CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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But the appeal of supply-side has never faded in many Republican circles, as Dole just proved when he picked Kemp as his running mate and unveiled an across-the-board 15% income-tax-cut plan. Though the cut opens him to attack from both Clinton and Ross Perot for abandoning his commitment to a balanced budget, it offers a galvanizing issue that isn't ideologically charged. Tax cutting is virtually a centrist issue, focused on the pleasure center to be found in every voter.

In the 1980s the Republican Party also became the first of the two parties to capitalize fully on some powerful new campaign tools: computerized direct mail, tracking polls, focus groups, marketing techniques. In the hands of conservative activists like Howard Philips and Richard Viguerie, those helped the G.O.P. identify and link disparate groups of the discontented. And among the most discontented of all were the evangelical and Fundamentalist voters who would emerge as the Christian right. It was race and taxes, two of the primal G.O.P. issues, that first galvanized them. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, took 56% of the evangelical vote in 1976. But the Internal Revenue Service and the Carter Justice Department later sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of some private religious academies that appeared to have been established to give white parents the option of segregated schools. The fight against that irs ruling mobilized churchgoers already repelled by an unbridled secular world.

Though conservative Christians threw themselves behind Reagan, he didn't deliver on abortion and school prayer. By 1988 the Christian right appeared to be in eclipse. Televangelism was in bad odor. Jimmy Swaggart was succumbing to sins of the flesh. Jim Bakker was convicted that year of fraud. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was disintegrating. (Like Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, it had never been a grass-roots organization so much as a media-sustained emanation from its celebrity chief.) After early success in Michigan and the Iowa caucuses, the 1988 presidential campaign of Pat Robertson tanked.

But just as Goldwater's 1964 defeat obscured the importance of the conservative network his campaign left behind, Robertson's quick fade disguised the enduring groundwork he had laid. From the congregations mobilized by Robertson (and his leftover computerized mailing lists) came the Christian Coalition. A true grass-roots organization that now claims a membership of 1.7 million, the coalition brought to the Christian right a new dimension of political credibility, meaning the power to deliver votes the way unions and big-city political machines used to do for Democrats.

And also the power to demand payback. In his book Active Faith, Ralph Reed, the coalition's executive cherub, asserts that his members and sympathizers constitute 40% of the Republican vote. Earlier this year, when Dole's primary campaign was wobbling badly, the coalition, which has given him its unofficial backing for some time, pulled out all the stops to deliver his crucial victory in South Carolina, the beginning of the end for Buchanan.