WHERE'S THE PARTY?

By Richard Lacayo

Agreed: those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The real problem is that sometimes so are those who remember it. And there you have the predicament of recent Republican history. From the time in the 1970s when the right wing of the G.O.P. zapped the moderates once and for all--a pivotal moment in that struggle was the substitution of Bob Dole for Nelson Rockefeller as Gerald Ford's running mate--there has never been any doubt as to whether the G.O.P. would be a conservative body. The only real questions have been how conservative and whose notion of conservatism it would be. If Republicans ever find an answer that truly matches the national mood, they might yet become the majority party they feel sure they must be. Two elections in recent years, Ronald Reagan's in 1980 and the congressional sweep two years ago, have brought them close. Then the same conservatives who revitalized the party ended by dragging it away to a place all their own.

So Bob Dole has been struggling all year to drag the Republicans back to the center, trimming on abortion and tacking on gun control. And whenever he does, explosive factions blow up in his face. Today Republicans are divided between socially moderate suburbanites and Ralph Reed's cultural conservatives, between supply-side tax cutters and old-fashioned budget balancers, between Pat Buchanan's protectionists and everybody else's free traders. In some ways the G.O.P. is like some massive geological formation. Each postwar upheaval--the cold war, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Federal Government, the sexual revolution--left behind some powerful formation and a fracture line.

The party that Dole will stand before this week started to take shape more than three decades ago, at about the time he arrived in national politics. Dole was first elected to the House in 1960, the year Jack Kennedy regained the White House for Democrats, who already controlled Congress. The conventional wisdom foresaw a new era of liberalism and activist government. For once the conventional wisdom was right. But most of the 40 or so G.O.P. House freshmen were so right-leaning they were called the Young Fogeys. That was fine with Dole. During his eight years in the House, he would be cited repeatedly by the Americans for Constitutional Action as the most conservative member of Congress.

Dole's brand of conservatism, however, which favored Small Government yet was susceptible to the charms of Washington when it came to things like farm-price supports, was being outpaced not only by the triumphant liberals but also by another kind of conservatism. A new right wing was consolidating within the party, causing internal splits that Nixon's loss to Kennedy made worse. On one side was an old-line Republican establishment built mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Its guiding doctrine was containment, not just in international affairs but at home as well. Republican moderates resigned to Moscow and Beijing had likewise accepted peaceful coexistence with the legacies of the New Deal, things like Social Security, government-backed mortgages and G.I. loans.

Arrayed against them was a burgeoning New Right in war paint. It wanted nothing less than to demolish the welfare state, including Social Security, and roll back federal powers over business and the states, while aggressively challenging the communist world, to the brink of war (and beyond). Its intellectual center was the National Review and its founder, William F. Buckley, who started the magazine in 1955 in part to reclaim conservatism from the cranks, conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites who had dragged it into the phosphorescent margins of American politics.

Catholic, patrician and Ivy League, Buckley was not entirely like the movement he summoned into shape. The New Rightists drew their strength from the fast-growing Sunbelt states of the South and the West. Their hero was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon did not excite them. Forget for a moment his impeccable credentials as a cold warrior. He had spent eight years as Vice President to the pliant Dwight Eisenhower, a man the Old Right had never entirely forgiven for winning the 1952 G.O.P. nomination away from their longtime hero, Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

Real rightists thought Nixon too had a squishy center. To the disgust of the Goldwater faction, he had spent much of the 1960 campaign courting Nelson Rockefeller, the lustrous epitome of the party's East Coast liberals. The last straw came on the eve of the G.O.P. Convention. At a meeting in Rockefeller's Manhattan apartment (read: Satan's throne), Nixon agreed to liberalize the G.O.P. platform, in part by adding an unequivocal civil rights plank. Goldwater compared the meeting to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich. For the final insult, Nixon chose Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a pedigreed symbol of the Eastern aristocrats, as his running mate.

To the red-blooded right, Nixon's defeat that November proved it was pointless to court the centrist vote already seduced by Kennedy. Even before J.F.K. moved into the White House, the New Right began remaking the G.O.P. in its own image. In 1960 Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative, an outline of his beliefs and his game plan for victory that eventually sold 3.5 million copies. For Buchanan, who read it as a student at Georgetown University, it was "our New Testament." Immediately after the election, activist F. Clifton White organized a meeting of 32 businessmen, lawyers, oilmen and bankers as the nucleus of a drive to nominate a conservative, preferably Goldwater, in 1964.

