The Republicans on the first two nights of their national convention have featured four of the most popular political figures in American life: John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Laura Bush. Interestingly, none of them was a nationally popular figure five years ago: John McCain was just starting his presidential campaign and was of course an opponent of George W. Bush; Laura Bush, as candidate Bush's wife, was not widely known; Giuliani was a major local politician in New York, vilified by the New York Times as a kind of fascist (the New York Times evidently prefers a city with crime rates more than double that of New York's post-Giuliani's crime rate); and Schwarzenegger was a well-known movie actor whose capacity to command big advances seemed about to be coming to an end.
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Now they stand in different shoes, as a result of the 2000 election campaign, of the September 11 attacks, of the California recall election. All are considered by old media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the dinosaur broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC—to be Republican moderates, unsympathetic in varying respects to George W. Bush's platform, supportive to varying extents of abortion rights (actually, McCain is not supportive of them at all) and other social causes of the American cultural left.
Yet they all delivered, on Monday and Tuesday nights at the Republican National Convention, brilliant speeches in favor of the candidacy of George W. Bush. In some respects they made stronger cases for Bush's policies—specifically, for the war against Saddam Hussein—than Bush has done himself over the past 12 months. My sense is that Bush and his top appointees consider the case for the war against Saddam so obviously justifiable that they don't feel obliged to set it out themselves with any rigor. But McCain and Giuliani did, on Monday night, with sophisticated and rigorous arguments. The choice, they said, was not between a tolerable status quo and a war but between allowing a regime with a proven record of developing weapons of mass destruction and assisting terrorists to do more in that direction or squelching that possibility.
Schwarzenegger and Laura Bush framed the issue in somewhat different terms. One always notes the moments when speakers at a convention evoke thunderous applause—as when McCain attacked the "disingenuous filmmaker" Michael Moore, or Giuliani mocked John Kerry as needing "two Americas" in which to voice his two different positions on the same issue, or Arnold Schwarzenegger mocked the Democratic economic gloomsters as "girlie men."
But just as significant are the moments when the ordinarily noisy convention floor is stunned into sudden silence. One such moment came when Schwarzenegger recounted his fear, when his uncle's car was stopped by Soviet troops, that his father or his uncle might be sent to Soviet labor camps forever. Another was when Laura Bush recalled how, looking out a White House window, she saw her husband walking in the lawn just as he was deciding to give the go-ahead to the war in Iraq. I do not know what people watching on television felt at these moments, but the feeling in the hall was palpable: the recognition that evil exists in the world and that without the assertion of American power, people can see their lives and everything they value destroyed in a moment—and that America can act to protect decent people against evil.
