Bush set up the whole convention to reflect media criticism of the Republican Party. His "compassionate conservatism" is the same as the "kinder and gentler America" that his father ran on.

This was such an extreme appeal to the media version of politics that even the media were taken aback. They listened to Colin Powell demand that Republicans follow Clinton. They listened as the open border of the United States was not criticized at all. They watched as the Republican platform approved of the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the liberals' taxpayer-supported propaganda units, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Public Broadcasting.

In one area, the media began to sound like the Republican base used to. In the last three presidential elections, the Party wrote a very conservative platform. Each time the conservative base worried that Bush or Dole would sell out the platform. They did.

This time, a major part of the platform was written to appease the media. Media commentators wondered aloud, over and over, whether the Party would betray THEM. Would Bush give them Powell's speech, all those minorities and exclusion of conservatives and conservative rhetoric (in the name of Inclusion, of course), and then go back to the old rightist Republicanism that won in 1980, 1988, and 1994?

Bush has sold conservatives out so obviously that it is no longer a question of his betraying his base. He isn't even pretending to go with them. It is the media who feel he may betray them.

There was a ritzy meeting of moderate Republicans down in Florida.

Gov. John G. Rowland of Connecticut told the group that the party platform ought to change because it is offensive to women, teachers, unions, homosexuals, and immigrants. "I will report to you that the good news is that the rich people and the business people still like us," said Rowland. "But that's about it."

Actually, Republicans get less women and more men. So they don't lose "women." Women are in the majority, so if Rowland were right, Republicans would never win a single election.

The Republicans certainly don't turn off union members. In a typical election year, Republicans get forty percent of the union vote in direct defiance of union leaders.

Presumably, then, what moderates are talking about is not union PEOPLE, but union MONEY. Unions are the only institution in America that can take money by force and use it in politics any way they want to. Media, moderates and McCain want to keep it that way.

So we are left with what the media and moderate line really is: "Republicans can't win if they don't appeal to women's libbers, teachers, homosexuals and immigrants." Rowland leaves one out of the groups in the standard formula: "Minorities."

Rowland's conclusion is even more revealing: "the rich people and the business people still like us." This is what liberals, moderates, and respectable conservatives always say: If you are not a minority, a homosexual, or an immigrant, you are a rich white man. This might give you a hint as to why moderates, who religiously follow this liberal line about voters, so seldom seem to win.

This moderate-media line is so insane that we need to repeat it, because no respectable conservative ever will. They imply, and often state, that anyone who is not women's libber, homosexual or minority is a rich white male. I challenge you to listen closely and not realize that that is what they are saying!

The media and the moderates completely leave out the group Reagan and Gingrich actually won with. These were the Wallace-Reagan Democrats, those who are increasingly unhappy about where this minority-immigrant-homosexual line is taking the country.

Yet the same media announced in 1994 that it was "the angry white males" who took both Houses of Congress away from the Democrats.

They said that because the line is that an angry white male is really anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. Anything they don't like always ends up being called Nazi.

The base of the Republican Party is white. The Democrats are a coalition of minorities. According to the line of all moderates and all the media, the latter is easier to hold together. Meanwhile, back in reality, as the minorities grow, their competition grows.

Only one thing keeps the Democrats from being a permanent and shrinking minority, and that is Republican strategy.

Democratic strategy is to give more and more of what the "haves" have to the "have nots." And remember, to them a "have" is anybody who is not a women's libber, a homosexual, or a leftist in a
minority group!

But there is a definite limit to how long one can win elections and buy minorities with white money. As minorities grow, their competition for "rich white money" grows, and only so many fleas can live on one dog.

The decades-long Republicans pursuit of the "Negro vote" is hopeless. Blacks have spent their political history in lock step. They will vote as their leaders tell them, and the liberals own their leaders outright. But other minorities are not so uniform.

For example, the same media that says Hispanics only vote for Democrats also insisted during the Gonzalez flap that the huge Cuban-American vote in Florida could be ignored because it was lost to the Democrats anyway.

The media-moderate argument is that minorities will never vote for a party whose base is white racially and Western European culturally. They then argue that the white population WILL vote for a party based on a minority coalition. In the meantime, the white majority gets more Republican when Republicans go for them, and minorities are learning that competing for dominance with other minorities causes serious problems.

The tendency of moderates and the media to use the word "Hispanic" and the word "immigrant" interchangeably represents the kind of real-world problem they have. To liberals, these two groups are the same.

To Americans with Hispanic names, there is lot of difference. Very few real American Hispanics want to trade in their American standard of living for an open border. But in Mediaspeak, anyone with a Spanish name who wants to restrict immigration at all is "a rich white man."

The deciding factor, strange as it seems, may be the truth: liberal programs don't WORK, rightist programs WORK. A party which is devoted to that proposition, rather than to following the polls and the fads, may be the one that wins in the long run.