Since the primary season, Republicans have sought to portray Democrats as single-minded Bush haters with no positive agenda of their own. Marc Racicot, chairman of Bush-Cheney '04, succinctly summed up this theme in an e-mail to Bush supporters back in December.
“They are making this one of the nastiest, vicious and negative campaigns in history,” Montana's former governor wrote. “Democrats are reduced to personal slams on our President and outright lies about his record because they lack a positive agenda and hate -- hate -- what he has done for America.”
The Republican national convention, supposedly, would combat this visceral hatred of President Bush with upbeat, substantive policy discussions. Karl Rove told New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney that the president's speech on Thursday would “lay out a forward-looking, positive, prospective agenda.”
But to lead up to Thursday, the Republicans are providing nothing but negativity.
From the beginning of the convention, the sins of John Kerry have been the prime target. Kerry is on “the wrong side” of nearly everything, according to House Speaker and convention Chairman Dennis Hastert, the first big-name speaker on Monday night. Arnold Schwarzenegger made fun of the Democratic national convention in the second line of his speech. John McCain, in a speech intended to co-opt the Democratic message of unity and woo fence-sitters, got his biggest reaction by attacking a certain “disingenuous filmmaker.”
They were all overshadowed, though, by Rudy Guiliani, who devoted a great portion of his 55-minute speech to painting a portrait of Kerry as a pandering and indecisive leader. Abandoning any semblance of the meaty, high-minded policy debate we were promised, Guiliani unleashed a fusillade of familiar attacks on Kerry, all recycled from previous Bush-Cheney stumps, such as the modern classic: “At one point, [Kerry] declared himself as an anti-war candidate. And now he says he's pro-war candidate. At this rate, with 64 days left, he still has time to change his position four or five more times.”
The former mayor then slipped in a none-too-subtle comparison of Bush as the unflinching avatar of Winston Churchill versus Kerry as Neville Chamberlain incarnate. In the world according to Guiliani, Kerry embodies a European proclivity for placating terrorists, and the mayor squarely aligned him with European appeasers.
“Remember, just a few months ago, John Kerry kind of leaked out that claim that certain foreign leaders who opposed our removal of Saddam Hussein prefer him,” Giuliani said. “This raises the risk that he might well accommodate his position to their viewpoint.”
Elsewhere in Madison Square Garden, beyond the view of a national audience, this kind of tasteless negativity has continued among the delegates on the floor. Morton Blackwell, a prominent delegate from Virginia and founder of the conservative political grooming shop The Leadership Institute, handed out Purple Heart Band-Aids mocking Kerry's war wounds. Well aware that deriding a Purple Heart recipient in a time of war was beyond the pale, Republican Party elders asked Blackwell to stop.
But given the sly endorsements of the “Swiftees” by George Bush Senior and first lady Laura Bush in advance of the convention, this kind of shameless derision shouldn't come as a surprise. In an interview with Time magazine, Laura Bush declined to criticize the ads. “Do I think [the ads are] unfair?” she asked. “Not really. There have been millions of terrible ads against my husband.” And on Monday, Bush Senior all but endorsed the ads when he told CNN's Paula Zahn that some of the group's claims were “rather compelling.”
We are only halfway through the convention, but more digs are on the way. Tonight's speech by Vice President Dick Cheney will lash out at Kerry and identify some of the senator's “confused convictions.” Democrat Zell Miller will add to this chorus; advance excerpts from his speech contain such gems as, “John Kerry wants to fight yesterday's war,” and, “20 years of votes can tell you much more about a man than 20 weeks of campaign rhetoric."
The anti-Kerry tirades that have filled the convention, however, are less of a diversion from an otherwise terrorism-themed convention than a purposeful and coordinated assault on Kerry himself. The Republicans want to convince America that the public hates John Kerry, that the public thinks John Kerry is pathetic. At the Democratic national convention, the crowd chanted along with the phrase “hope is on the way.” At the Republican national convention, Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele mocked that optimism, and the crowd chanted, “But not John Kerry.”
Despite Republican assertions to the contrary, the personal slights and Bronx cheers that have accompanied the first two days of the convention have exposed how thin Rove's forward-looking positivism truly is. There is an agenda to this convention, all right. It's just all negative.
Mark Goldberg is a Prospect writing fellow.
