THE NEXT ACT

By Richard Lacayo

Here's one thing at least that Republicans have in common with Democrats. Every few years they give off the odor of desperation. Both parties rest on such unstable coalitions that after every big election the losing side goes into a mortal funk, wondering whether its crucial constituencies are cutting loose once and for all. One year after George Bush was proclaimed unbeatable, the Republicans were sifting through the wreckage of their loss to Bill Clinton. Two years after that, the Democrats lost Congress so badly they were asking if the numbers would ever add up their way again. Now it's the Republicans, so euphoric in '94, hitting the skids again. Is it possible to talk about a manic-depressive cycle in the two-party system?

The re-election of not only a Democratic President but also a popular Vice President who can barely wait for 2000 is almost too much for Republicans to bear. So they will spend the next few months doing what political animals do by nature when struck, which is lick their wounds and bare their fangs at one another. The Republicans will worry, and they should. Women, the new swing vote, more or less deserted them. The old swing vote, blue-collar Reagan Democrats, who are culturally conservative but not so crazy about Big Business, drifted away after Pat Buchanan faded. In polls conducted only days before the election, practically every gender, racial and age group favored Clinton except for households with incomes over $75,000. The latter group constitutes about 12% of the country. This is not good news for the Republican future.

Was it just Dole who got rejected this week, or was it some fundamental dimension of the G.O.P. message? And if it was the message, which part? Did Dole move too far to the center or not far enough? Should he have stuck to tax cutting, as Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes kept insisting, or run against abortion and vulgar pop culture, as William Bennett and the Christian right were hoping? At one time or another, Dole tried to run all those ways, so his loss cast a shadow over every label and lets every wing of the party read the returns in the way that suits it best. But when the fighting is over, the only question that will really matter is this one: If the Republican Party is in pieces again, who picks them up?

One major contender, naturally, is the religious right, which controls much of the party apparatus on the state and local level. Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition, is promising that in the next presidential race his 1.7 million-member organization will coordinate with other religious conservatives early in the Republican primaries to name their candidate. And this time, it won't be a halfhearted culture warrior like Dole.

Along the sawtooth edges of the Christian right, Reed is under suspicion as a political strategist who found religion rather than a committed religious conservative who found politics. He knows there is grumbling about him for tacitly backing Dole, a loser who hardly even touched on abortion and family issues in the campaign. Reed's defense--"It's hard to make the argument that this race would have been significantly closer if the nominee had been someone else" (Buchanan? Alan Keyes?)--is plausible enough. Even so, next time the pressure will be on Reed to find somebody agreeable to Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, hard-liners who want a candidate like Bill Bennett, one who talks their talk.

Then there are the supply-siders, who became a force in the party again this year largely because centimillionaire Steve Forbes discovered the joy of politicking. Forbes says Dole's 15% tax cut didn't catch on because Dole failed to stay on message. "If you don't hammer that proposal consistently, it becomes fuzzy," Forbes says. He will stay in the game through his think tank, a required accessory for any serious candidate, and may run again in 2000. But don't count on Kemp. Fellow conservatives are turning against him for declining to play Dole's attack dog. Kemp has been telling friends that he expects to spend the year 2000 at his condo in Vail, Colorado.

And Buchanan? During the primaries a lot of blue-collar Republicans gathered behind him because he took up their grievances against corporate America. His way of tiptoeing up to the edges, and over the edges, of racism and anti-Semitism infuriated liberals. (And they were not alone.) But it was Buchanan's protectionism and his attacks on greedy executives that really turned off the business wing of his party. For decades the G.O.P. flirted with the populist attack on elites, a venerable Democratic tactic that Richard Nixon borrowed for his own purposes. Now that Buchanan was giving that message a serious class-based edge, however, G.O.P. leaders flinched and ran. "The Republican Party can't do more than mouth populism," says G.O.P. strategist Kevin Phillips.

A handful of Republican moderates have started to talk about establishing an institutional counterweight to the right wing. Their analysis is familiar. The candidates most likely to win presidential elections can't get past the conservatives who control the party's nominating processes. So they want to start a centrist think tank and cheering section modeled after the Democratic Leadership Council, the group formed in the 1980s to keep the Democrats from veering left on every issue. "All I want to do is enable the party to get back on course," says five-term New York Representative Amo Houghton, who is promoting the idea.

How far will they go? "The moderates have the best argument," says neoconservative turned neoliberal Michael Lind, author of Up from Conservatism. "It remains to be seen if they have the same organization." Republican centrists are a dwindling breed. In the Senate, conciliators like Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine--and Bob Dole--are leaving or have left. The G.O.P. leadership there is dominated by "movement" conservatives like Trent Lott of Mississippi and Don Nickles of Oklahoma. And the House leadership--Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay--is Exhibit A in the argument that hard-right Southerners have taken over the party.

Is there a Republican center? As they have in the past, Governors may provide some of it. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman could help her party overcome its problems among female voters, though Whitman's pro-choice position on abortion makes her unacceptable to the right. And there's Colin Powell, who is laying the groundwork for something or other. Last week he made last-minute donations to five Republican candidates around the country. One was Robert Smith of New Hampshire, a very conservative Senator who would ordinarily be an odd enthusiasm for Powell, who supports abortion rights and affirmative action. But Smith has been one of the most powerful Republicans in New Hampshire, where the first primary of campaign 2000 will be held. Powell's donation suggests that he might be hoping to make peace with the conservatives who declared war on him this year just as he was nearing his decision on whether to run.

Meanwhile, over at the offices of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, a group of congressional staff members meet once a week to plot strategy for the next four years. Lately they have been talking about the need to set up quickly a Select Committee on Impeachment in the House. Their hopes hinge on scandal plus the all but inevitable recession. A lot of Republicans are hoping they don't have to do any rethinking at all. Maybe the best formula for the future of their party is just to do whatever makes Clinton's second term miserable, then sit back and wait.

--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM