THE PLIGHT OF THE G.O.P.

For the Grand Old Party, these should be the good new days. Republicans control the White House, as they have for 16 of the past 24 years. Under their grow-slow policies, the economy has been rebounding for 16 months, and inflation has been brought down to the second-lowest rate (after Switzerland) in the Western world. Not only has prosperity been restored, but the nation is at peace, and the cities and campuses are cool. The pollsters report that public confidence is on the rise and that Americans are becoming more conservative--suspicious of Big Government and the big-spending programs fashioned by Democrats. All in all, a nice backdrop for heady Republican success at the ballot box.

But for Republicans gathered this week in Kansas City, success seems as elusive as the smoke that wreathes convention halls--a dream without much political substance. There is the customary hope and hoopla, the bunting and bravado, but underneath run currents of deep anxiety. Whoever gains the Republican nomination this year inherits a split and dispirited party and faces the heavily favored, consensus-minded Democrat Jimmy Carter. If the G.O.P. candidate loses in November, the already wobbly party will become even shakier. Not just its opponents but Republicans themselves are wondering whether the G.O.P. can survive much longer.

When House Majority Leader Thomas ("Tip") O'Neill says that Gerald Ford is the "last Republican President," his remark can be dismissed as partisan indulgence. But Oregon's former Republican Governor Tom McCall has to be taken more seriously when he says, with gallows wit: "I thought the party was already six feet under. You should speak more respectfully of the dead." Warns House Minority Leader John Rhodes: "If the G.O.P. does not experience a significant change in political fortunes by 1978, it is likely to go the way of the Whigs."*

The fact that Republicans have occupied the White House for most of the past quarter-century tends to obscure the party's almost steady loss of power at other levels of government. The G.O.P. has not controlled Congress since 1954, when it had 48 Senators and 221 Representatives; today it is down to 38 Senators and 145 Representatives (v. 290 for the Democrats). There are only 13 Republican Governors, and the party has a majority of both houses of the legislatures in only four states (Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota and Vermont). In many Southern states the Republicans have virtually no officeholders and little organization. Even in the once strongly Republican Middle West and New England, most of the state legislators, Governors, U.S. Senators and Representatives are now Democrats.

Clearly, the public is becoming disenchanted with the G.O.P. A recent Gallup poll reports that only 22% of the American public consider themselves to be Republicans--down from 34% in 1954. But 46% of the public say they are Democrats, the same percentage as in 1954.

Nelson Polsby, a top political scientist at Berkeley, argues that the Republicans are so weak that the U.S. no longer has a real two-party system: "I would call it a 1 1/2-party system." Robert Teeter, President Ford's chief pollster, believes that the G.O.P. has reached "permanent minority status." According to this theory it will eke out a presidential victory only when the majority party stumbles, as the Democrats did by dividing over the Viet Nam issue in 1968 and over George McGovern's policies in 1972. If the Democrats do not make crippling mistakes, the G.O.P. seems destined to finish second.

More optimistic Republicans note the dismal shape that the Democrats were in following the defeat of McGovern and take comfort in the cyclical nature of American politics. After a drubbing the G.O.P. tends to rebound, as it did following Barry Goldwater's huge loss in 1964. Observes Teeter: "Every time the Republican Party takes a real shellacking, it bounces back. But it's like a rubber ball. It doesn't bounce as high as it did the time before."

The present plight of the G.O.P. argues against an easy comeback. As the party has grown smaller, it has become more set in its ways --less willing to compromise or extend itself. Too many moderates have dropped out of the G.O.P., especially in reaction to Watergate. Local party organizations have been left in the control of conservatives, who are inclined to be suspicious of almost all Government initiatives, however beneficial they may seem to the rest of the country. They also tend to oppose detente with the Soviets, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and gun control, for all of which there is a large constituency in most parts of the U.S.

One moderate who fled to the waiting embrace of the Democrats in 1973 is Michigan Congressman Donald Riegle. He felt that his faction of the party no longer had any influence. "We were like the tail of the dog; we couldn't wag the dog." A Republican pondering whether to follow Riegle's example is Maryland's Charles Mathias (see box). Another moderate, Manhattan Lawyer Rita Hauser, former U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, complains: "We are viewed by the right wing as if we were lepers. I have nothing against conservatives, but they are not willing to make the happy pragmatic blend, and that is why they lose."

