he most impressive moment in George W. Bush's speech accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention Thursday was his call to eliminate the barriers to opportunity between rich and poor. ''My fellow Americans,'' he urged, ''we must tear down that wall.''
By echoing the famous remark Ronald Reagan addressed to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 about the Berlin Wall, Bush made it clear that the campaign to eliminate the economic divide in America would be his moral equivalent of the Cold War. It was a bold stroke that steals a march on the Democrats' traditional dominance of domestic issues and neatly turns attention away from foreign affairs, an area where Bush, the governor of Texas, is not strong.
In a speech that often seemed less like a coherent argument and more like a string of bumper stickers - ''We can begin again,'' ''The alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference,'' ''It won't be long now'' - the recognition that Americans on the wrong side of the wall are condemned to lives of ''poverty and prison, addiction and despair'' was bracing. Unfortunately, this will also be the most difficult part of the speech for Bush to deliver on because so much of his party's platform and so many of his own campaign positions serve to reinforce that wall.
Bush pointed to his tax-cut proposal as a means of demolishing the economic divide. He would lower the rates on the poorest taxpayers from 15 to 10 percent. But the bulk of his tax cut would benefit those in the top bracket, whose rates would decline from 39.6 to 33 percent. This would only widen the wealth gap.
Bush would double the current child tax credit, but he would also make it available to more wealthy taxpayers, not phasing it out until incomes rise above $200,000. His plan does nothing to change the Social Security tax, the most regressive of all payroll taxes, which for many poor families is more of a burden than the income tax. This is at odds with Bush's stated principle that ''those with the greatest need should receive the greatest help.''
Additionally, Bush's tax plan is so costly that analysts say it would eat up 82 percent of the projected surplus over the years, leaving far less to invest in education and health care.
And the Republican Party opposes raising the minimum wage.
Bush called Thursday night for making Head Start an ''early learning program,'' but he has offered nothing to extend the program to the millions of poor children who are eligible but not now enrolled.
Bush called for eliminating the estate tax, which affects the top 2 percent of the population, by saying that ''every farmer, every small-business person'' and every family should be able to pass on their life savings to the next generation. But when Republicans in Congress had a chance earlier this year to support a more modest proposal to relieve estate taxes precisely for farmers and small-business owners, they rejected it.
As they repeatedly promised, the Republicans did deliver ''a different kind of convention'' in Philadelphia. For a party long identified with exclusivity to engage these kinds of issues is a meaningful departure, and the double-digit bounce in the polls Bush received after his speech suggests that many voters welcomed it.
But Bush needs to engage more than his heart if he is to ''extend the promise of prosperity to every corner of this country.'' He will need to focus his mind and invest the public's money where it does the most good for those most in need. Otherwise, as Colin Powell said in the part of his speech that skewered the party for opposing affirmative action but not special deals for corporate interests: ''It doesn't work.''
