Campaign 2000: The Selling of George Bush

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The G.O.P. Convention will be the Bush team's chance to put the best version of their candidate and his past on display. Count on a film with romantic images of Midland. And count on the rest of the staging to be as laser-focused on making Bush seem noble, sincere and decent. For the convention in Philadelphia, the Bush team has chosen as its theme the careful "Renewing America's Purpose. Together." The real leitmotif--pushed by the campaign for many weeks--is much edgier: "George Bush Is a Different Kind of Republican." Mimicking almost exactly the language Bill Clinton used to stiff-arm his party's liberals eight years ago, it is an implicit sniff at the old kind of Republicans who will be gathered that week in Philadelphia.

Everywhere the symbols will align to send a comfortable message. The imperial raised platform will be gone, replaced by a lower, more accessible stage; Washington politicians will be shoved off to side stages and obscure time slots; and an entire classroom of inner-city kids will spotlight Bush's education proposals. A final night devoted to testimonials to the candidate will feature an African-American preacher; women will be prominently displayed in prime-time speaking roles every night.

To answer how Bush is different, campaign aides often mention Condoleezza Rice, the African-American woman who worked as a foreign-policy adviser to both Ronald Reagan and Dubya's father and who serves as Dubya's guru on the subject. Says Hughes: "So people look at that and say a young, smart, creative African-American woman, who has worked for two Presidents, believes George Bush ought to be the next President."

Against the cyclorama of policy proposals and political pageantry, the final task of his coordinated national debut will fall to the candidate himself. On the last night of the convention, Bush will declare he is a new kind of Republican, a "uniter not a divider." But he will have to take the next step and argue that the times demand what only he has to offer. As one of his advertising gurus put it bluntly last week, "We must come up with a problem to which he is the only solution."

Penning the transformational speech is Mike Gerson, the bespectacled former journalist who can quote passages from Martin Luther King more easily than the bromides of Barry Goldwater. An evangelical like Bush, a Hoosier who worked for Dan Coats, the former Indiana Senator, Gerson was one of the scribes of compassionate conservatism before it was given a moniker. Bush will call on his generation, the baby boomers, to lead the nation to take advantage of prosperous times. "I've seen the culture change once, and I can see it change again," the Texas Governor once told TIME about his fellow boomers. It will be a tricky moment, a chance for Bush to show the "good man" his imagemakers have worked so hard to highlight. But for a man who has at times grown smaller in stature the larger the stage, it will also be a moment when viewers will decide whether the man and the myth are the same.