HILADELPHIA - It was a country music convention, for a country music party, led by a country music candidate. We discover the first Tuesday in November if America is a country music country.
George W. Bush gave a very good speech, the best big speech he's made ever, with pretty fair delivery, from an artful text, with short phrases that helped him negotiate his big night. Introduced by a fetching video of him driving across his ranch with his dog, Spot, on his lap, Bush avoided the land mine of going too negative against the Democrats. His family hates everything about Clinton & Clinton, but Bush & Bush Inc. understands America does not want a bitter and vengeful president.
''We are the party of inclusion,'' he said to Republicans whose takeover of the Sunbelt states was based on Richard Nixon's Southern strategy. Every black congressman but one is a Democrat, but Bush pulled off the biggest cosmetic makeover of a political party in modern times. His official campaign song's refrain is populist pabulum: ''We pay the taxes, we pay the bills, so they better pay attention up on Capital Hill.'' But his speech ignored the GOP leaders who control Congress, and who were relegated to bit parts here.
Bush's post-speech tableau was often obscured by the cascades of 150,000 balloons and 300 million - that's what they claim - pieces of confetti. It was excessive - perhaps ''Tex-cessive'' is the word - and the stage was often invisible in the visual clutter. But this was the biggest cosmetic job since they invented plastic surgery. If it works, Bush is a genius.
Fixated on Bill Clinton as his party is and his family remains, Bush spoke more in sorrow than in anger of the president who licked his old man. To every Bush, Al Gore is but an afterthought, the speed bump on the way to Pennsylvania Avenue, the address every delegate here thinks will be won soon. ''So many talents, so much charm, such great skills,'' mused the younger Bush of the hated Clinton. ''So much promise, to no great purpose.'' Take that, Bubba!
It is the Bush crowd that is making this campaign a morality play, a restoration drama. Dubbaya plays Prince Hal to the old man's Henry IV, the scamp who'll reclaim the castle and make everything right again. His strategy assumes that Gore is Clinton and Clinton Gore. ''This administration had its chance. They have not led. We will,'' he said three times in a sort of irregular meter that left no doubt he's running against two Democrats, one past and one maybe future, maybe not.
A lot of Thursday night's acceptance speech was a pithy pitch for class and racial harmony, a soft-and-cuddly alternative to the past two hard-edged GOP conclaves that ended in vainglorious defeat. The closest thing we heard resembling his father's fatal ''read my lips, no new taxes!'' mantra was a pledge to rescue Social Security, to wit: ''No changes. No reductions. No way.'' No kidding, that's how he's packaging it.
Bush still has that goofy grin at odd moments, brow furrowed, biting his lip, like Johnny Carson waiting to deliver a straight line. If he debates as well as he read his speech, the Democrats have a problem. Half his speech could have been delivered by Ted Kennedy, the reach-out-to-racial-harmony stuff. Then we got Dubbaya's Four Big Ideas: huge tax cuts; school vouchers; privatizing part of Social Security; and the missile defense scheme many scientists say can't work and most world leaders decry. So the Russians hate the idea? They don't vote, right?
He tossed the I'll-ban-partial-birth-abortion bone to the right, and tried to mollify the middle with ''good people can disagree'' on abortion, though he's against it. The crowd was won over before he strolled onstage. It was rapture rampant. They see him delivering them from that Clinton clone, Al the Afterthought. The game plan aims at swing voters with touchy-feely ''compassionate conservatism.'' But he doesn't rely on polls. Nah.
It was also a brilliantly camouflaged convention, with a relentless assembly line of black and brown speakers, with much worthy and hearty rhetoric about lifting up the downtrodden. Off camera were the corporate lobbyists and millionaire contributors who slipped George W. Bush $10 million at lunch the day he hit town, putting his personal haul this season over $100 million.
Impeachment? Never happened, so far as this crowd heard. Henry Hyde? All those syrupy Southern senators who led Pickett's Charge up Impeachment Hill? Non-persons, banished by the scriptwriters. Newt Gingrich? He's working for Fox TV now, with a lot of the other Clinton-bashers on the Murdoch payroll. The Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells, those roistering reverends who threatened the likes of Bush Sr. and Bob Dole with bumptious biblical brimstone, were relegated to the cheap seats.
Where camouflage was insufficient, there was collective amnesia.
Bush Sr. beat Michael Dukakis with attack ads featuring Willie Horton, the black convict made famous by Bush television commercials, showing revolving doors of dark-skinned marauders supposedly turned loose upon white America by that lying liberal from Massachusetts. Bush Sr.'s 1988 acceptance speech, vowing death to cop-killers and promising prayer in schools, included this: ''It is a scandal to give a weekend furlough to a hardened first-degree killer who hasn't even served enough time to be eligible for parole.'' But Bush Jr. is going the compassion route.
Bush Jr. beat Ann Richards for governor in Texas by claiming she hadn't built enough prisons (she only added more cells than any previous governor) and was squishy-soft on crime. He has 130,000 prison inmates in Texas, makes money by importing other cons from states with more pricey prison cells like Massachusetts, and has executed 132 locals to date. He lops them off at the rate of one convict a week, give or take.
But he wants America to know he gets all teary-eyed when he talks to a 15-year-old boy in a Texas hoosegow who later got shot. Too bad. Of course, George Jr. also signed laws allowing Texans to carry concealed handguns, and to protect gun makers from government lawsuits. You have to watch this Texan's sleeves, as well as the hands, when he deals.
But the hard news out of Philly is that the Bush campaign is rolling. The candidate delivered the speechifying goods as promised, the campaign hammered the heck out of every possible upstart, and the train is rolling on time. The delegates who left town Friday think they have a winner. It may yet turn out that America is not as lustful for change as Bush & Bush think. But that's for Al Gore to prove. Earth to Al: Better get off your butt pronto. Labor Day may be too late.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
