The moment the Republicans' smiley mask slipped

Delegates forgot about their party's cuddly new image when Dick Cheney took the podium, reports Julian Borger in Philadelphia

Full text of speech
The Republican crowd had been drip-fed on syrup all week. Sweet, positive talk, a sugar-coated version of racial inclusion and huge doses of honeyed optimism.

They lapped it up happily enough, but the sort of people who cross the country to come to party conventions are political carnivores. They crave red meat, and when they finally got it last night, they roared their appreciation.

The man chosen to feed them was the vice-presidential nominee, Dick Cheney, who had been thought too nice and dignified a man to take on the traditional number-two role of going negative.

He went all out to prove the pundits wrong last night with an aggressive speech attacking Al Gore as a mere surrogate of the hated Bill Clinton.

At last, the 2,066 delegates had a means to vent the accumulated anger of the past eight years. And when Mr Cheney told them that President Clinton's "last hour is coming", the release of pent-up fury filled the Philadelphia convention hall. The cheering lasted nearly two minutes, and Mr Cheney had not yet reached his punchline.

It was a punchline he repeated, slowly, three times in the course of his prime-time address, and brought the house down each time. "It is time ... It is time for them to go," he said, unsheathing what is clearly to be one of the principal rhetorical weapons of the campaign.

It was a phrase used to effect by Al Gore in 1992, now turned against him. Last night, it found an instant resonance among party followers who have spent eight years in the wilderness.

"Time to go," the crowd chanted. It was the full-throated vocalisation of Clinton fatigue. The underlying strategy emerged clearly: to bind Mr Gore to Mr Clinton at every turn so that they become one double-barrelled epithet in the minds of the voters, and then to revile the Clinton experience.

But whereas the 1992 Gore use of the "time to go" line had an economic significance in hard times, in Cheney's lips it took on the twist of moral distaste. Neither the word "Monica" nor "Lewinsky" was mentioned, nor are they likely to be during the course of the campaign.

The Bush camp is well aware that if there is Clinton fatigue in middle America, there is even more weariness of his persecutors. The erstwhile Republican heroes of the House judiciary committee, who led the charge against Mr Clinton in the 1998 impeachment hearings, have been invisible throughout the convention, locked away like an embarrassing, muttering relative.

As the Washington Post pointed out, the Republicans were determined this year to appear "friendly neighbours rather than nasty snoops". So the Bush camp, reluctant to foreswear the memory of Monica altogether, have evolved a set of euphemisms, like vicarage gossips who are dying to reprise a squalid tale but prevented from doing so by good taste and propriety.

"On the first hour of the first day" of a Bush administration, Mr Cheney promised, the new president "will restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office."

You could almost hear the sighs of relief coming from the Gore campaign headquarters. The nice multicultural Republicanism of the first three days had really begun to scare the Democrats, for whom the low point was General Colin Powell's rousing appeal for racial inclusion on Monday night.

In a presidential race in which Mr Gore is trailing by more than 10 points, the Democrats are longing for the mean-spirited, middle-aged white men of the Republicans' 1994 revolution led by Newt Gingrich (another name not even whispered in this year's convention).

Possibly for that reason, President Clinton has appeared in recent days to play the role of goad, taunting George W Bush for his alleged reliance on "daddy" to fight the election, nearly provoking George senior into losing his temper, but not quite.

Even if George the younger resumes the upbeat, positive tone of the convention, the Democrats will still have Dick Cheney to gnaw on. They have his past congressional votes: against the release of Nelson Mandela from an apartheid jail, and against the Head Start educational assistance programme for poor children.

Now he has turned negative. It stoked the crowd and made him the party's darling for the night, but it also meant that the happy-smiley mask, elaborately painted in many hues over the first 72 hours of the convention, finally slipped.