt post-post-deb cruising around Camden in the middle of the night, and instead of a delicious frisson all they get is a shudder.

At least the photo of the smiling white socialite patting down the spread-eagled homeboy will keep Whitman off the ticket and, with luck, send her permanently out to pasture, but it's the top of the ticket that worries me. He's turned into Lyndon Baines Bush. Instead of throwing money at problems, LBB throws tax credits. His $42 billion "New Prosperity Initiative" would give the "working poor" a tax credit to buy health insurance, but lest anyone call it welfare, the Bush camp insists that "the governor hasn't proposed any wealth transfers," as if the revenue lost in tax credits did not have to be made up for by higher taxes on somebody else.

His New Prosperity Initiative even creates $750 million in tax credits for teachers who use their own money to buy classroom supplies, but none dare call it Great Society II. "The reason you haven't heard any criticizing," said Sen. Rick Santorum, "is because these are tax reductions, not new government programs." Oh. . . .

Keeping track of LBB's blizzard of billion-dollar initiatives is slow business because so many news stories have to be read twice, like the one about the "American Dream Down Payment Fund," in which LBB proposed a program to give poor people money to put into savings accounts so they can buy a house.

After rereading this to make sure it said what I thought it said, I came across a column by Cal Thomas praising it. "But his objective is not to maintain people in their dependency," Thomas explained. "He wants to emancipate them. It is a subtle but important distinction." It certainly is, and if you reread Thomas you will grasp it: Democrats give people money to spend, but Republicans give them money to save.

The definition of "compassionate conservatism," once so elusive, can now be pinned down: It's new government programs masquerading as tax credits. That won't pour, however, so Republicans at the squeeze-me convention, like my beau's mother and Cal Thomas, will define it as they wish it to be, using great big gobs of emotion and happy talk to sing of the miracles of self-sufficiency that rugged individualism can achieve if you just spread around enough handouts.