The conservatives mounted the Reagan challenge and seemed prepared to risk repeating the electoral disaster of 1964, when many state and local Republican officeholders were carried to defeat along with Goldwater. In a way, ideology means more than victory to the far right. Many are agitating for a third party that would contain only the ideologically pure of heart. William Rusher, publisher of the National Review, is a conservative who wants to start a third party. But he writes scathingly of some conservatives as "personalities who are simply incapable of participating in a collective effort, especially if that effort requires them to subordinate their own preference to a serious degree. For them, the thrill of political action lies not in the possibility of success, but in the struggle itself or even in defeat. The impact of this masochism upon healthier forms of political action can be catastrophic."

President Ford would seem to be an improbable target of conservative wrath. In his battle with Ronald Reagan, he has moved to the right on domestic and foreign issues. He has toned down the activist, imperial presidency of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He has battled Big Government and followed moderate-to-conservative economic policies. Yet he is not given much more credit by the Reaganite right than he is by the Democrats. If Ford wins the nomination, he will get the backing of some Reagan supporters but by no means all. National polls indicate that as many as a third of the registered Republicans say they would not work for Ford and would vote for Jimmy Carter. A loss in November would intensify the fratricidal warfare.

In party battles, the moderates are often no match for the conservatives. Some fault the moderates for lack of nerve, but lack of know-how may be the real problem. A recent example: the failure of Missouri Governor Kit Bond to hold his state delegation for Ford. "He got his teeth kicked at his own state convention," says Oregon's Tom McCall. "The liberals don't have time to get their masters and doctorates in intraparty conniving. They're administrators." The latest Harris poll shows that Republicans prefer Ford over Reagan 63% to 33%. Reagan is such a close contender for the nomination because the party's conservatives have generally out-organized and outfought the moderates.

Many Republicans of the moderate variety do not have the stomach for the hard-slogging, doorbell-ringing business of precinct politics.

Democrats seem to show more flair and zest for the game, an ability to take and give hard knocks, to be down one day and up the next. Says Republican Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, former board chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.: "The Republicans fight like cats and go home and sulk. The Democrats fight like cats, and suddenly there are more cats." Clifton White, who managed Goldwater's prenomination campaign in 1964 and is now helping Ford, complains that a basic element is missing from most Republican politics: fun. "The Republicans take everything so seriously. I have had more fun with my Democratic friends than with Republicans."

The Republicans are also stuck with an image that hardly attracts people to the party. "Republicans are regarded by many as hard, callous, cruel and insensitive," writes John Rhodes in his new book on Congress, The Futile System. "We give the impression of not caring--and that is the worst possible image a political party can have." To Rita Hauser the party has the "look of country club WASPs from Texas and Southern California." Adds Walter Dean Burnham, professor of political science at M.I.T.: "The average Republican comes across as an old-fashioned kind of guy who clips coupons and is well enough off so that he does not want to share anything with anyone else and wants to hold down the public sector so that the private sector can rip people off."

Yet the Republicans have been slow to seek a new image. S.I. Hayakawa, the Republican candidate for the Senate in California, is trying to generate ideas to fill what he feels is an intellectual vacuum. "The main function of our party," he says, "appears to be to say no, no, no, to ideas originated by Democrats." In a speech before the convention platform committee last week. Treasury Secretary William Simon made the same point. "The trouble with the Republican Party, as Woodrow Wilson once observed, is that it has not had a new idea for 30 years. Well, it has been another 51 years since Wilson made his observation, and I am afraid it still holds true, at least for a growing number of voters. We need to spell out in plain language what we stand for and what we believe in."

If the Republicans could do that effectively, they would take the first step toward winning a majority, if for no other reason than that an increasing number of Americans seem to be embracing traditional Republican principles. Queried by TIME last week, President Ford offered an explanation for the apparent shift in public opinion. "Many Democrats believe that the way to solve our economic and social problems is through a large central Government which will supervise and plan most of the important activities in the economy and the nation. Based upon the experience of mankind through the ages, Republicans believe in a more limited Federal Government, with primary responsibility as close to the people as possible. More and more people are coming to believe that the Federal Government cannot solve all our problems, that it cannot spend beyond its resources, and that individual freedom and self-reliance--many of the old virtues --must be preserved."

