Texas Two-Step: Beyond Compassion, Bush Keeps Wooing Core Conservatives --- Along With Dual Pitch, GOP Targets Key Blocs Of States in Last Push --- Surviving Debate With Gore
PHILADELPHIA -- When George W. Bush makes a warm-hearted appeal for support across the political spectrum in his acceptance speech tonight, he will sound compassionate. In other words, he'll sound a lot like Bill Clinton.</br></br>But "compassionate" is only half of Mr. Bush's "compassionate conservative" formula. The "conservative" half has gotten far less attention here this week, and yet it forms the bedrock of the strategy that Bush advisers will pursue in search of victory in November.</br></br>The strategy is based on a simple belief: There are more conservatives than liberals in the American electorate, and nearly all of them now are Republicans. That's the legacy Ronald Reagan, who wrenched millions of conservatives from their ancestral Democratic homes, bequeathed to today's GOP. From the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Bush's first priority has been to keep these conservatives content, and that will continue to be the case through the fall run toward the White House.</br></br>Despite much advice to the contrary, candidate Bush has refused to shrink from his conservative positions. He's pushing a sweeping tax-cut plan, even though his congressional counterparts have retreated this year in favor of more modest cuts. He's offering a controversial proposal to partially privatize Social Security that many Republicans in Congress dare not touch. And he's resisting popular gun-control measures, despite fierce Democratic attacks. He also brushed off GOP moderates in selecting a solidly conservative, antiabortion running mate in Dick Cheney. The goal: to nail down the two core elements of a winning coalition, a phalanx of Southern and Western states and white male voters nationwide.</br></br>What's most striking about Mr. Bush's strategy is how it has diverged from the theories that many strategists advanced after the Republicans' electoral setbacks of 1996 and 1998. GOP leaders received plenty of advice to soften their conservative positions on issues such as tax cuts, abortion and gun control, even though such moves would anger the party's base. Mr. Clinton, for his part, used just such an approach to break his party's presidential losing streak in 1992, when he ran as a "different kind of Democrat" who pushed welfare and trade policies at odds with the Democrats' black and labor constituencies.