It was exactly four years ago today as I write these words that candidate George W. Bush appeared before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At the time, the Bush campaign was pushing "compassionate conservatism." In that context, the NAACP speech was one of Bush's most important of the campaign. Very few GOP presidential nominees had ever bothered to grace the organization with their presence, and the appearance set Bush in sharp contrast, for example, to the 1996 Republican standard-bearer, Bob Dole, who declined an invitation by way of saying he suspected the group was "trying to set me up."
It was also one of Bush's best speeches of the campaign because it met the crucial criterion, one the pundits love, of showing a surprising humility. Bush acknowledged that "the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln," and he pledged that "strong civil rights enforcement will be a cornerstone of my administration." The words were by no means persuasive to everyone, but the media certainly bought the act, and the appearance helped burnish Bush's image as a new kind of Republican.
Four years later, Bush is shunning an invitation from the NAACP to speak at this year's conference. He blames recent harsh comments by NAACP officials Kweisi Mfume and Julian Bond. And undoubtedly, they have made some such comments. One could well argue that, as black leaders assess the record of an administration that intervened so aggressively to do away with affirmative action in a Michigan court case, the harsh comments were deserved. But policy differences aren't the real reason Bush isn't showing up this year. He isn't showing up because compassionate conservatism is out.
The same weekend Bush was snubbing the NAACP, he decided to focus his Saturday radio address on his push to ban gay marriage under the Constitution. Since Bush announced that initiative several weeks ago, the expected hubbub about gay rights as a campaign issue has failed to materialize, and it seems that at most, the issue will be a marginal one this fall. And this occurred in a week, remember, when Bush could have, however half-honestly, used the release of the Senate intelligence report to take to the airwaves to proclaim to the American people that the intelligence community received no political pressure from the White House -- any way you slice it, a far more pressing electoral issue. So why return to gay marriage now?
Because compassionate conservatism is out, and comprehensive conservatism is in. Only a tiny percentage of the electorate is up for grabs this year; maybe five percent. Political guru Karl Rove understands well that the administration's record makes fighting for that five percent a challenge. So the reelection campaign is clearly and only about shoring up the right-wing vote.
Hence, the about-face on the NAACP. Hence, the attempts to keep the gay-marriage issue in the news from time to time, just to remind his base that, even if the atheistic left-wing media have written the issue off, he has not. Hence, the overwhelming likelihood that Bush will stand by Dick Cheney despite some calls to the contrary (combined with the shrewd observation by my colleague Harold Meyerson in his Washington Post column two weeks ago that a younger and more ambitious veep candidate would interfere with the Bush family's dynastic plans for Jeb's ascendancy). Hence, the cornerstone piece of Rovian strategy -- the emphasis on getting as many of the four million evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 out to the polls as possible (through, by the way, a politicization of the pulpit that recently led even one Southern Baptist official to pronounce himself "appalled" by the tactics).
I know I'm hardly the first person to make this observation. But the important thing here is not how many liberal columnists make the observation. The important thing is that the mainstream media take notice and get the trope into the news columns. Compassionate conservatism had no trouble at all getting onto the front pages in 2000, when many a piece of "news analysis" remarked, with wide-eyed, childlike wonder, on Bush's centrist posture. We're about halfway through this general election campaign, and I sure don't remember seeing many news analysis pieces about the hard-right tenor of this campaign. Rove understands: Give something a reassuring and euphonious name, and journalists will repeat it forever. This year's strategy, we can be sure, will remain unchristened by Rove, who must be chuckling about how easy it all is.
Undoubtedly, Bush will make a feint or two toward the old compassion motif at the GOP convention (if he doesn't do even that, the hard-right strategy will be on unusually naked display). Will those feints be enough for the media to swallow the story line again, after four years of policies like the ones we've witnessed? One important aspect of the right wing's successful attacks against the "liberal media" has been to force the major media to self-censor a finding that is objectively true just because it happens to coincide with a strong liberal point of view. But liberals didn't press this administration's policies or design its reelection strategy. The media's job for the next five months is to describe these things not as Bush and Rove wish them to be portrayed, but as they actually are.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect. His column appears in the online edition each week.