The rest is bloody and familiar history. Goldwater won the nomination (after a nominating speech by political newcomer Ronald Reagan) and ran, forthrightly, as Goldwater. He proposed to make Social Security voluntary and eliminate farm subsidies, positions his party would not dare to suggest again seriously for almost three decades. He supported giving nato field commanders the authority to launch nuclear weapons. On Election Day, Goldwater was crushed, getting just 39% of the vote. The G.O.P. lost two seats in the Senate, 37 in the House. It was a sign of Bob Dole's popularity in his district that he managed to hold onto his House seat, though by just 5,000 votes, while Goldwater, whom Dole had supported, lost Kansas handily.

The Goldwater campaign introduced into Republican rhetoric a whiff of apocalypse that would hang in the air for decades. His famous assertion that "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" was still audible in Buchanan's declaration of culture war--extremism in the pursuit of tradition--at the 1992 convention. But now that the smoke of '64 has cleared, it's evident Goldwater struck the themes of smaller government that would eventually bring his party to power. Struck them too hard, perhaps, and too soon, but still. In the meantime, however, the New Right lacked an electoral majority to compare with the Democratic alliance of labor, white Southerners and middle-class progressives. A marriage of ideological mismatches, that coalition was to politics what the bumblebee is to aerodynamics: a creature that in theory can't fly. But it did, and Republicans had no weapon with which to bring it down.

Very soon they would find it in plain sight. It was race. In 1956, one year after dispatching troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, Eisenhower won 40% of the black vote. But by 1960, despite the civil rights plank agreed to at the Rockefeller meeting, Nixon was already subtly bidding to the white, conservative South. During the campaign, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, Nixon resisted advice to make a supportive phone call to King's wife Coretta. A brief call from Kennedy, made at the urging of his advisers, was enough to shift a sizable part of the black vote to the Democrats.

For most of his presidency, Kennedy would be no more than a hesitant ally of the civil rights movement. But in his last year he enraged the segregationist South by introducing the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Though Goldwater described himself as personally opposed to segregation, he opposed any federal efforts to enforce basic rights for blacks. Five months before the 1964 election, he was one of only 27 Senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act. At that year's G.O.P. Convention, the civil rights plank was voted out of the platform. The South noticed. In addition to his home state of Arizona, Goldwater carried just four others: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina.

The G.O.P. noticed back. Four years later, Nixon rode to victory over Hubert Humphrey partly on the strength of a Southern strategy devised to move the Dixiecrats permanently into the Republican camp. While remaining formally committed to racial equality, Nixon made clear he would go slow on the federal enforcement of voting rights and integration. For his '68 campaign he also recruited prominent Southerners from the Goldwater circle, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, an early defector from the Democrats. Meanwhile, under the pressure from the long hot summers of racial riots, the antiwar and black-power movements and the gleefully patricidal youth culture, the New Deal coalition fractured further. Not just white Southerners, but also blue-collar ethnics, tradition-minded by instinct, realized they were Republicans after all.

The third-party presidential bid of Alabama Governor George Wallace that year awoke the G.O.P. to a powerful new theme: conservative populism. From the time of William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats had been the defenders of the little folks against the power of money that had its natural home in the Republican Party. Wallace proposed instead a world in which waitresses and factory workers were oppressed by ivy-educated policy wonks and limousine liberals, an elite who crafted busing plans while their own kids went to private schools. Between them, Nixon and Wallace took 57% of the vote in 1968.

Reading those numbers, Kevin Phillips, a Nixon campaign aide and architect of the Southern strategy, saw the future, and it worked. In his book The Emerging Republican Majority, he predicted an unbeatable G.O.P. coalition of Southern and Western voters united by their resentment of Northeastern power and their fear of urban blacks. "A new era has begun," he promised. And it had. As Michael Lind points out in his new book Up from Conservatism, after the 1934 congressional elections, the first of the New Deal era, the South had virtually no Republicans in Congress. Now it has more Republicans than Democrats, though it took until the G.O.P. sweep of 1994 to complete that tilt.

Where was Dole in all this? In and out of synch. As a Congressman in the early '60s he steered clear of racial politics. Dole supported the major civil rights bills, a political possibility for him because he represented a wheat-farming district that was less than 1% black, where racial friction was about as much of a problem as overcrowding. When the New Frontier evolved into the Great Society, he voted against some War on Poverty measures like public-housing subsidies and the bill that established Medicare. But his Small Government conservatism was open to the Big Government payout opportunities of the '60s. After his 1966 election to the Senate, Dole's first floor speech was a plea for federal aid for the handicapped. A few years later, he would join Senator George McGovern to ease eligibility for federal food stamps, a liberal priority that happened to be supported by the farmers who were his main constituency.

