Politics Daily
- The latest grievance from the Tea Party nation is how the mostly white mainstream media projects its own flaws onto mainstream America when they report that most of the attendees at Glenn Beck’s rally on Saturday were white. The allegation triggers memories of another big event, the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, where there were more minorities onstage performing and being honored than there were in the audience. That was the convention that nominated George W. Bush, running as a compassionate conservative and trying to convince voters that he had moved beyond the divisive rhetoric that dominated his father’s convention in Houston eight years earlier. That was the one where Pat Buchanan delivered his famous culture-war speech, vowing to take back the streets of America one by one, with guns if necessary, and Marilyn Quayle, wife of the vice president, lectured working mothers about neglecting their families.
The Republican delegates cheered the red-meat rhetoric, but the audience at home was horrified, and I believe it was Newsweek that dubbed the gathering “The Hate Fest in Houston.” President Bush went on to lose in November to Bill Clinton, a shocker for those who couldn’t imagine a draft-dodger unseating a veteran of the Greatest Generation. Bush Sr. had alienated suburban white moderates along with minorities by indulging in such an open courtship of the right at his convention. George W. Bush wouldn’t make the same mistake, showcasing so many minorities in Philadelphia that Jon Stewart said that the GOP was “back in black.”