Richard Cheney, Ford's White House chief of staff, suggests that recent election returns demonstrate how much the national mood has changed. "The economic center of gravity of the nation is moving away from programs like the Great Society; it's shifting in a more conservative direction. I think this analysis is sustained by the fact that liberals such as Morris Udall, Fred Harris and Birch Bayh didn't do very well in the Democratic primaries, while Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy sat them out; it is sustained by the fact that the Republicans have had two men in contention for the nomination who are basically conservative."

The Republicans have been slow to take advantage of the new mood. Their message, often overwhelmed by the negativism of the hard core, is not getting across. "We have done an absolutely rotten job of selling ourselves," says Washington's G.O.P. Governor Dan Evans. "We are spending too much time arguing over what part of the political spectrum we are in--giving too many saliva tests." Lamar Alexander, Republican candidate for Governor of Tennessee in 1974, complains that the party has not been as effective as Jimmy Carter in "expressing conservative life-styles and personal values." Political Analyst Kevin Phillips agrees: "A lot of practical conservatives could support Carter. He has a cultural appeal to the New Majority." In short, Carter appears to be beating the Republicans at their own conservative game--a considerable political feat for a candidate who also takes many conventionally liberal stands.

The G.O.P. has distanced itself to such an extent from many American ethnic and interest groups that it can scarcely be considered representative of the nation. Don Riegle looks over the U.S. House of Representatives and says: "You notice that on the Republican side there are no black members, not many women, very few from ethnic groups, very few from modest economic circumstances. What you see is a group like an Establishment men's service club. On the Democratic side you have the whole country represented. Because of this, the Democratic Party has a tolerance for differences, and that is its real strength." Because of its limited membership, he adds, the G.O.P. "fails to understand the problems faced by the rest of the country. It can't dope out answers."

The Kansas City convention underscores the party's narrow base. As at past conventions, a disproportionate number of the G.O.P.'s nearly 5,000 delegates and alternates will be male and rather rich. According to a CBS News survey, the Democrats had 11 % black delegates, the Republicans have 3%; the Democrats had 33% women, the Republicans have 31%; barely more than a third of the Democrats earned over $35,000 a year, v. more than half of the Republicans. The Democrats were also younger: 15% of their delegates were 30 or under, whereas the Republicans claim only 7% of that tender age; while 5% of the Democrats were 65 or older, 9% of the Republicans are in this range.

In terms of religion, there is a greater preponderance of Protestants at the Kansas City convention than there was at Madison Square Garden. Says Statistician Warren Mitofsky, who prepared the CBS survey: "Even the Irish Republican delegates are 61% Protestant and only 35% Catholic; the Democrats' Irish are 66% Catholic and 28% Protestant."

The G.O.P. has thus missed many opportunities to broaden the party. A few years ago, the Republicans were given a solid chance of becoming the dominant party in the South because of the breakup of the segregationist Democratic Party. But it was the Democrats who renewed themselves, welcomed the black voter whom they had formerly shunned, and became more entrenched than ever.

The Democrats developed a new generation of leaders--like Carter, and such past and present Governors as Florida's Reubin Askew, South Carolina's John West, Arkansas' David Pryor. Black politicians rose rapidly to power in the South, and were invariably lured by the Democrats: Georgia Congressman Andrew Young, Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, among many others.

In the South, as in much of the rest of the nation, Republicans have written off the black vote as unattainable and perhaps even unwanted. But blacks, who now constitute more than 20% of the Democratic vote, have enabled Democratic candidates to win even while losing much of the white vote; Carter showed how that works in Florida, North Carolina and Michigan. Says William McLaughlin, G.O.P. state chairman in Michigan: "The weakness of the Republican Party is that when we go to the ghetto to talk about what we have done, we have to send a white man. Because we've been unable to crack the black vote, we don't have elected black officials. We're in a chicken-and-egg situation. How do we elect that first black guy to go in and help sell our program?"

The Republican Party has also been laggard in recruiting an even more crucial ally: the big-city ethnic voter who has grown increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party and more conservative in his outlook. Back in 1968 Republican theorists like Kevin Phillips were urging the G.O.P. politicians to offer some programs that would appeal to urban Catholics, whether Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, or Czech. In his latest book, The Mediacracy, Phillips writes that traditional Republicans and ethnics have a common enemy in the new "knowledge-sector elite"--liberals and Big Government, education, foundations and the press, who tend to belittle the industrious, upward-striving lower middle classes. But once again, Republicans have not made the appropriate gestures. Phillips concludes that the G.O.P. has failed to "substitute an articulate indictment of knowledge-sector miscalculations for country club know-nothingness."

