Sex, even style, and the GOP city

3 September 2004

Sex and Republicans? It just seems so wrong, kind of like mixing beer and ice cream. Yet there are Jenna and Barbara Bush, the Coors Light Twins of politics, up on stage at Madison Square Garden, mouthing the dreaded "S" word. "Ganny," Jenna says, directing her comments to her grandmother, "you're just not very hip." She then looks knowingly at the crowd. "She thinks `Sex and the City' is something married people do but never talk about."

Yikes. Creepy or not, it's all part of the new and improved GOP.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, his face looking just a few plastic surgeries shy of Michael Jackson, reached out to immigrants. A fiery Zell Miller appealed to Democrats. Mary Lou Retton and Sen. Elizabeth Dole (in a cringe-provoking "Bride of Frankenstein" hairdo) sought the support of women. NFL Hall of Famer Lynn Swann and Obama wannabe Michael Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, pitched the Republican message to African-Americans.

Jenna and Barbara, meanwhile, were reaching out to the promiscuous.

The big tent of the Republican Party has become much, much bigger.

There weren't a lot of immigrants, Democrats or blacks in Madison Square Garden this week, and odds are most of the delegates didn't fancy themselves promiscuous either (or at least, not that they would admit). Delegates greeted the twins' routine with nervous laughter.

But the crowd at the convention hall wasn't the true target of those appeals anyway: It was viewers at home. Republicans know they have an image problem. People think they're just stodgy white folks who endlessly worry about gays and religion. The message from the podium this week? We're cool. We're the rockin' Republicans, the party of movie stars and pugnacious mayors. We're diverse, we're tolerant and we even welcome single urban women who just wanna have fun.

That was the first hit in a crisp and devastating one-two punch of a week that left George W. Bush and Dick Cheney much better off than they were a month ago.

The second punch, the real haymaker, was about terrorism.

In the early part of the week, speaker after speaker - John McCain and Rudy Giuliani most notably - made the case for terrorism as the transcendent issue of our times, one that rises above party labels and partisan disagreements. The logic was as follows: The homeland is in danger. We are engaged in a war. Afghanistan and (in a leap with which many sharply disagree) Iraq are part of that war. Wars require resolve and commitment. Even if there may have been missteps, Bush has shown that kind of resolve and commitment.

Then it proceeded to eviscerate Kerry and the Democratic Party. Mitt Romney, adopting the posture of the guy from Kerry's home state who knows him best, tore into Kerry's record and inconsistency. Miller, still nominally a Democrat, denounced his party for no longer having the backbone to defend the nation. And Dick Cheney, dry and stentorian, was harsh in assessing Kerry's aptitude to be commander in chief: "A senator can be wrong for 20 years, without consequence to the nation. But a president always casts the deciding vote."

Both parties understand that winning this election requires reaching out to and persuading centrists. Democrats have made the calculation that domestic issues - the economy, health care, education - could accomplish this. That thinking was evident in Kerry's pick of John Edwards as his running mate. It is also evident in Kerry's me-tooism on foreign policy, where the distinctions between him and Bush are matters of degree rather than principle.

This week the GOP reached out as well, putting on a public face that (as long as you don't read the platform) makes it look less harshly right wing and appeals to centrists uncomfortable with the party's traditional insularity. It then coupled that sweet and light approach with a grim, put-the-fear-of-God-in-ya message: Pick John Kerry and we'll lose the war on terror.

The GOP calculation is that, in the minds of wavering voters, issues of security trump everything else.

Are they right? Whether you love Bush or hate him, clearly the passions of the moment revolve around terror and the nation's response to it. The protesters who descended on New York - outnumbering GOP delegates by at least a magnitude of 10 - weren't there because Bush underfunded No Child Left Behind or because millions don't have medical insurance. Those types of issues, after all, have been around for decades and have never brought more than a handful to the streets.

It may be that this passion doesn't drive the election, with undecided voters more worried about jobs and unpaid bills. For the moment though, the GOP has successfully shifted the field of battle to matters of war and foreign policy, turf on which it believes it can win in November.