Perspectives on Election ’94 : It’s Rehab Time for the Democrats : Let the conservatives go, embark on a partywide soul-searching--and cultivate a liberal Newt Gingrich.

Lawrence of Arabia once mused that “there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a great defeat.” This is a precept that Democrats might want to embrace in the aftermath of Tuesday’s cataclysm. As they sift through the ashes of their party and search for items of value that might be salvaged, the one sure thing that can be plucked from the debris is a matchless opportunity for a top-to-bottom examination of what the Democratic Party is and ought to be.

What needs to be done is not some post-election assessment that focuses on the mechanics of campaigns, such as fund-raising or advertising, but a searching of the party’s soul.

Such a catharsis is not simply necessary; it is long overdue. It needed to be done in the aftermath of the Reagan victory in 1980 when the fortunes of the party sunk with the loss of the Senate majority and effective control of the House. That opportunity to define what the nation’s oldest political party actually stood for never took place because the surviving Democrats were fearful of alienating their brethren in Congress. When certain liberal members did attempt to invoke the legacy of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson in the House Democratic Caucus’ strategy sessions, a chorus of pragmatists cried that clarifying the party’s principles would send the conservative Democrats into the arms of the Republicans, and with their departure would go the party’s majority, and with it the chairmanships and other emoluments of majority status. Gillis W. Long of Louisiana, caucus chairman at the time, announced that his job was “to unify, not purify,” and that basically ended the discussion.

The party’s fortunes improved in the 1982 elections and nothing more was heard on the subject. Indeed, the most tangible outgrowth of the period of bleak party fortunes was the birth of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was dedicated to the proposition that the party could be turned away from a leftward course. But the DLC welcomed all Democrats and became less a centrist force than a classier and more cerebral alternative to the party’s national committee.

The election on Tuesday virtually wiped out the party’s philosophical center. The Democrats’ right wing had long ago disappeared. What remains is the most liberal collection of Democrats since 1974, perhaps even 1964. These are the people who must man the disaster team, along with a President who has yet to establish precisely where he stands philosophically or with which ideological coordinates he hopes to govern.

But despite the apparent bleakness of the picture for the Democrats, there has never been a better opportunity to probe the party’s essence precisely because the stakes have decreased so dramatically. There are no more chairmanships to fret about.

The announcement by Alabama’s reelected Sen. Richard Shelby that he is converting to the GOP is probably only the precursor of many more such decisions. As those Democrats who are not indelibly liberal shrink in numbers and become political curiosities, the defining lines of the party will become neater. Soon, the soul-searching can begin.

The question is not whether this self-examination should take place, but rather where it should happen and who should participate. Ideally, this autopsy ought to involve all of the significant Democratic players: the President, the Democratic members of the House and Senate and elected officials from the states--a kind of midterm convention such as the one that took place at Philadelphia in 1982, but this time specifically not for the purpose of showcasing candidates or offering seminars in the latest campaign software. It should be done sooner rather than later. Democrats are demoralized, and at the very least a gathering of this sort would apply some much-needed grief therapy--the kind of thing that is done for victims of natural disasters to reassure them that they are not suffering alone.

A national convocation to debate the future of the party would also be helpful to the surviving leaders in Congress: a new Senate minority leader yet to be chosen, House floor leader Richard Gephardt and caucus chairman Vic Fazio of California.

One thing the Democrats also need to do: find themselves a Newt Gingrich, a figure who has both the intellectual reach to produce a strategy for a party so impoverished in vision and the tactical skills to implement it. Democrats might bridle at the idea of emulating the approach of the presumed Speaker-to-be on the grounds that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but they must hold their revulsion in check. After all, one secret of waging effective warfare is to make use of what worked for the hated enemy, adapting his successful weapons and tactics to your own purpose: beating him.