From the looks of things, this was supposed to be the beginning of the Summer of Love, Bush White House-style. The president actually sets foot in France; he shakes the hands of surrender-monkeys Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and even tells the former that he should stop by the next time he's in the neighborhood. He sits Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas down together, and he -- or Secretary of State Colin Powell, or someone -- gets Sharon to use the word "occupation," which is at least mildly shocking. (We can be certain that if it had been Bill Clinton's administration doing the nudging, the howls from the right wing would have been ceaseless.) Finally, in the more-than-mildly-shocking-department, gay people are invited to the White House -- not to meet with Bush himself, of course, but nevertheless to the White House, and by all accounts through the usual visitors' door.
Well, it's getting to be re-election season, which means it's time to start bringing the phrase "compassionate conservatism" back in circulation -- gently, at first, through gesture. The slow movement toward election-year reason is an old trick of politicians who tend toward the non-election-year extreme. Former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato was a master of this canter toward the center; most years, especially early in his Senate career, his voting record was basically indistinguishable from Strom Thurmond's, and then, come 1986 and 1992, when he realized he had to face the voters, he was suddenly over in Kate Michelman territory.
The mainstream media, which falls for just about everything this White House perpetrates, will undoubtedly bite on this, too. I'll bet you my last subway token that Bush will march into New York for the GOP convention next September and throw out a few earnest lines about recognizing the need for "tolerance" and "inclusion." The Ministry of Propaganda (FOX) will pick up the theme for the required number of days (I'd swear that Karl Rove and Roger Ailes have worked out a mathematical formula for how long they have to pound on something to get the mainstream press to accept it). And the rest of the press will swallow it like eager Little Leaguers at a pizza party.
The truth, of course, is very different. The truth involves a Republican Party so possessed by ideology that, even if one decides to give Bush the (generous) benefit of the doubt and allow that efforts toward moderation come from his heart and not from Rove's calculation of camera angles, it is incapable of being anything other than exactly what it has always been.
This is most obvious with regard to gay rights, where even the recent meager steps a few GOP leaders have taken in the direction of decency have stirred the self-appointed God squad into its usual censorious posture. GOP Chairman Marc Racicot made a few pro-gay -- or not-ragingly-anti-gay, which constitutes progress -- comments. The aforementioned contingent of gay people went to the White House. No sooner had these developments transpired than the right-wingers started baying. Monday, on the Web site newsmax.com, the site run by the embarrassing Christopher Ruddy (the New York Post ditched Ruddy for handing in shoddy and inaccurate copy, which is a pretty good working definition of embarrassing), headlines blared that the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other Christian-right leaders were threatening to "bolt" the GOP if such impious overtures continued. There was considerable fulminating from the usual sources that any party that chooses to consort with homosexuals is a party that must be opposed full bore. Falwell's house newspaper, the National Liberty Journal, carried the headline, "Christian Leaders Threaten to Abandon GOP in 2004."
I'd quote the newsmax.com story for you, except that, curiously, when I went to recheck it yesterday, this item was gone from the site. (It seemed to be the only such item that haddisappeared, as opposed to having been merely pushed down the page as new ones wereadded.) One supposes that this excision of bile could mean that the newsmaxers woke up Tuesday morning singing Pet Shop Boys tunes. More likely, it means the party wants, for now, to keep up appearances and just shove the matter under the rug, admitting to the outside world no dissension.
We can conclude this because, with this White House, virtually everything is about appearances. Bush refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans in November 1999 -- an important "appearance," in the early, pre-primary days of the 2000 campaign, for the sake of establishing his bona fides among the religious right. But then, after he took up residency at the White House, another appearance, thistime of something approximating tolerance, was needed. So some friends, led by a Texas conservative who is gay and who came out after his old pal George won the governor's mansion in 1994, formed an alternative and more Dubya-friendlygay group called the Republican Unity Coalition (RUC). (One prays that the acronymicharmony with Royal Ulster Constabulary was not someone's idea of a joke.)Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson agreed to play the role of avunculargo-between. Then, with considerable fanfare, Mary Cheney, the vice president'sdaughter, joined the group in 2002, acknowledging her sexuality for the firsttime publicly and issuing a statement that said, "We can make sexualorientation a non-issue for the Republican Party."
Well, one is unsure today exactly how she intended to go about this, because the Web site of TheAdvocate magazine reported Monday night that Cheney had resigned from the RUC board, without issuing a statement and without having made one high-profile gesture of any sort during her tenure. A source told The Advocate that she was resigning to pursue business interests. Seasoned observers have reason to suspect there's more to the story -- namely, that Christian righters threw down the gauntlet and demanded that the White House show signs of clamping down on its creeping sexual relativism. That's not very Summer of Love at all. Of course, neither is a tax cut that denies child credits to working-poor parents or provides no relief to the lowest-rung taxpayers. But the administration's real Summer of Love will come next year, when it's re-election time; the theme song will be "All You Need is Compassionate Conservatism." And don't get your hopes up about that headline quoted above -- even Falwell will be singing along by then. The question is whether the media will provide the chorus.
Michael Tomasky's column appears every Wednesday at TAP Online.
