His embrace of the civil rights and women's rights movements as positive historical facts, not to be undone, matters too. That's worth something. It's different than past candidates. So is Bush's vision of the role of government. Just as Clinton proclaimed an end to the era of big government, Bush has called an end to its demonization.
Government can serve a useful purpose.
That's the new tenor of the Republican Party starting out the 21st century. The claim carries weight in part because of Thompson and other Republican governors like him who have forged innovative, if still often unproven, policies to grapple with poverty, bad schools and other problems Republicans traditionally neglected. And it carries weight because Bush is proposing to use government agencies, not abolish them, to improve health care, guarantee retirement security, promote home ownership for poor people, improve education for poor children and more. The help he envisions may be too limited or mistargeted, but that's a different argument. But the desire to win is a powerful motivator, and the commitment to a new philosophy, no matter how calculated, carries consequences.