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The Republican convention is over, and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp are basking in the big bounce. The Democrats will hold their convention, and Bill Clinton and Al Gore will enjoy the post-convention bounce.
You get the idea we're watching a trampoline tournament or a check-writing contest, but the received traditional wisdom tells us that all this bouncing will stop after Labor Day when the real campaign starts.
And what will the Republicans do then? Generally the GOP contrives a threat -- godless commies in government, militant feminists demanding unisex restrooms, evil judges forbidding school prayer, welfare mothers getting abortions, flag burners on our streets -- and then promises to deliver us from that dread menace to all that we hold dear.
I'm not privy to what the GOP strategists plan for the 1996 campaign, but it's fun to speculate about what they might offer save us from this year:
· Heroin. You can't put out a magazine these days without junk or a junky on the cover, so in theory, heroin should work pretty well as a campaign issue. It's like unsafe streets and bad schools -- nobody's for it.
But it will just start several rounds of escalation.
Dole will say the Clinton Administration is soft on
drugs,
and that he will get tough and stop this
horrible epidemic of profiteers who prey on our youth and
get them addicted to a dangerous substance.
Clinton will respond with I thought he was talking
about tobacco, and I'm glad he's come on board here
but
add that Attorney General Janet Reno has issued new
guidelines requiring that suspected heroin dealers be shot
on sight.
Dole will call for carpet bombing of movie studios and
recording companies who glamorize this insidious
vice.
Clinton will respond with a humane and
just
proposal for concentration camps.
So, while heroin is appealing at first, it's hard to see how Dole can exploit it effectively, without Clinton stealing that issue, as he has many others.
Further, Republicans are going to have a hard time arguing that they favor smaller and less-intrusive government when they make an issue out of what might or might not be in people's bloodstreams. That dog won't hunt.
· Villages. Attacking villages is, of course, a slap at that uppity Hillary Rodham Clinton, who should have known her place and contented herself with fabricating a diary of Sox the Cat for the best-seller list.
But there are other good reasons for Republicans to hammer away at villages.
Villages, traditionally, are fairly self-sufficient. If people raise their own food, they don't need multi-national agri-business firms like Archer-Daniels-Midland -- a fertile source of campaign contributions. If people take care of each other, they don't need insurance companies -- another source of campaign contributions. If people do business at ma-and-pa stores, they won't be exporting the profits to Wall Street -- yet another source of campaign contributions.
Not that there are many real villages left in this country, but it's best not to let people get the idea that they might be able to live without Wal-Mart, Blue Cross, or Cargill. It works so well on so many levels, that the anti-village attack should be a major theme by late September.
· The Clinton Administration's War on the
West.
During the Reagan-Bush regime, our commercial
districts displayed scores of vacant store fronts, houses
stayed on the market for years and rural populations were
dropping.
Then Bill Clinton went to war against the West, destroying our traditional ways.
The results are dreadful, almost catastrophic. You can't find a place to park downtown, Realtors call often asking if you want to list your house, and our infrastructure needs some expensive investment to cope with a growing population.
And Dole can save us with his economic plan -- regurgitated Reaganomics. If it has the same results here as it did the last time around, our mountain towns will go back to being poverty-stricken backwaters.
Further, this should be easy to sell. We Westerners are the dumbest voters on earth, at least when it comes to economic self-interest.
Reagan carried the West handily in 1980, after endorsing
the Sagebrush Rebellion and promising to end the Carter
Administration's War on the West.
Four years later,
with mines and mills closed, the economy moribund,
foreclosures and bank failures everywhere, free-lunch kids
a majority in every classroom as enrollments plunged -- he
carried the West by an even bigger margin.
This is a proven GOP winner, and the only question is when Dole will pledge to end the war -- before or after Halloween.
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