Republicans' Birdcage

There's a rhythm to a presidential election year.

After the full-tilt boogie of the primaries, this one's reached a more relaxed tempo, with both campaigns working right now on positioning, throwing a few feints, and avoiding the sort of mistakes that would send them stumbling rather than marching triumphantly into their respective summer coronations.

George W. Bush's meeting last week with a small group of openly gay Republicans was interesting because it seemed to incorporate all of these elements.

It was about positioning, sure, part of the Texas governor's move to the center, and it may have been a feint of sorts, too. Maybe Team Bush hoped that Gore, thinking himself in a genuine competition for gay votes, might play one of his compulsive games of one-upsmanship.

And as Bush sought to avoid errors of omission and commission, it became pretty plain that his meeting had plenty to do with this year's Republican convention.

The moderate wing of the Republican Party still has bad dreams about Pat Buchanan's 1992 declaration of "cultural war" in the Houston convention hall. Though any number of things brought George Bush senior down that year - and though Pat Buchanan was not the only Republican to take a hard line on so-called "family values" in that year or those that followed - the "harsh GOP convention of 1992" has found its place in the conventional wisdom of campaigning: how NOT to run a Republican nominating convention.

Republican determination to not repeat its off-putting (to the mainstream) air of meanness led to 1996's tepid and awkward Dole nominating convention, where Susan Molinari and Elizabeth Dole's speeches were used to soften the rhetoric if not the messages themselves.

This year, it seems, the Republicans continue to heed the lessons of '92 - first and foremost in their choice of the presumptive nominee. Before the rightward lurches of the primary campaign, George W. Bush looked to rank-and-file voters the way he must have been seen by Republican strategists and king makers - like the perfect offspring of that fragile marriage between moderate Republicans and the Christian right. Which, considering his lineage, he almost literally is.

What Bush's "compassionate conservatism" mostly amounts to, of course, is a rhetorical bow to changing attitudes on issues such as education, the environment, and the role of government. Put another way, Bush is trying, with the right words and gestures, to hit the moving target of the American political center.

What's becoming plain, however, is just how hard this is for a conservative candidate to do, "compassionate" or not. With the battle lines already so tightly drawn within his own party, George W. Bush must try to appease the middle while not seeming to call attention to the logical disconnect this causes with the "family values" thrust of the post-Reagan Republican platform.

Gays are not, of course, the only target of the Christian right's values jiha. But the recent legislative and judicial struggles of the gay rights movement - gays in the military, gay marriage, bias laws - and even the mainstream emergence of gay culture (Ellen, et al) have put them repeatedly in the far-right's crosshairs on an issue-by-issue basis.

The compassionate conservative's stand on homosexuals seems to be this: I'm OK, you're OK - so long as you don't want to serve in my military, marry my son, or get "special protection" from civil rights laws.

To those old enough to remember or with an ear for history, this will all ring familiar. And the conundrum the Republicans are facing now echoes the one with which segregationists of both parties were confronted as the black civil rights movement matured: once bigotry falls out of mainstream fashion, it's hard to talk the accepted talk without walking the walk. When the prevailing political winds force a party to abandon prejudicial rhetoric, how can it continue to advocate prejudicial policy without wrapping itself in the cloak of hypocrisy?

That the outright slurs and the sly innuendo of even recent years past are no longer acceptable public discourse is a measure of just how far we have come as a society. Yes, the military service and marriage issues center around long, long-standing traditions that are by their very nature resistant to change. And yes, good people still disagree in good faith about legal action that would open these institutions to gays.

But on the partisan level, the difference is this: the Democrats have put themselves at the vanguard of the shift in mores that is opening society to openly gay men and women. Maybe not to the extent that certain gay political leaders would like or demand, but the Democrats have staked out the cutting edge of the political center, at least, on these issues.

In contrast, the Republicans are being dragged along - and for a national party that seeks to be the dominant one, that's not a comfortable position to be in.