George W crowned with nomination under patriarch Bush’s benevolent gaze

Vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney, a former Defence Secretary and oil executive not previously known for verbal swagger, sparked off dancing in the aisles with a line patently stolen from Al Gore’s 1992 campaign speech — "It’s time for them to leave."

"The last day is near. The wheel has turned, and it is time, it is time for them to go," Cheney told cheering delegates in a speech laced with cliches. Former President George Bush and his wife Barbara watched approvingly amid a sea of posters and banners, while George W. saw the proceedings from a nearby hotel, having just arrived in Philadelphia from his campaign on the road.

George W. Bush will deliver his acceptance speech later tonight, rounding off a strong Republican bid to recapture the White House after being kept out for eight Clinton years. The Democratic riposte will come at its convention in Los Angeles on August 15.

Despite generating some feel-good atmosphere with their verbal steam, the Bush-Cheney team might well have laid themselves open to a solid rebuttal by asking the American people if they want four more years of the Clinton kind by electing Gore. If one goes strictly by the economic indices and improvements in social factors like crime and schooling, the answer would be a resounding yes.

But Republicans are widening their platform and playing the moral card, hoping middle America is sufficiently incensed by what they say is the moral decline of the Clinton years. Attacking the Clinton presidency, Cheney and others have repeatedly said they want their children to grow up respecting the office of the President — a thinly disguised reference to Clinton’s "prof-legacy," as one delegate quipped.

The ethical dimension has now begun to resonate so strongly that pundits are wondering if this is now turning out to be a proxy battle between the waspy and moralistic former president George Bush, who thinks he was deprived of a second term by a southern hill-billy with no class, and Bill Clinton, fighting to establish his legacy through an unattainable third term.

The senior Bush as been a benign presense throughout the convention, watching the proceedings with wife Barbara and the family brood. On Wednesay, he finally joined the verbal sparring by hitting out at theDemocrats for their long-standing jibe that George W was born with a "silver foot in his mouth."

Warning that his son can "dish it out if he has to,’ Bush Sr said former Texas governor Ann Richards knew what he could do with that silver foot. Richards lost the Texas governorship to Bush jr. after a bitter battle during which she described him as "a shrub, not a bush."

Bush Jr, or George W as everyone here likes to refer to him as, will deliver his acceptance speech tonight, rounding off what political mavens say is one of the strangest GOP conventions in recent decades.

On the one hand, the party has tried to reinvent itself as an inclusive and secular force by giving voice to many black and hispanic leaders. But the core of the party still remains white and conservative.

Democrats, whose convention typically has many, many more minorities, are calling the Republican effort a "masquerade ball" intended to mislead voters. The final day of the four-day convention, the theme of which is "President with a purpose," is expected to carry the so-called charade even further with speeches in Spanish and an endorsement from George Bush’s brother Jeb Bush (whose wife is Mexico born). The jamboree will climax with the acceptance speech of George W in which he is likely to define his agenda.