CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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Meanwhile, history would go on delivering Democrats to the G.O.P. by the truckload. As the 1970s got under way, the civil rights movement proceeded from voter registration and lunch-counter integration into trickier questions like court-enforced school busing and affirmative action, areas in which Northern whites started to see a cost to themselves. Then came Roe v. Wade and the first stirrings of gay activism, two more developments that sent a lot of blue-collar Democrats running for cover. Cover was the G.O.P. Soon they would be joined by the neoconservatives--apostate liberal intellectuals, including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who fell out with the Democrats over social policy and the cold war.

Nothing less than the calamity of Watergate interrupted the G.O.P.'s good fortune. When the '74 election brought a large infusion of Democrats into the House and Senate, liberals could tell themselves their world view still comfortably matched the sentiments of a voting majority. It wasn't so. Republicans were about to recapture the country. First, though, the conservatives had to recapture their party.

During the Ford years, the right was deeply disaffected by his continuing pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, his tolerance of high federal spending and his choice of none other than Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Ronald Reagan's challenge to Ford in the 1976 primaries was the signal that movement conservatives, as they were beginning to call themselves, would not stand idly by while the G.O.P. drifted into an entente cordiale with Democrats. At the Republican Convention in Kansas City that year, Reagan came close to taking the nomination. It was as a peace offering to the Reaganites that Ford replaced Rockefeller with Dole. Though not a movement conservative--meaning one who didn't have to trouble himself with the legislative compromises that were Dole's daily business--Dole was orthodox enough to get Reagan's blessing.

For Dole it was a mixed blessing. To be part of the '76 ticket, the first after Watergate, was hardship duty. Paired with the benign Ford, he dutifully fulfilled his role as designated raptor, snapping away at Carter-Mondale, but it didn't work. After the election, not only did the Democrats have the White House, but just a dozen Governors were Republicans. In Congress the G.O.P. was a battered minority in both houses.

Four years later, the party had regained the White House, the Senate and half the governorships. What happened? For one thing, it was the Carter years--high inflation, high interest rates, Soviet tanks in Afghanistan and American hostages in Tehran. But the Republican Party, which had already found a uniquely appealing candidate in Reagan, also found a fantastically appealing new theme: tax cutting.