Republicans promise detailed Bush agenda

WASHINGTON — President Bush will present what aides say will be a detailed second-term agenda when he is nominated in New York in 10 days, part of an ambitious convention program built on invocations of Sept. 11 and efforts to paint Sen. John Kerry as untrustworthy and out of the mainstream.

Bush's advisers said they were girding for the most extensive street demonstrations at any political convention since the Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey in Chicago in 1968. But in contrast to that convention, which was severely undermined by televised displays of street rioting, Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

And after months in which Bush stressed issues of concern to conservative supporters — from restrictions on stem-cell research to a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage — the convention will offer its national television audience a decidedly more moderate face for the president and his party. If "strength" was the leitmotif of the Democratic convention in Boston, "compassion" will be the theme in New York, marking the return of a mainstay of Bush's 2000 campaign, party leaders said.

Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., who has become increasingly estranged from his party, will lead a prime-time televised lineup of speakers as notable for who is not there (conservative Republican leaders) as for who is (Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the moderate Republican governor of California). And Republicans are pressing for a quick and quiet adoption of a party platform to minimize dissent over issues that have divided the party, in particular, immigration restrictions and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Most of all, Bush's aides said that after five months in which they have focused almost exclusively on attacking Kerry, the president will use his speech to offer what they asserted — without offering details — would be an expansive plan for a second term, in an effort to underline what they argued was Kerry's failure to talk about the future at his own convention.

"This speech has to lay out a forward-looking, positive prospective agenda," said Karl Rove, Bush's senior political adviser. "It has to show — and to defend in a way the American people want to hear — his policies on the war on terror."