CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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...