HOW HE SEES IT The unreal face of the Grand Old Party

By MARTIN SCHRAM
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Pay no attention to that elephant behind the curtain. Or all the other elephants hidden in the attic.
Look only at the TV screen. That's where we're parading before your eyes every caring, compassionate, real and faux-moderate we can find here at our Grand Old Party convention. We know that winning in November requires a newer, kinder face (at least from August to November). A pro-independent and, especially, a pro-women face. So we're spotlighting McCain and Rudy and Arnold and our very best and most presentable women. We've got them back-to-back and front-and-center, all over our Madison Square Garden convention platform.
Whoops. Strike that. I didn't mean to use the word "platform."
Pay no attention to our platform. Disregard the fact that our Official 2004 Republican Party platform was built with those same old conservative planks that made you cringe and flee in the past. We hammered them into place only to keep our wing nuts in place.
The platform
We hoped we'd keep our platform out of sight, with all the bull elephants, while we were pitching our woo to the women voters. We didn't want to call attention to the fact that our platform:
UOpposes all abortions and believes no woman has a right to choose to have an abortion. We want a constitutional amendment to ensure that. And we want legislation to stop those who perform abortions.
UOpposes gay marriages or any other sanctioning of homosexual coupledom.
UOpposes any change in President Bush's sharp stem-cell research limits that were crafted just to appease our most extreme conservative Christian fundamentalists. We don't see anything wrong with our president's plan that says it is OK for life-creating fertility clinics to destroy all of their unused embryonic stem cells by throwing them into the garbage -- but won't permit those embryonic cells to be used for life-saving research that could cure Parkinson's disease, paralyzing spinal-cord injuries, maybe even Alzheimer's disease.
So, so don't be confused into looking at the policy platform. Because we're not really standing on it, not this week. We're about winning enough moderate and independent voters in the crucial swing states. Especially luring some of those women voters who've been voting for Democrats for far too long.
So we're wearing our new convention face. And we've gotten some unexpected help in the new-faces department. Michael Moore, every liberal's favorite documentary-maker, showed up in the press section. So we're finding all sorts of ways to put his unkempt ugly mug all over the TV screens. We just mention him; he smirks for the TV cameras. And independents and moderates must be thinking: If that's the face of the new Dems, forget it.
Of course, we're pushing the president as a strong leader against terrorism; the polls say Bush beats John Kerry on that question every time. Big-time. It's getting us the veterans' vote. Even though our guy ducked Vietnam by getting into the National Guard -- and spent some of his Guard time in Alabama helping Dad's pal campaign for office. And Kerry volunteered for Vietnam, volunteered for one of the most dangerous Navy missions, saved a guy's life by fishing him out of the river amid enemy gunfire -- for which the Navy awarded him medals for valor.
In front of the cameras
So we are being very careful to push the strong-leader thing -- while wooing women voters by putting our new compassionate image in front of the TV cameras.
But we almost blew it. One of our most zealous conservative activists, Morton C. Blackwell, a Virginia delegate and Reagan White House assistant, was handing delegates bandages with a purple heart on each of them, to ridicule Kerry's three Purple Hearts. Each bandage also had this note: "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it."
Of course, delegates everywhere put these on their faces. And the faces were put on TV. But hey, that's not the new face we are pushing this week. (We have a firm policy against getting caught on videotape as being responsible for those cheap-shot attacks that have hurt the only certified Vietnam War hero running for president.) So Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie rushed to Blackwell and halted that too-visible bashing of John McCain's pal, Kerry. Hopefully, just in time.
After all, this week's made-for-TV game plan was clear: The brand-new face of the Grand Old Party is not about bash, it's about compash. It'll always be a fail-safe plan. Unless some wise guy discovers how to take a sexy picture of a policy platform -- so it can become a TV news story.
XSchram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service.