GOP dissent to be kept quiet

NEW YORK — Delegates to the Republican National Convention who are inclined to express displeasure with President Bush’s performance have not been given much room to talk.

Political discipline imposed from the top of the Bush campaign on down stifled debate in the platform and any public dissent about a lineup of keynote speakers who hardly reflect the conservatism of the delegates.

“The fact is that this president has unified our party in a way I haven’t seen in 20 years,” said Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “You’d have to go back to Ronald Reagan to see this kind of unity and support for a president. The Republican Party today is George W. Bush’s party.”

The delegates, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday, are more conservative and religious and are less likely to believe the president made any mistakes in his execution of the war on terror and in Iraq than Republicans voters as a whole.

They are more stridently against homosexual “marriage” than Republican voters on the whole, 17 percent less likely to think that the environment should be protected “even if it means a loss of jobs” and, by a count of 86 percent to 70 percent, are more inclined to think that the war in Iraq was worth the costs in lives and money.

The delegates also overwhelmingly agree that Mr. Bush should talk about the role of religion in his life on the campaign trail — 80 percent — while only 68 percent of the overall party agreed.

The makeup of the delegation reflects chief Bush political strategist Karl Rove’s recognition that the White House needed to pre-empt any platform fights before the majority of delegates arrived in New York, party operatives and well-connected delegates told The Washington Times.

The White House and the Bush campaign did that by ensuring that only loyalists willing to accept discipline from the top became convention delegates.

The names of delegates to platform subcommittees were kept secret until the full committee began meeting last week.

“It’s the most tightly controlled convention I’ve ever seen,” said Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative icon for Republicans whose efforts to strengthen platform language on stem-cell research and immigration laws ran into a wall erected, she says, by the White House.

Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, echoed Mrs. Schlafly’s assessment, as did Ann Stone, who heads Republicans for Choice.

Even stricter standards of reliability were applied to the selection of the party’s platform committee, in theory tasked with writing the platform, but, in fact, was a rubber stamp for the platform already written by the Bush-controlled staff.

“We’re all stooges for the campaign,” joked a delegate, who then stood with four other delegates in a mock pose for a picture they laughingly called “The Five Stooges.”

Outside interest groups normally able to lobby platform subcommittees have found themselves stymied.

More liberal Republican delegates failed to get a proposed “unity plank” that acknowledges different opinions on homosexual “marriage” and abortion to even come up for debate.

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