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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Mark Shields: Boston makes GOP's New York job a lot tougher
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WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- The morning after his address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, former President Clinton volunteered to this scripturally challenged reporter that his speech's most provocative line had been inspired by the Book of Isaiah.
What Clinton spoke was truly unarguable: "During the Vietnam War, any young men -- including the current president, the vice president and me -- could have gone to Vietnam but didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background and could have avoided it, too. Instead he said, 'Send me.' "
Each evening and speaker was dedicated to delivering slight variations on the convention's central theme: Biography is destiny; Democrats who have long lionized anti-war protesters now un-self-consciously salute and honor the combat veteran who served bravely in that most protested of wars. As the hero who later protested that war, John Kerry is the ideal bridge in resolving all conflict between those two Democrats' eras.
The discipline of the Boston delegates in submerging their own personal agendas for victory in November was truly impressive. Not once all week did I hear the presiding officer -- so that a speaker could be heard in the hall -- have to gavel the convention hall to order.
Not once were the marshals called upon to clear the aisles. As pollster Peter D. Hart who began attending Democratic conventions in the '60s astutely asked: "When was the last time that at a Democratic convention you saw on stage more American generals and admirals than labor union presidents?" Answer: Maybe during Andrew Jackson's convention, probably never. Hart added, "In Boston, Democrats (by featuring Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore and Bill Clinton) did not, as they have, run away from their past."
In seeking to repair his party's "Values-Deficit" problem, John Kerry spoke about his own faith and the moral influences of his parents, even doing a little rhetorical grave-robbing by quoting the Republican patron saint: "I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side."
The Kerry speech brimming with promises of new domestic and defense spending and middle-class tax cuts was long on coddling and bereft of any challenges to his fellow citizens for collective sacrifice in pursuit of the common good. Democrats will be rightly criticized for complaining about swelling federal deficits under Bush while potentially adding to them as the Party of the Free Lunch.
The biggest overreach was Kerry's invoking the Fourth Commandment -- "Honor thy father and mother" -- as one reason why he, as president, "will not privatize Social Security."
Still many politicians in both parties agreed that in Boston Kerry had more than met the commander in chief test, an imperative qualification for any serious presidential candidate in post-9/11 America. Further Republican efforts to tarnish Kerry's service in Vietnam look now to be a fool's errand.
Nowhere were the Democrats' discipline more important than in the near iron-clad avoidance of Bush-bashing by convention speakers. An informal tally indicates that the Republican president's name was spoken fewer than 15 times. Instead, Democrats mostly made the relentlessly affirmative case for John Kerry's character and patriotism.
Where does this leave the GOP heading into New York? There, will they make only a positive case urging George W. Bush's re-election, or will Madison Square Garden turn into a marathon Kerry-bashing?
The Republicans could risk coming across as stridently negative at a time when voters overwhelmingly say they are fed up with petty partisanship. That Republican dilemma may turn out to have been the Democrats' shrewdest convention move.
