Face it: The conclave of Southern and Midwestern
Republicans who just met at The Peabody for three days, attracting presidential
candidates and big-time national media alike, are not as square around the edges
as Democrats, who see themselves as the curators of cool, would like to believe.
The main public business of the Southern Republican
Leadership Conference got under way Friday with a former governor of Tennessee,
Lamar Alexander, playing “Love Me Tender” and “Memphis, Tennessee” on the
piano and reached its climax, more or less, with Mike Huckabee, the
governor of adjoining Arkansas (and one of the aforesaid presidential hopefuls),
playing a hot and credible bass on “Free Bird” during a Saturday night jam
session.
Oh, there was a plenary session on Sunday morning, with a
gospel choir performing and Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp speaking
and a few other housekeeping details going on. But by then the event’s
presidential straw-vote poll, first of the 2008 presidential campaign, was
history, most of the attendant press had decamped, and the majority of SRLC
delegates — from 35 states overall, as Tennessee Senator Bill Frist had
made a point of telling the home-state media on Friday morning – were somewhere
between the check-out desk at their hotels and the check-in desk at the airport.
Anyhow, the real drama of the convention, such as it was,
was played out between those first notes tickled by Alexander and the licks hit
by Huckabee. Much oratory and a generous quantity of bloviating had ensued, tons
of barbecue and other comestibles underwent liquidation, and there had been the
requisite amount of schmoozing and, if the testimony of South Carolina Senator
Lindsay Graham can be read between the lines, carousing.
Graham, a bachelor, was tousled and casually dressed when
he showed up for his spot on the dais Saturday morning, in the wake of dour and
moralistic musings by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a social
conservative. “That was one noble and high-minded speech,” Graham began. “Well,
that part of the program’s over. We’re going to have real fun for a few minutes.
And I’d appreciate less clapping, because my head hurts. I don’t know about
y’all, but I stayed out way too late.”
Graham continued to stoke his audience with insider jokes,
the 50-year-old senator suggesting at one point that if he followed all the
precedents of his predecessor, the late centenarian Strom Thurmond, “my
wife’ll get born sometime next year.”
Once he got going, though, Graham struck the same chords
with his folksy drawl as almost everybody else who spoke, going somewhat lighter
on anti-abortion rhetoric than Brownback, say, but sticking close to the party
song-sheet on issues like tax cuts and tax credits and the planned elimination
of the “death tax” (read: estate tax), “which is socialism.” Harping like most
other party orators on the need for immigration reform, Graham cracked that
“it’s harder for me to get my bags through the airport than it is for somebody
to walk across the border.”
Like the other speakers, too, he pledged continued fealty
to his admittedly down-in-the-polls party leader, President George W. Bush,
whom he characterized as being “under siege” but insisted was “the Winston
Churchill of our time,” especially in his determination to seek out Islamic
terrorists everywhere and, in a flight of rhetoric that got the delegates on
their feet, “capture ’em and kill ’em!”
SO THERE IT WAS: Graham’s brief sweep – like the other
speakers at the tightly run weekend affair, he had roughly 15 minutes to do his
thing — indicated some of the elements of a credo that, as he maintained, had
brought the Republican Party in his lifetime from “nowhere to somewhere” in the
South and made this region the “anchor of the party”: Fiscal frugality,
deregulation, border control, rally-’round-the-flag rhetoric.
Add to that the celebration of conventional mores that most
of the speakers poured on thick. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney
surprised many observers by coming down from what he described as “the bluest
state in the Union” and finishing second, to favorite-son Frist, in the
straw-vote poll. Part of that was due to Marshall’s reported marshalling of a
corps of College Republicans to inflate the vote, but his success may have owed
as much to his denunciation of the gay unions recently declared legal by the
judiciary in his state.
Marriage is about “the raising and nurturing of children,”
insisted Romney, going on to declare, “Every child in America has the right to a
mother and father.” And, to further indicate the extent to which he was on the
side of the conservative angels, Romney added the crowd-pleasing non-sequitur,
“”This country should never become the France of the 21st century!”
