A CHANCE TO LEAD

AS they start on the road to November, the Republicans are united. Now what will they do with their unity? Richard Nixon is clearly in tune with his party. Will he be in tune with the country?

These are the chief questions that emerge from the Republican Convention and will dominate the political scene for the next 2 1/2 months. The American party system allows a measure of plasticity every four years. The Republicans are making the most of this chance. The painful ruptures of the past have been treated and very nearly healed--almost in a spirit of harmony or bust. After pulling back from its heartfelt but self-indulgent right-wing position of 1964, the 1968 party once more stands in the middle of its ideo logical spectrum.

Within his party Richard Nixon represents the only centripetal force. The country is troubled, the opposition divided. The rational course is to play it safe, to bet that self-preservation--just staying together as a party--will be nine-tenths of victory. It is, after all, an election in which the incumbents are in danger simply because they are incumbents. Nixon's choice of the factionally neutral Spiro Agnew as running mate was part of that strategy.

These assumptions, of course, may prove too neat. Unity is essential for a minority party, but the G.O.P. may find the price tag troublesome. Does harmony require straddling at the expense of commitment? Does it mean combining the vocabulary of change with the policies of conservatism? The convention offered mixed portents.

Boldface Type. Symbols of unity and progress napped like so many ensigns at fleet review. Barry Goldwater sounded like a man from the N.A.A.C.P. New York's John Lindsay agreed to second Agnew's nomination rather than serve as the rallying point for opposition to it. The platform, the keynote address, Nixon's acceptance speech and the subsidiary verbiage were on the whole impeccably progressive in tone, promising jobs, justice, education and a "piece of the action" to the poor, peace in Viet Nam, honorable conciliation with the Communists.

Those who wanted to could find less obvious signals bearing a slightly different message. Only one sentence in the platform's domestic-policy section appeared in boldface type: "We will not tolerate violence!" Somehow Nixon manages to sound more forceful and specific in emphasizing the need for law and order than in pleading for social justice. The targets of his acceptance speech are the "forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators." They are "good people. They're decent people. They work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care."

His critics might reply that Nixon's "good people" really have little cause to protest in the streets. But more to the political point is that the whites, the mature, the securely employed and the affluent combine to form a voting majority. This massive bloc belongs permanently to neither party. It follows no one ideology. Nixon seeks to attract enough of it to form an electoral majority. To do it, he must capture the imaginations of many Democrats and independents who are largely reconciled to the Big Government he likes to berate and have been cool toward Nixon in the past. At the same time, he must reckon with the disinherited, principally Negroes, who in some states can hold the balance in a tight election.

Tasteless Opulence. Nixon seems to be giving considerable weight to the kind of argument expressed by one Southern lady on the convention floor. She declared: "This is a protest year. We've got to get that protest." She did not mean Negroes or fractious students. The protesters that concern her are people "who are sick and tired of their money going out of their pockets to keep people sitting in front of TV sets all day."

A great many Americans quite understandably feel this way, and there may be political wisdom in paying heed to such feeling--especially at a time when George Wallace can he found soaring on gusts of middle-class discontent. Nixon adopted the old-style Southern strategy in the convention, extending it to put together a coalition of Southern, Border and Midwestern states; indications are that he may use a similar strategy to try to win the general election. This makes sense particularly if one bets that conservative sentiment will run wide and deep between now and Election Day, and by no means only in the South. This formula might lose Northeastern states--but it might also attract significant numbers of disgruntled voters in the North. This plan is reinforced by the echoes of riots past and prospective. A bloody battle was raging in a Negro area just across Biscayne Bay from Convention Hall. Each ghetto upheaval will make things tougher for the Democrats this year.

Compared with the Miami riot, the scene in Convention Hall seemed a little unreal at times. All political conventions, of course, convey a certain air of fantasy. But last week's assembly went somewhat further than usual in this respect because of the lack of real contention over men or issues. The very idea of nominating a self-proclaimed "unknown quantity" such as Agnew hardly helped. Neither did the tasteless opulence of Miami Beach or the well-coiffured, well-dressed appearance of the delegates. "They're nice people," said one big-city Northern Senator, "but they've just never ridden a subway." The comment was not altogether fair. It is such people who work long and hard for their political parties; affluence, or the lack of it, is not necessarily an index of social conscience. Still, the contrast between the people in the Convention Hall and the nation's grubbier problems could not be ignored.

Leeway. The Democrats will doubtless try to sharpen the contrast. Both Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy professed satisfaction at the prospect of running against a Nixon-Agnew ticket, although Humphrey had more reason to be happy. Had the Republicans picked Nelson Rockefeller, the temptation for the Democrats to desert their front runner would have been greater.

Nixon, as the challenger, will have considerable leeway in shaping the debate. He may choose to capitalize primarily on the sour mood of the moment, or he may choose a more positive, upbeat approach. He may shuttle between the relatively conservative and relatively liberal lines. He is in a good position to take any course, for so far, at least, he has retained an uncommon degree of flexibility. Nothing in the platform, nothing he himself has said, binds him in an unalterable position. Within a few weeks the nation should be able to see how Richard Nixon intends to use his new strength.

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