The Republican rightward tilt has become so pronounced that it will be very hard for the party to recover its balance. Yet balance is what American politics is all about. After the humiliating 1964 defeat, G.O.P. National Chairman Ray Bliss shrewdly guided the fractious party closer to the political center, thus opening the way for Nixon's victory four years later. Similarly, Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss helped his party recover from the George McGovern debacle of 1972; he even managed to bring George Wallace and Ted Kennedy together on the same Alabama platform. The question is: Can today's G.O.P. find the center again and recover its status as at least a part-time majority party?

From its beginning the G.O.P. had to struggle to become and remain a majority party; it succeeded when it reached out broadly to many groups and built a durable coalition. It was founded on an unshakable principle: opposition to slavery. In 1854, in response to Southern attempts to spread the "peculiar institution" westward, a group of dissident Whigs and Democrats met at Ripon, Wis., to form a new party, which they called Republican after the earlier party of Thomas Jefferson. As the fight over slavery intensified, the fledgling party attracted more members, but it needed something beyond the slavery issue alone. As Historian Herbert Agar writes: "No national party in America has room for men who hold one sacred belief to which all else must bow." The G.O.P. became dominant when it put together a coalition embracing many issues, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln.

Nominated for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln supported programs that would appeal to Easterner and Westerner, farmer and merchant, immigrant and homesteader. The party tried not to alienate a single group outside the South as it proposed high tariffs, land grants to railroads, federal aid for river and harbor projects, liberalized naturalization laws and free land in the West for small farmers. "Lincoln searched with superb intelligence," writes Historian Wilfred Binkley, "to discover the point of equilibrium among the conflicting social forces of the nation." It was this ability to deal with many groups under the relentless pressure of civil war that brought the nation through its worst crisis. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, but he was also the great mediator, and he set an example for subsequent party leaders to follow.

After Lincoln's assassination, power in the party passed to the so-called Radical Republicans, who lacked his breadth of outlook and were determined to impose a harsh and lasting peace on the South. During the postwar industrial boom, businessmen and the party that sympathized with them were natural allies; a nexus was thus established that would both strengthen and weaken the G.O.P. in years ahead. Businessmen took cruel advantage of the docile Republican Ulysses S. Grant, whose second term was scarred by scandal. Though tainted by its association with the Confederacy, the Democratic Party made a comeback by attacking high tariffs, tight money, and corruption in Government.

The parties were locked in roughly equal combat until the first great political manager, Mark Hanna, broke the grip of the Democratic opposition. An enlightened industrialist who treated labor as a partner, Hanna directed William McKinley's 1896 presidential campaign against the Democratic populist, William Jennings Bryan ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"). By issuing a lot of persuasive campaign broadsides, translated into several languages for immigrants, Hanna convinced laborers as well as businessmen that Bryan's demand for the free coinage of silver would devalue the dollar. Sound money, Hanna sloganeered, would guarantee everyone a "full dinner pail." McKinley's landslide assured Republican domination during most of the first third of the 20th century.

Assassinated shortly after reelection, McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, whom Hanna called a "crazy man." With an unrivaled showmanship and zest for office, T.R. became the best coalition builder since Lincoln, attracting workers and farmers, reformers and imperialists. He borrowed from the Progressive program to curtail the growing power of the trusts, regulate the railroads, establish standards for food and drugs, and set aside public land for conservation. He strengthened his hold on the electorate by showing the flag around the world. "I took the [Panama] Canal Zone," he boasted.

Yet he turned on his own party when he was disappointed by the conservative tendencies of his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. In the manner of Ronald Reagan, Roosevelt challenged a sitting President. He narrowly lost to Taft at the raucous G.O.P. Convention, which was described by Mr. Dooley as "a combination iv th' Chicago fire, St. Bartholomew's massacre, the battle iv th' Boyne, the life iv Jesse James and th' night iv th' big wind." Then T.R. formed a third party (Bull Moose) and ran in the election. By splitting the Republican vote, he enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. In 1920 a combination of war-weariness and opposition to Wilson's single-minded support of the League of Nations returned the Republicans to power.

