CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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The third-party presidential bid of Alabama Governor George Wallace that year awoke the G.O.P. to a powerful new theme: conservative populism. From the time of William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats had been the defenders of the little folks against the power of money that had its natural home in the Republican Party. Wallace proposed instead a world in which waitresses and factory workers were oppressed by ivy-educated policy wonks and limousine liberals, an elite who crafted busing plans while their own kids went to private schools. Between them, Nixon and Wallace took 57% of the vote in 1968.

Reading those numbers, Kevin Phillips, a Nixon campaign aide and architect of the Southern strategy, saw the future, and it worked. In his book The Emerging Republican Majority, he predicted an unbeatable G.O.P. coalition of Southern and Western voters united by their resentment of Northeastern power and their fear of urban blacks. "A new era has begun," he promised. And it had. As Michael Lind points out in his new book Up from Conservatism, after the 1934 congressional elections, the first of the New Deal era, the South had virtually no Republicans in Congress. Now it has more Republicans than Democrats, though it took until the G.O.P. sweep of 1994 to complete that tilt.

Where was Dole in all this? In and out of synch. As a Congressman in the early '60s he steered clear of racial politics. Dole supported the major civil rights bills, a political possibility for him because he represented a wheat-farming district that was less than 1% black, where racial friction was about as much of a problem as overcrowding. When the New Frontier evolved into the Great Society, he voted against some War on Poverty measures like public-housing subsidies and the bill that established Medicare. But his Small Government conservatism was open to the Big Government payout opportunities of the '60s. After his 1966 election to the Senate, Dole's first floor speech was a plea for federal aid for the handicapped. A few years later, he would join Senator George McGovern to ease eligibility for federal food stamps, a liberal priority that happened to be supported by the farmers who were his main constituency.

Yet Dole's hawkishness on Vietnam and crime issues and his unwavering loyalty to Nixon were enough to keep him in good standing with the right wing. When word got out in 1971 that Nixon was planning to make Dole chairman of the Republican National Committee, there were protests to the White House from nearly half the 43 Republicans in the Senate. Many were moderates who were afraid he would concentrate party assets on conservatives. They were wrong. One of the main lessons Dole learned from Nixon, who expanded social spending at home even as he escalated the war in Vietnam, was the importance of offering something to all Republican factions.