HILADELPHIA - With a rousing speech in a jubilant hall, Texas Governor George W. Bush stoked his party's hunger to reclaim the White House but laid bare the principal question of the day: Does the politics of contentment require a politics without controversy?
For a week this question lingered in the hot air of Philadelphia. All recognized its presence. None dared answer it. No historical precedent offered a guidepost. But in an era of good feelings - a period almost without politics - the Republicans' newly minted presidential nominee went with his instincts. He determined that what the American people want most is a good feeling about their leaders and then he set out to provide it.
''This whole convention can be called the politics of pleasantry,'' said Frank I. Luntz, a Republican pollster. ''Everybody is so gosh-darn nice.''
The niceness was almost everywhere; specifics were comparatively rare. But policy really wasn't the point.
Bush's call for ''a new beginning'' was a celebration of American diversity and American promise in a set piece of American political theater. It was full of well-rounded rhetoric (he spoke of using ''good times for great goals'') and big promises (he vowed to extend American prosperity ''to every forgotten corner of this country''). It drew on the optimism of Ronald Reagan and the idealism of John F. Kennedy. It mixed, in its way, the faith in the American people that was a hallmark of Jimmy Carter with the unpretentious utilitarianism that marked the short presidency of Gerald R. Ford.
But both in his speech and in his route to the GOP nomination - each a display of the discipline that eluded him in youth and that served him in maturity - Bush showed himself to be an American original.
A classic late bloomer, he showed last night that the late-flowering bloom can be brilliant in its impact. He is the son of a political family, but he showed last night that his gifts - not the patrician rectitude of his grandfather but a breezy sense of possibility, not the establishment sense of duty of his father but a fresh sense of opportunity - were his own.
The last century was blighted by the dictators' cult of personality. This century - inaugurated in the United States by Bill Clinton - is more about the pop culture of personality. The language of the Bush acceptance speech may have been about overhauling the public schools, strengthening Social Security, safeguarding Medicare, providing prescription-drug benefits, but the tone, timbre and delivery were much more about personality than about the policy nuances of any of those things.
George W. Bush has a remarkable personality. In a week's worth of festivities, speeches, fund-raisers, caucuses, coffees and casual street meetings, the Republicans spoke more of who their nominee is than of what he would do with power. Part of who he is, of course, is that he is not Clinton.
But the threads that ran through this week's sessions and that were prominent in last night's acceptance speech indicated that there was more of Bill Clinton to George W. Bush than either man is likely to acknowledge. Clinton rose to power and kept it by becoming a burglar in the Republicans' policy mansion. He broke in and stole their dedication to balancing the budget. He muscled his way in and made off with their determination to overhaul welfare.
And last night the Texas governor did to his rivals just what the onetime governor of Arkansas did. He broke into the Democrats' home and made off with the silverware of education, the flatware of Social Security, the stemware of the poverty fight, even, in an extraordinary invocation of ''we shall overcome,'' the bejeweled legacy of the civil rights movement. He tucked them all into his coat pockets, swaggered onto the stage and showed them off as his own.
At one point he even borrowed their language, saying, as Robert F. Kennedy might have, that prosperity remains beyond the reach of too many Americans. ''We are their country, too,'' the governor said. ''And each of us must share in its promise, or that promise is diminished for all.''
The lift of the driving dream, so much a part of American political rhetoric, was there in the form of the simple statement, ''Americans live on the sunrise side of the mountain.'' That is a part of the Bush personality that was unknown until last night. It is the part of the Bush personality - more than the smile, which beguiles the listener, or the casual manner, which wins over the crowd - that might scare the Democrats the most.
What was missing, however, was a staple of the Republican political repertoire for three-quarters of a century: What will it cost? How will it work? Where can you find the support for it?
All week long the Democrats have wondered how they might respond to the Republicans' convention. They have 10 days to contemplate their answer. But part of it might be those kind of questions, the kind the Republicans used to throw so scornfully at them.