The 1920s were so prosperous that Republicans did little more than enjoy the boom and take credit for it. They moved closer to Big Business and pursued the twin policies of high tariffs and low taxes. The loudest dissenting voice was that of farmers, whose prices fell throughout the period. The era was symbolized by the presidency of the flinty Yankee Calvin Coolidge, who did and said as little as possible. The country, he was sure, could run itself--and for a time, at least, he was right.

Herbert Hoover was perfectly qualified to continue this style of government, but he became a casualty of the Depression. The groups that had gone along with the G.O.P. as long as there was prosperity broke away to vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Blacks, Jews and other urban ethnic groups had been reliably Republican before the Depression; Roosevelt's appeal and his social programs made them solidly Democratic. Unable to prevent F.D.R. from being elected to four terms, the Republicans seemed to be retired into permanent opposition. The G.O.P. split into two groups--liberal internationalists and conservative isolationists, a division that hindered a recovery at the polls. The party did not regain the presidency until a popular war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, announced that he was a Republican.

Ike won in a landslide in 1952, picking up large chunks of the Roosevelt coalition, especially Southerners and urban Catholics. His victory was largely a personal one; he did little to rebuild the party and, in his exasperation over its archconservatives, even considered starting a new one. In 1960 his Vice President, Richard Nixon, narrowly lost to John Kennedy, who reassembled parts of the F.D.R. coalition. When Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and was then overwhelmingly re-elected four years later, the G.O.P. appeared to have its first opportunity since 1932 to become a majority party. But Watergate quickly put an end to the dream.

Though the odds are against a Republican rebound any time soon, the G.O.P. has recently acquired an important advantage in that its basic principles have returned to favor. The so-called new conservatism, if not exactly sweeping the land, is gently grazing it. As Ford and other Republicans emphasize, disappointment with many Government programs has brought a renewed respect for individualism and selfhelp. Dismay over the best-laid plans of bureaucrats has led to a new appreciation that the free market is the best provider of wealth. There seems to be new truth in the Republican axiom that the best government is the least government, that the most useful assistance has the fewest strings attached. As the crime rate has continued to rise, Americans are catching up with the basically Republican notion that punishment remains the surest deterrent. Law-and-order is not necessarily a slogan for oppressing minorities but an essential ingredient for civilized life.

When Republicans make an effort to seek out this new awareness, they often discover it among groups that not long ago were the staunchest supporters of quite different principles. Says Charles Freeman, a Young Republican who is trying to recruit party workers: "Four years ago, I was booed off the stage when I tried to speak for Nixon at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Now I find the students more serious about themselves and about the future, and some of them are coming into the party." Gilbert Fitzhugh, who travels to colleges to express a businessman's view, has found a dramatic shift in attitude: "Campuses are so much better than they were ten years ago that there is no comparison. The students are ahead of their teachers in their doubts about Keynesian economics. They are beginning to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch."

Blacks are also beginning to question liberal assumptions. Willie Williams, the eleventh child of a black Mississippi sharecropper, is a realtor and Republican activist who is fed up with what he calls the Democratic snow job, or self-serving rhetoric. Republicans, he believes, could appeal to blacks by stressing economic opportunity. Says he: "I feel I can control my own destiny if I get a chance at running a small business for myself. Blacks are going to have to deal with life as it really is. There is no advantage in going to the country club if you don't have the money to buy yourself a drink." Thomas Hurt, a retired schoolteacher in Birmingham, Ala., is a loyal Republican who felt shut out by the local white party for many years. But this year he was elected a delegate to the national convention and his hopes for the party have revived: "Quite a few of the thinking class of blacks are getting away from the ultraliberalism of the Democratic Party and are tired of being heavily taxed." any other people would move toward the Republican Party if the G.O.P. met them halfway.

This calls for a certain initiative and enterprise, expansiveness and elasticity--qualities that have been all too absent from much of the party in recent years. Says John Zagame, who two years ago plunged into politics at the age of 22 and was elected to the New York state assembly: "The only way that we can control the Government is to appeal across party lines to a broader spectrum of American people. The party's role is to proselytize its principles--less Government participation, less control, fewer subsidies, more independence for the average citizen."