Yet Dole's hawkishness on Vietnam and crime issues and his unwavering loyalty to Nixon were enough to keep him in good standing with the right wing. When word got out in 1971 that Nixon was planning to make Dole chairman of the Republican National Committee, there were protests to the White House from nearly half the 43 Republicans in the Senate. Many were moderates who were afraid he would concentrate party assets on conservatives. They were wrong. One of the main lessons Dole learned from Nixon, who expanded social spending at home even as he escalated the war in Vietnam, was the importance of offering something to all Republican factions.

Meanwhile, history would go on delivering Democrats to the G.O.P. by the truckload. As the 1970s got under way, the civil rights movement proceeded from voter registration and lunch-counter integration into trickier questions like court-enforced school busing and affirmative action, areas in which Northern whites started to see a cost to themselves. Then came Roe v. Wade and the first stirrings of gay activism, two more developments that sent a lot of blue-collar Democrats running for cover. Cover was the G.O.P. Soon they would be joined by the neoconservatives--apostate liberal intellectuals, including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who fell out with the Democrats over social policy and the cold war.

Nothing less than the calamity of Watergate interrupted the G.O.P.'s good fortune. When the '74 election brought a large infusion of Democrats into the House and Senate, liberals could tell themselves their world view still comfortably matched the sentiments of a voting majority. It wasn't so. Republicans were about to recapture the country. First, though, the conservatives had to recapture their party.

During the Ford years, the right was deeply disaffected by his continuing pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, his tolerance of high federal spending and his choice of none other than Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Ronald Reagan's challenge to Ford in the 1976 primaries was the signal that movement conservatives, as they were beginning to call themselves, would not stand idly by while the G.O.P. drifted into an entente cordiale with Democrats. At the Republican Convention in Kansas City that year, Reagan came close to taking the nomination. It was as a peace offering to the Reaganites that Ford replaced Rockefeller with Dole. Though not a movement conservative--meaning one who didn't have to trouble himself with the legislative compromises that were Dole's daily business--Dole was orthodox enough to get Reagan's blessing.

For Dole it was a mixed blessing. To be part of the '76 ticket, the first after Watergate, was hardship duty. Paired with the benign Ford, he dutifully fulfilled his role as designated raptor, snapping away at Carter-Mondale, but it didn't work. After the election, not only did the Democrats have the White House, but just a dozen Governors were Republicans. In Congress the G.O.P. was a battered minority in both houses.

Four years later, the party had regained the White House, the Senate and half the governorships. What happened? For one thing, it was the Carter years--high inflation, high interest rates, Soviet tanks in Afghanistan and American hostages in Tehran. But the Republican Party, which had already found a uniquely appealing candidate in Reagan, also found a fantastically appealing new theme: tax cutting.

Whatever else it was, the Reagan Revolution was indeed a 180 degrees turn in the party's views of deficit spending. For more than a century the G.O.P. had been the party of balanced budgets. Goldwater actually opposed Kennedy's 1963 tax cut on the grounds that spending cuts had to come first. But the constant warnings against deficits, and the corresponding insistence that popular but costly programs had to be cut, had also made the G.O.P. a party of bitter medicine. Democrats could promise more sugar at every election year. By the late 1970s the G.O.P. was asking itself which role it wanted to play, Cassandra--or Santa Claus?

Enter eight reindeer, to the sound of sleigh bells. Supply-side theory, developed by Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer and passionately advanced by New York Representative Jack Kemp, held that sharp cuts in income taxes would actually increase government revenues by unleashing the pent-up power of the economy. Jobs and higher wages would explode like popcorn, from which higher tax revenues would follow, despite the lower rates. In no time, the supply-side theory went from being a disputed intellectual curiosity to being the unofficial doctrine of the party. It made possible a new, infinitely optimistic Republicanism, one that permitted Reagan to promise lower taxes without reductions in the most beloved federal benefits, like Social Security and Medicare. Popular programs at popular prices. Attention, K-mart voters.

One reason taxes became a sharper issue is that prosperity had moved so many wage earners into the middle class, lunch-pail Democrats turned two-car suburbanites. Then inflation pushed them into ever higher marginal brackets. That immense new middle class began focusing on what government took from them, a chunk of their paychecks, instead of the things it gave them, like student loans and government-backed mortgages. In 1978 California produced the tax revolt that culminated in Proposition 13, a 57% cut in property taxes. That same year Kemp and Delaware Senator William Roth Jr. proposed a 30% across-the-board federal tax cut.

