COLUMNS RIGHT/JAMES P. PINKERTON : Haley Barbour’s Challenge: Reinventing Republicanism : Eschewing ‘litmus tests’ but mindful of the segmentation of his party, the new chairman struggles to find the GOP’s niche.

The good news for Republicans about the election of Haley Barbour as their chairman is that the GOP will probably win more elections. The bad news is that fewer and fewer people care.

Ideology is replacing party partisanship as the organizing principle of politics. Traditionally, the two major parties have been relatively non-ideological holding companies for diverse constituencies. F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition included communists and klansmen. The Reagan coalition was a “big tent” embracing the religious right as well as secular yuppies.

But blind partisanship can’t survive the searching eye of TV. The lowest-common-denominator approach may bring victory, but it is unsatisfying to issue-oriented citizens who feel empowered by picking up the phone and chewing out a politician on C-SPAN. The new politics is more worried about getting a point across than getting someone elected.

It is often said that the Republican National Committee must go back to basics, but the very terminology--”nuts and bolts”--clanks with the sound of the pre-Information Age. Barbour’s Republicans will have to evolve toward a new, participatory, high-tech but user-friendly politics, and maybe even learn from the techniques of the candidates and causes that defeated them last year.

Hot personalities and hot-button issues make for ad hoc activists, not rank-and-file loyalists. Money and energy now flow directly into crusades: pro-life or pro-choice, anti-tax, anti-gun, etc. One of the two parties will still win most elections, but incumbents find themselves atop a permanent floating crap game of unstable, vox pop- driven allegiances. Ask Zoe Baird, whose congressional support burned away in a firestorm of phone calls and faxes.

On the left and the right, “message” candidates raise money, run and then regroup on the airwaves. CNN hosts both Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan. And when a new star--Ross Perot--was born on “Larry King Live,” that was a sign that the traditional path to political power--working your way up--had been short- circuited. Expect a lot more “Bob Roberts”-type candidates; contemptuous of the parties, they will run on their own egos.

Activists often bypass elected officials completely, using initiatives and referenda to get what they want, be it limits on growth or limits on terms.

The new tribunes of the people are Rush and Phil and Sonya Live, delivering immediate political gratification to a populace too impatient even for direct mail. The parties are too slow, and as a result were irrelevant to the fast-breaking furor over Clarence Thomas, the House bank or gays in the military.

Gay activists are the cutting edge of the new post-modern, post-party politics. Their effective use of a visual vocabulary of iconic symbols--the pink triangle, the red ribbon, the “Silence Equals Death” slogan and, most effective of all, the Quilt--emblemizes and energizes not only the fight against AIDS but the whole gay-rights movement. With their media access and savvy, gays have earned their place at the deconstructed political table. And if history records that President Clinton broke his promise to the middle class but kept his commitment to the gays on military service, then that will be proof that they have old-fashioned clout as well.

Barbour is smart to de-emphasize the abortion issue. “A fellow who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20% traitor,” he said. It remains to be seen, however, what the hard-core Right-to-Lifers will do in response. Will they stay in the Republican harness, or will they give up on the GOP and move toward direct action, such as Operation Rescue?

Barbour will seek to make the GOP “more than a clearinghouse: a developer of new ideas. . . . We shouldn’t just admit our diversity,” he said, “we should be proud of it.”

He will have to find a niche for the national committee amid a segmented internal GOP market that includes, from left to right, the Republican Majority Coalition of former Congressman Tom Campbell, Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett’s Empower America and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.