On those principles, at least, the party's moderates and conservatives can find common ground--and the party needs both groups if it is to prosper. Says Glenn Gerstell, president of the liberal Republican Ripon Society: "If there's one thing that separates a liberal Republican from a liberal Democrat, it is that Democrats when faced with social problems turn to the Government. A Republican looks to private enterprise." Jeanne Cronin, executive director of Ripon, recalls that as a social worker in Philadelphia "I saw that local control worked much better in most programs than bureaucratic control from Washington." Party liberals and conservatives can unite, she believes, in an attack on the Democratic Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, which decrees that the Federal Government must take all steps--including public employment, if necessary --to bring the jobless rate among adults down to 3% within four years. "Full employment is a good objective," she says, "but the bill unnecessarily bypasses the private sector. Too much money will be spent to set up the administrative bureaucracy."

With drive and imagination, some Republicans have given their party a new look and a new life, demonstrating what can be accomplished in the face of Democratic majorities. Among them:

> Michigan Governor William Milliken, 54, is a fiscal conservative with close ties to the business community. Last fall he trimmed $127.3 million from the state budget and he has started a persuasive campaign to lure new business to Michigan. He also makes frequent forays into ethnic areas and appoints blacks, Hispanics and members of other minorities to state posts. He has attracted enough activists to the party so that almost every political office will be contested by the Republicans this year. The G.O.P. is given a chance of picking up two or three congressional seats, and its candidate for the Senate, Marvin Esch, Congressman from Ann Arbor, may defeat Don Riegle, the G.O.P. renegade.

> Richard Rosenbaum, 45, chairman of the New York Republican Party, is the first Jew to hold a post that was usually occupied by upper-crust WASPS. He scarcely hides his ethnicity, which he doubtless reckons to be an asset to the G.O.P.; he is given to Yiddish slang, and during Passover he sometimes takes a lunch of matzoh and gefilte fish to meetings. Little that happens among Republicans in New York escapes his watchful eye, and his firm hand has kept some of his state's delegates from straying from President Ford. Rosenbaum has also lobbied hard in Washington for more aid to the hard-pressed Northeast. He has set up committees to draw blacks, Hispanics and other groups to the party. "Some of what we have to do is nuts-and-bolts organization. But that's only half the job. We have to broaden our appeal to pick up Democrats and independents."

> Chuck Slocum, 29, Republican State Chairman in Minnesota, would appear to have one of the most hopeless jobs in the party. He faces the awesome strength of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, which fills most of the offices in the state and produces such stalwarts as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Governor Wendell Anderson. But Slocum is not intimidated. He has been trying everything to strengthen his party, including altering its name a bit, to the Independent Republican Party. Convinced that the D.F.L. has reached its "outer limits," Slocum is appealing to all the groups who traditionally join the Democrats. The state G.O.P. now has separate divisions for women, youths, blacks, senior citizens and even labor. Says Slocum: "The polls show that most people agree with our programs, but we have a whale of a time getting that message across in a humane way."

> Robert Ray, 47, Governor of Iowa, enjoys an 82% popularity rating by combining conservative principle with reasonable reform in a state where most other officeholders are Democrats. He has resisted general tax increases and has repealed levies on foods and drugs. He has also taken stands in favor of abortion and E.R. A. Appalled by the Goldwater disaster of 1964, which cost Iowa its Republican image, Ray resolved never to let party polarization occur again. Under his leadership the G.O.P. has slowly climbed back to a competitive position in the state. "I think the mood here is quite good," he says. "Two years ago, I made some calls to try to convince people to run for the legislature and got no's from almost everyone. This time, there's lots of enthusiasm. It's a completely different attitude."

The success of these Republicans demonstrates what G.O.P. history also reveals: the party does best--achieves a majority and attains its goals--when it reaches outward rather than when it turns within. Its function, after all, is to perform as a political party, not as a sanctuary for inviolate ideas. Its role is to interpret these principles for a wider public, to make Republicanism a living, relevant creed. The party needs conservatives, at least some liberals, all kinds of moderates--plus women, Catholics, ethnics, blacks, and anyone else who can subscribe to most though not necessarily all Republican ideas. The old party obviously is not so grand today, yet decay is not inevitable. Republicans have made an impressive start in examining their own deficiencies, such bruising introspection being in the best Republican tradition of selfhelp. But the party's future will be assured only when it has made itself so vital to Americans that they cannot do without it.

*The conservative, nationalist-minded party of the early 19th century, which favored a maximum of government assistance to business and a minimum of regulation; the Whigs expired in 1856 after sharp defeats at the polls.

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