http://thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030915&s=conasonBush and his political adviser Karl Rove knew that he could ill afford his father's mistake of alienating the far right. At the same time, they knew he had to avoid being isolated politically on the right. "Compassionate conservatism" was their answer. So deft was this gambit that it left journalists gawking and scratching their heads, as if they had witnessed the candidate literally running in two directions at once.
During the election year to come, Bush and Rove will renew the "compassionate conservatism" theme to draw independent, female and minority voters, balancing the appeal of a "wartime presidency" that is already beginning to lose its luster. The President recently returned to emphasizing buzzwords like "inclusive, positive and hopeful" in a June speech to the Urban League.
Indeed, "compassion" is a featured topic on the new website put up by Bush-Cheney '04 (www.georgewbush.com), where "news" about the President's agenda of compassion includes highlights like "President stresses importance of health and fitness." The need for such filler reflects how thin the Administration's portfolio for the poor remains. The site's most noticeable feature is a "compassion photo album" consisting almost entirely of photos of the smiling Bush with smiling black children. This is almost identical to the public-relations material Bush and his advisers rolled out during the 2000 campaign (and the minstrel-show GOP convention in Philadelphia), repackaged to remind voters that he is, or purports to be, a "different kind of Republican."
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This wasn't the first time, of course, that attractive branding had sold the nation a phony product. After two years of skewed tax cuts, destructive deregulation and social regression, nobody doubts Bush's conservatism. But where's the compassion?
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