The Official Start Of Culture War

This Against the Grain commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

You'll hear much talk in the coming weeks about how this wasn't always so. That's certainly true. But I'm not sure who really misses them except political reporters and true political junkies. For now, the conventional wisdom about conventions actually is wise: they are infomercials.

It's ironic in a big way that as campaigns have become better financed, longer, and more vicious, the assemblies of politicians and activists have become more boring and hollow.

Politics and politicized citizens are far more polarized than they were in 1992. But you won't see that at the conventions.

I mark a pivotal moment in the emergence of both trends - the castration of conventions and the polarization of politics - to the waning hours of primetime on Monday evening, August 17, 1992.

Ronald Reagan was supposed to be delivering a nostalgic and unifying homily to the Republican National Conventional at the Astrodome in Houston. But a rare lapse of Republican choreography pushed the former president out of primetime. Instead, it was Pat Buchanan in the opening night spotlight.

Buchanan had bloodied President Bush in the primaries, more with rhetorical red meat than with actual votes. When the primaries ended in June, Bush spokeswoman Torie Clarke (later the Pentagon spokeswoman during the other President Bush's Iraq war) said Buchanan would have to "get down on his hands and knees and grovel over broken glass with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out" before he'd be allowed to give a speech in Houston.

Bush the Elder's fear of the Republican right spared Buchanan the broken glass diet. But Buchanan spat out more fire than anyone expected in a speech Democrats love to remember and Republicans still try to forget.

He opened with a humorous roast of political correctness and the Democratic convention just past, a "giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden - where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists - in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history."

The money lines came later:

"My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side."

Many mark this as the official declaration of the culture war seen in so much political commentary, strategy and rhetoric since then. Clearly the dramatic clash of the 1960s over civil rights and the Vietnam War was the big bang. In the 1980s, Republicans exploited wedge issues that separated Democratic candidates from voters who moved away from them on cultural issues - abortion, gay rights and entertainment. But with the Buchanan broadside, culture warfare evolved into something else, something meaner, more close minded and less tolerant - on both sides - and something that has continually pushed the two sides further apart.

Buchanan set an un-Bushian, angry tone for the rest of the convention.

Pat Robertson, Bush's rival for the 1988 nomination, told the convention that Bill Clinton has "a radical plan to destroy the traditional family and transfer its functions to the government." (Codename: Monica)

The other real bombshell came from Marilyn Quayle, the vice president's wife. Dan Quayle had inflicted a hailstorm on the ticket in May when he attacked a popular sitcom, "Murphy Brown." Candace Bergen played a big-time TV reporter who was single and was going to have a baby out of wedlock. Quayle not only condemned this alleged degradation of traditional family values, he insinuated that such moral turpitude caused recent riots in Los Angeles.

With a presence on the snarly side of dour, Mrs. Quayle took up the crusade her husband had pretty much abandoned by the time the convention rolled around:

"I came of age in a time of turbulent social change. Some of it was good, such as civil rights - much of it was questionable. But remember, not everyone joined the counterculture, not everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution or dodged the draft... Not everyone concluded that American society was so bad that it had to be radically remade by social revolution. Not everyone believed that the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it."

Reading those words now, it's hard to imagine how divisive they were at the time. The message, especially for women, was 'If you're not just like us, we don't want you.'

Republicans agreed with the pundits for a change: the convention was a disaster. George Herbert Walker Bush lost his bid for re-election for many reasons and this was one more.

Political conventions have lived controversy-free and sanitized ever since. Both parties determined that only porridge and puff would be served up at future conventions. And that is exactly what has happened.

The culture wars of American politics, meanwhile, have both continued and escalated. Just not at the parties' conventions.

Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.

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By Dick Meyer