The 25% Kemp-Roth cut approved in the first year of Reagan's presidency failed to produce revenue in anything like the amounts the theorists had projected. Meanwhile, throughout the Reagan years, though discretionary spending dropped by more than a third, not a single major federal spending program was eliminated. Republicans were still unwilling to embrace Goldwater's frank and fatally unpopular rejection of the big-budget entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. (When the G.O.P. Congress made a feint at Medicare last year, its approval rating plummeted.) The predictable result was a massive increase in the federal deficit, $1.5 trillion over eight years, and a crisis that reopened the split between supply-siders and fiscal conservatives like Dole and George Bush. To this day, movement conservatives resent Dole for pushing through a $98.3 billion tax increase in 1982 followed by another for $50 billion two years later--the undertakings that led Newt Gingrich to call him the "tax collector for the welfare state"--and for supporting the 1990 tax deal Bush made with Democrats to bring the budget in line.

But the appeal of supply-side has never faded in many Republican circles, as Dole just proved when he picked Kemp as his running mate and unveiled an across-the-board 15% income-tax-cut plan. Though the cut opens him to attack from both Clinton and Ross Perot for abandoning his commitment to a balanced budget, it offers a galvanizing issue that isn't ideologically charged. Tax cutting is virtually a centrist issue, focused on the pleasure center to be found in every voter.

In the 1980s the Republican Party also became the first of the two parties to capitalize fully on some powerful new campaign tools: computerized direct mail, tracking polls, focus groups, marketing techniques. In the hands of conservative activists like Howard Philips and Richard Viguerie, those helped the G.O.P. identify and link disparate groups of the discontented. And among the most discontented of all were the evangelical and Fundamentalist voters who would emerge as the Christian right. It was race and taxes, two of the primal G.O.P. issues, that first galvanized them. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, took 56% of the evangelical vote in 1976. But the Internal Revenue Service and the Carter Justice Department later sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of some private religious academies that appeared to have been established to give white parents the option of segregated schools. The fight against that irs ruling mobilized churchgoers already repelled by an unbridled secular world.

Though conservative Christians threw themselves behind Reagan, he didn't deliver on abortion and school prayer. By 1988 the Christian right appeared to be in eclipse. Televangelism was in bad odor. Jimmy Swaggart was succumbing to sins of the flesh. Jim Bakker was convicted that year of fraud. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was disintegrating. (Like Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, it had never been a grass-roots organization so much as a media-sustained emanation from its celebrity chief.) After early success in Michigan and the Iowa caucuses, the 1988 presidential campaign of Pat Robertson tanked.

But just as Goldwater's 1964 defeat obscured the importance of the conservative network his campaign left behind, Robertson's quick fade disguised the enduring groundwork he had laid. From the congregations mobilized by Robertson (and his leftover computerized mailing lists) came the Christian Coalition. A true grass-roots organization that now claims a membership of 1.7 million, the coalition brought to the Christian right a new dimension of political credibility, meaning the power to deliver votes the way unions and big-city political machines used to do for Democrats.

And also the power to demand payback. In his book Active Faith, Ralph Reed, the coalition's executive cherub, asserts that his members and sympathizers constitute 40% of the Republican vote. Earlier this year, when Dole's primary campaign was wobbling badly, the coalition, which has given him its unofficial backing for some time, pulled out all the stops to deliver his crucial victory in South Carolina, the beginning of the end for Buchanan.

Part of the G.O.P. dilemma is the paradox of answered prayers. The interests of blue-collar workers and Christian moralists, the two groups that have flocked to the party since the '60s, don't always square with the interests of its third and most enduring constituency, freewheeling capitalists. Free enterprise is a powerful and munificent system that also has a way of eliminating jobs and stifling pay raises while contriving new threats to the moral order, from cyberporn to Courtney Love. And so the moralists and low-wage earners who are now part of the coalition sometimes see a role for government intervention where the business wing sees none.

It was from the tangled core of this predicament that Pat Buchanan's insurgency arose. Buchanan tried to mobilize blue-collar Republicans by speaking to their conservatism on abortion and sexual matters and to their anxieties about the economy. But the solution he offered them, protectionism, has almost no support within the upper echelons of his party. What G.O.P. leaders like party chairman Haley Barbour resented most about Buchanan was his threat to change the focus of their message from taxes to wages, a subject that makes the business wing uncomfortable.

To their relief, Buchanan was a self-canceling phenomenon. His protectionism turned off as many workers as it attracted. And coyly bigoted formulations had been embedded in his language for so long that his warnings against greedy corporate chiefs got lost in his self-produced clouds of static. But Buchanan's flourish was one more warning to Dole that his party is a breakable coalition, subject to passions its leadership can't always manage.

Can Dole simultaneously moderate and mobilize all the parts of that unstable mixture? The crucial factor is time. Pulling yourself back from the ideological edge is a project that can take years. Just ask the Democrats. Dole has until Nov. 5.