Normally I don’t pay Cal Thomas, the syndicated, GOP-talking-points huckster, much mind. I read him the way opposing attorneys read each other. You need to know what the other side, however self-serving but refutable, is saying.
But in a recent column about Washington gridlock, he disingenuously noted that the GOP was, in part, to blame because it always seems “to be responding to the Democrat agenda, rather than forcing Democrats to respond to theirs.” Really. No way Mitch McConnell reads that with a straight face.
Thomas pointed to his prime example: How Republicans are forced to respond to the charge that their party isn’t compassionate. Imagine. He recalled that George W. Bush “fell into the Democrats’ trap when he claimed to be a ‘compassionate conservative.'”
This gives revisionism a bad name. For politically pragmatic purposes, George W. Bush was trying to find some strategic GOP wiggle room–not unlike, for example, what Bill Clinton had done with his “New Democrat” approach that included welfare reform and putdowns of Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. Recall that the UK’s Tony Blair was the avatar of “New Labor.” It was a viable strategy to co-opt the middle of the political spectrum. GWB followed suit.
In fact, I was there in Philadelphia in 2000 when “W” made his convention acceptance speech. He referenced touring a Texas prison as governor and seeing an inordinate number of young black inmates. But, no, he didn’t reference their doing time after doing a crime. He said what a waste it was to seemingly write off these young men. There had to be a better approach.
I was in the company of other members of the print media, none of them the Washington Times, The Weekly Standard or The National Review. To a reporter, they responded with the same gut feeling. A Republican with this kind of approach! A stereotype-defying Texas governor who seemingly saw minority-incarceration rates as more of a social crucible than an endemic criminal issue. Hey, he could really win this thing.
What these scribes had witnessed was an effective, scripted strategy–not some misstep into a Democratic-agenda trap. It was “W’s” finest rhetorical hour–until the one with a megaphone a year later.