Republicans: Anchors Aweigh

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Some moderates fear nonetheless that they will be thwarted by what many see as a general drift toward the right in the U.S. One of them recalls the meeting between a group of moderates, including Javits, Pennsylvania's Senator Hugh Scott and Henry Cabot Lodge, at a Manhattan restaurant after the 1964 debacle; all agreed that the Republican right wing was washed up. "They were wrong," he said. "Goldwater missed his timing by four years. Why do you imagine Reagan has come on as fast as he has?" His analysis could be correct. But it may also turn out that voters in the suburbs and big cities of the East, Midwest and even parts of the South are less receptive to Reagan's appeal than was California's electorate.

In any event, with traditional electoral patterns changing and once invincible Democratic bastions crumbling, the major population centers are the places where next year's election, and many another to come, will be won or lost. Last year young, energetic, nondoctrinaire Republican candidates won victories from New England to the Pacific Northwest. If the G.O.P. plans realistically to capture the White House in 1968, it can do so only with the same sort of men—and a platform shaped to the needs of an urban nation sorely in need not of new faces alone but also of new ideas and the popular support to translate them into reality.