CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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Part of the G.O.P. dilemma is the paradox of answered prayers. The interests of blue-collar workers and Christian moralists, the two groups that have flocked to the party since the '60s, don't always square with the interests of its third and most enduring constituency, freewheeling capitalists. Free enterprise is a powerful and munificent system that also has a way of eliminating jobs and stifling pay raises while contriving new threats to the moral order, from cyberporn to Courtney Love. And so the moralists and low-wage earners who are now part of the coalition sometimes see a role for government intervention where the business wing sees none.

It was from the tangled core of this predicament that Pat Buchanan's insurgency arose. Buchanan tried to mobilize blue-collar Republicans by speaking to their conservatism on abortion and sexual matters and to their anxieties about the economy. But the solution he offered them, protectionism, has almost no support within the upper echelons of his party. What G.O.P. leaders like party chairman Haley Barbour resented most about Buchanan was his threat to change the focus of their message from taxes to wages, a subject that makes the business wing uncomfortable.

To their relief, Buchanan was a self-canceling phenomenon. His protectionism turned off as many workers as it attracted. And coyly bigoted formulations had been embedded in his language for so long that his warnings against greedy corporate chiefs got lost in his self-produced clouds of static. But Buchanan's flourish was one more warning to Dole that his party is a breakable coalition, subject to passions its leadership can't always manage.

Can Dole simultaneously moderate and mobilize all the parts of that unstable mixture? The crucial factor is time. Pulling yourself back from the ideological edge is a project that can take years. Just ask the Democrats. Dole has until Nov. 5.