The “Presidency III” straw poll last weekend-a made-for-TV event featuring Larry King and all the shrimp you could eat-didn’t feel like the dawn of an era. It seemed like the detritus of one. The 3,376 delegates settled for front runner Bob Dole, who won just 33 percent after spending more than $i million. Phil Gramm finished second with 26 percent. Lamar Alexander, who had staked his hopes on this event, finished with a disappointing 22 percent. Pat Buchanan (9 percent) and Alan Keyes (8 percent) split the pro-life vote. It was the political equivalent of entropy.
The Republicans shouldn’t be in this torpor. They haven’t been so powerful since Eisenhower’s early days. Conservative ideas dominate public discourse. The GOP continues to gain, especially in the South. On Saturday they picked up the Louisiana governorship. On paper, the Republicans are poised to obliterate Democrats in a re-aligning election next year.
So why did the Orlando pageant seem a sideshow? The lineup is one reason. There was doubt whether any of the candidates could defeat Bill Clinton. Too many of them were “charismatically challenged,” as Rep. Bob Dornan said. The hallways were full of wistful talk of men who are not in the race: Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell.
Some who did show up came across as just plain weird. Speaking to the delegates, Dornan discussed his love of barefoot water-skiing. Steve Forbes lectured on the temperance movement. And Keyes went on so long that organizers shut off the microphone and dimmed the lights to get him to stop.
If Reagan was the Renaissance of GOP conservatism, Orlando is the start of its rococo age. While GOP conservatives in Congress deal with the realities of governing, the presidential contenders look for something dramatic to say: not just less government, but really less government. At a Christian Coalition rally near the convention site, Keyes and Buchanan vowed to lead a moral revival in the name of God.
There were other eye-catching ideas: abolish the IRS (Dick Lugar); no air conditioning in prisons (Gramm); no loans to Vietnam (Buchanan). The lone pro-choice candidate, Arlen Specter, decided not to show–and may drop out this week.
The strategy of “top tier” candidates was not more ideology, but less. Dole and Gramm offered themselves as the enforcers who would do the tough work of completing the GOP revolution. Using his control of the Senate calendar, Dole timed a budget vote for late Friday to coincide with the Larry King forum, arriving in a Washington studio just in time to tout the bill. Outflanked, Gramm could only promise to quit the presidency after one term if he hadn’t balanced the budget. His plain-vanilla conservatism allowed him to claim it was now “a two-man race.”
Plausible but not much beloved, the leading candidates had sought to impress the delegates with huge convention operations. Alexander’s effort fell short but was state-of-the-art: campaign as color-coordinated marketing scheme. Volunteers wore his trademark red and black cheeked shirts. Soon to come: a CD-ROM of his speeches and a mail-order catalog of “Lamar Wear.”
Dole’s gold-plated offensive had less flare but more money. It included a “Camp Bob” for kids, Grand Marnier and chocolate elephants at his receptions, and free hotel rooms. The man in charge was Paul Manafort, a Washington lobbyist who began his career in Reagan’s ‘79 Orlando campaign. Last week his command center was on the seventh floor of the city’s Peabody Hotel. “We did what we had to do,” Manafort said after the vote. Yes, but barely. “It’s incredible deja vu,” Manafort added. Which just goes to show that, in politics, memory can be selective.
