Eight years ago, language was racist and cruel

How different this week has been from the last occasion when a Bush accepted the Presidential nomination of the Republican party.

How different this week has been from the last occasion when a Bush accepted the Presidential nomination of the Republican party.

True, back in Houston 1992, they stuck up a bronze statue of the President outside the Astrodome, and almost managed to kid themselves they could win in November. But whereas George W Bush took a double-digit lead into Philadelphia, his father arrived in Texas 17 points behind Bill Clinton in the polls and the mean-spirited, divisive gathering which followed was never really going to change things.

Houston was the last time Ronald Reagan, the Republicans' greatest icon, but now stricken with Alzheimer's disease, addressed his party's convention. A bitter floorfight on abortion was narrowly avoided, but it was open season for bashing "skirt-chasing, draft-dodging" Bill Clinton.

But the most vivid memory is of the speech by Pat Buchanan, the right-wing populist who had given President Bush a real scare in the early 1992 primaries, and vowed to carry the fight against "King George" all the way. This year, Buchanan is safely confined to the Reform party. But in Houston he gave a satanic performance. His language was cruel, xenophobic and homophobic, verging on the openly racist.

No Reaganesque "shining city on a hill" for him. Just the promise of all-out war on the forces destroying America. "Block by block we must take back our cities, take back our culture and take back our country."

In the hall they cheered, but the middle of the road voters were appalled. The broad church of sunny Reagan Republicanism had shrunk to a narrow claustrophobic barracks. Women voters shunned the Republicans that year. They had surrendered the vital centre ground of American politics to Clinton, and he never relinquished it.

The overriding goal of both Republican conventions since has been not to make the same mistake again. San Diego 1996 was a notably gentler occasion, but the strategy didn't really work because Bob Dole, the nominee, was too far behind in polls and temperamentally incapable of projecting fuzzy optimism.

That same fuzzy optimism is Bush junior's stock in trade. Every sign is that however choreographed and stripped of real emotion, the Philadelphia convention has succeeded in its aim of projecting "compassionate conservatism" as Republicanism's new guiding spirit.