And every Republican eminence, without fail, celebrated the
recent confirmation of a host of conservative federal judges, notably
including Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Majority Leader Frist, in his sit-down session with members of the Tennessee
media as the convention was getting under way, had cited that as his “single
greatest accomplishment,” the fact that, through last year’s eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontation over the filibuster, he had been “able to right a court system
that was terribly broken.”
In his own remarks to the delegates later that first
morning, Frist’s Tennessee colleague Alexander would make the issue the
centerpiece in his triad of Democratic misprisions – “higher taxes, liberal
judges, and mediocre schools.”
AND HOW DID DEMOCRATS RESPOND to all this? State party
chairman Bob Tuke came down from Nashville and made himself available to
the media, along with such local Democratic stalwarts as state Senators Steve
Cohen and County Commissioner Deidre Malone.
“I fought the war in Vietnam, not in a bar in Alabama,”
ex-Marine Tuke pointed out dryly in a dig at the current Commander-in-Chief.
Tuke said the war in Iraq had been undermined by the “lack of people with
military experience” in the Bush administration. “That’s why they’re pursuing
the wrong strategy, have failed to see that the troops have armor, and have
forced Guardsmen to endure endless extensions of duty. There’s an utter lack of
sensitivity. They’ve cut veterans’ benefits and underfunded the V.A. and first
responders and failed to provide for proper port security….”
And so on, in a perhaps telling catalogue of reasons why,
especially in the wake of the recent controversy over administration plans to
lease ports to Arab emirates, Bush’s poll numbers have plummeted.
Republicans at the SRLC meeting took note of the poll
problem, with several of them, like erstwhile party maverick John McCain
of Arizona, himself riding high in the polls, using it as an opportunity to
declare a need for party solidarity. Other Republicans — like Frist himself,
who pointedly noted to reporters his role in putting the controversial port
transfer on hold – declared a discreet distance from Bush, where necessary.
Here and there other critics of the Bush administration
made their play – like gay activist Jim Maynard, who led a group
of protesters keeping a daily vigil on the other side of Union Avenue from The
Peabody. But for the most part the Republicans were able to showcase their cause
(and the host city, for that matter) without much resistance. Such leading
Democratic officials as mayors Willie Herenton and
A C Wharton and congressman Harold Ford Jr. made what amounted to
courtesy calls during the three-day meet.
SOME OF THE MOST TELLING REBUTTALS of the gospel preached
at The Peabody, or at least of its chief priest in Washington, came, usually off
camera and off the page, from members of the respectably-sized national media
contingent in attendance for the three days. In reviewing the politics of
straw-vote polls like the one held in Memphis by The National Journal‘s
Hotline, syndicated pundit Charlie Cook recalled candidate Bush
“crashing and burning” during a Midwestern conclave of Republicans eight years
ago. “It set him back at least six months,” said Cook.
And on Sunday morning, MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris
Matthews, strolling around downtown in search of vintage Memphis
architecture, confided to a group of autograph seekers that he’d “had dinner’
with Bush just a month previously, thought him a “nice guy” but one who was out
of his element as president.
As for those who want to succeed Bush, home-stater Frist
didn’t wow many onlookers with his speech on Saturday but did win the straw
vote, with almost 37 percent of the nearly 1500 votes cast, Romney made his
surprising second-place showing with 14 percent, and third place was tied
between Virginia senator George Allen and a vote of confidence for Bush
himself. (McCain, still regarded with suspicion by party regulars despite his
lofty popularity in most polls, floated the Bush vote in advance as a tactic,
most observers thought, to distract attention from his own anticipated showing;
he ended up with 4.6 percent on his own.)
If nothing else, the Republicans on display in Memphis put
on an impressive display of their range. Consider Huckabee: in addition to his
demonstrated ability to do Skynnyrd riffs, he’s a bona fide Baptist minister and
a marathon runner, who shed 110 pounds in something like a year’s time. With the
2006 off-year elections just ahead, Democrats have somewhat less time than that
to work off their own dead weight and begin to play catch-up.
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