Speech Draws Hard Line in the Sand

In a surprisingly confrontational speech, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole on Thursday set the stage for a presidential campaign to be fought on both ideological and generational grounds.

Dole’s alternately lyrical and caustic address constituted a sharp right turn from the generally moderate message delivered from the podium over the Republican convention’s first three nights.

On Thursday, Dole was less the quiet and empathetic neighbor portrayed in speeches the night before than a firm and sometimes stern fatherly presence warning that American society had lost its way, and promising the iron fist to criminals, terrorists, and the erosion of “economic liberty” at home.

Emphasizing his own age, even as his opponents term his 73 years a liability, Dole more directly than ever before presented the presidential campaign as a choice between the World War II and baby boom generations that have dominated American life for the last half-century.

Though he minimized criticism of President Clinton by name, Dole enlarged the Republican indictment against his rival’s character into a stinging generational critique of not only the president but the young advisors he has brought into government. The administration, Dole said, constituted “a corps of the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered, and never learned. . . .”

Dole surrounded his cultural message with an array of conservative priorities that he said would guide his presidency--from an across-the-board 15% cut in income tax rates to the abolishment of parole to an end to the Internal Revenue Service “as we know it.”

In his conclusion, Dole fused his two messages into a single phrase, as he urged voters to view the election as a referendum on “trust”--not only which candidate deserves their trust, but which candidate trusts them to live in a society where government retreats and lets “the people be free.”

Many of Dole’s arguments reprised familiar refrains from his campaign; the most distinctive new emphasis was his suggestion that the America of his youth offered a better guide to the next century than the post-World War II America in which Clinton grew to manhood.

Offers a ‘Bridge’

Dole minced no words in arguing that America has lost its moral compass over the past generation. He decried “decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values. . . .” And then he threw down a gauntlet: The values that built America, he insisted, have “little to do with the values of the present.”

He presented himself as the “bridge” back to “a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action.” In some of the speech’s most striking passages, he rooted himself in a vanished America of “God, family, honor, duty, country” that he contrasted with the “permissive and destructive behavior of modern America.”

With such pointed and pugnacious contrasts, Dole moved to reopen a clear ideological distinction with Clinton, who during the past year has relentlessly blurred the differences between the parties on issues like the budget and welfare.

If Dole holds to the hard line he laid out Thursday night--a question left open by the tenor of both the speeches earlier in the week and by Jack Kemp’s more moderate speech accepting the vice presidential nomination--he will undoubtedly reestablish distinct differences with Clinton.

The sharp tenor of Dole’s speech reflected the belief of many in his campaign that his best chance of catching the president lies in framing the election as a choice between conservative change and a liberal “status quo.” But after Clinton has spent months trying to occupy the center, Dole faces the risk that he may draw a clear contrast with the president only by moving too far rightward for the majority of the electorate.

In Reagan’s Trail

Never known as an captivating orator, Dole on Thursday was more forceful than charismatic; yet he projected a strong sense of place and conviction that evoked a powerful response from the partisans in the hall. Though he never reached the oratorical heights of Ronald Reagan, Dole positioned himself in Reagan’s trail, opening his speech with praise for the former president and concluding it with a Reaganesque flourish in which he declared himself “the most optimistic man in America.”

With Dole still trailing Clinton by double digits in surveys conducted through the first nights of the convention, Republicans this week declared the address the most “important speech in his life” and the key to transforming the election.

Transforming a presidential race in a single night may be too much to ask for any address, though Republicans monitoring voter reaction said the initial responses appeared positive. But, after seeming to wander without a clear direction for much of the past few months, Dole on Thursday may have met one of his principal, if baseline, goals: to convince Americans that the race presents them with “crystal-clear differences.”

To establish those lines, Dole delivered a speech strong enough to induce ideological whiplash from the convention’s initial direction.

“This speech was more confrontational than I expected,” said John Herrington, the California Republican Party chairman.

During the first three nights, GOP planners made a calculated effort to moderate the party’s image. Virtually invisible on the platform were leaders of the GOP Congress hailed just 18 months ago as the vanguard of the “Republican revolution.” Gone too was talk of the causes that animated the grass-roots activists who powered the 1994 Republican victory: banning abortion, lifting restrictions on gun ownership, rolling back federal environmental and other regulations.

Kinder, Gentler Notes

Instead Republicans early in the week gave their spotlight to moderates such as Colin L. Powell and Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), and welcomed to the stage an astonishingly diverse assortment of women, minorities and disabled speakers as they reached out to centrist voters who have swelled Clinton’s leads in the polls.

“For four years, the Republican Party has been painted as mean-spirited, religious fanatic, intolerant and not compassionate,” said one convention planner Thursday afternoon. “We have resonated out of here a picture of inclusiveness, tolerance and compassion.”

Some of those kinder, gentler notes endured in Dole’s address Thursday night. Just as Elizabeth Hanford Dole argued during her talk-show-style stroll through the convention Wednesday night, the nominee said in a halting voice that because he revered the memory of his father, who had persevered through poverty, the nation could trust him to “be faithful to Americans in need.”

And, while praising tolerance and promising inclusion, Dole also notably omitted several conservative causes; though he fleetingly lamented a rising number of abortions, he made no reference to his opposition to legalizing the procedure. Nor did he offer a single word of defense for the Republican Congress.

But the overwhelming thrust of his speech was to emphatically attach himself to a right-leaning critique of government and modern society.

His specific proposals ran through an extended agenda of conservative reforms, from tax cuts to strengthening national defense and, in a nod to Patrick J. Buchanan, protecting the nation’s “sovereignty” against encroachments by the United Nations and international trading organizations.

Making the Links

Yet more powerful than all of his specifics were the links Dole sketched between them. Stepping onto the stage with a lifelong reputation as a legislative pragmatist--a man whose instincts ran toward pastel moderation--Dole painted in the primary colors of a true believer.

He soared beyond his call for less government spending and less taxes to present an overreaching government as a threat not only to “our economic liberty” but to liberty itself. In a passage that bent toward the pure flame of libertarian writers like Ayn Rand, Dole declared: “A government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.” And again: “For the government cannot direct the people; the people must direct the government.”

Dole offered an even more provocative message on cultural issues, looking back to an earlier America he said “only the unknowing call myth.”

And then, in a phrase that transmuted memory into vision, Dole boldly declared: “To those who say it was never so, that America has not been better, I say, ‘You’re wrong, and I know, because I was there.’ ”

These may be the flourishes of a single evening. But if Dole maintains these themes, he will be betting that Americans can be convinced that the road to a better future runs back through to the past--and the excavation of “the old values” that Dole says he could summon again for having seen.

More on Politics

* BEHIND SCENES: Paul J. Manafort Jr. gets the credit--and criticism--for keeping tight control over the Republican convention proceedings. A18

* WHEREOF HE SPEAKS: Dole talks of family, crime and other issues in excerpts from his acceptance speech. A21

* NORMALCY, OR NOT: GOP convention workers welcome a return to life as usual. E1 . . . And an odd assortment of characters gathered outside the spotlight. E3

* FUNNY BUSINESS: Cable’s Comedy Central has found much that is amusing in its coverage of the Republican convention, Howard Rosenberg says. F1

* OTHER STORIES, GRAPHICS: Pages A5, A18-A22