COLUMN ONE : Partners--and Rivals: One Party, 4 Agendas : Boosted by the Reagan revolution, Dole, Gramm, Alexander and Buchanan battle to redefine the GOP while pressing their own presidential bids.

For Republicans, it was a night to remember--and to build on.

With each passing hour on election night 1980, the returns added new dimensions to the GOP triumph. Not only had Ronald Reagan won the White House, but his party had also seized control of the Senate, long a citadel of Democratic power.

The victory was all the sweeter because only a few years before, the party had been devastated by one of the worst scandals in American history.

Suddenly, the door of opportunity was open for Republicans and for a fair number of Democrats who shared the faith in Reagan’s conservative creed. But for no one was the vista brighter than it was for Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Patrick J. Buchanan--four men who for more than a year have been principal contenders for the 1996 Republican nomination for president.

By exploiting the opportunities the Reagan era created, each in his own way would help to shape the course of the Republican Party. In a sense they would be partners but also rivals. For each would come to represent one of the main tributaries of Republican belief, and today they each compete for the right to define their party’s message and the chance to confront Democrat Bill Clinton and his credo.

Using his Senate leadership posts as steppingstones, Dole has become the chief tribune for Midwestern Republicanism, the stolid but enduring faith in a marriage of convenience between the rewards of the free market and the obligations of government.

By contrast, erstwhile Democrat Gramm, who joined the GOP soon after Reagan’s ascension, has emerged as his new party’s most aggressive apostle of the swaggering take-no-prisoners conservatism spawned by his Sun Belt base. While Dole focused on deficit reduction--even if it meant raising taxes--Gramm fashioned a bold anti-government stance.

Alexander, relying on his skills as a merchandiser of his ideas and personality, along with his experience as a Tennessee governor, has bolstered the Reagan regime’s emphasis on the much-lauded but long-neglected doctrine of federalism, laboring to transfer power from Washington to the states.

As a journalist and critic, Buchanan rode the rising tide of conservative ideology produced by the Reagan revolution to its crest, then plunged directly into the battle for the electorate, championing his own populist brand of conservatism with a hard-edged message aimed straight to the gut of his ardent supporters.

From the start, as Reagan prepared to enter the White House, it was clear to all that the stakes were monumental in this clash of ambitions and beliefs that would determine the party’s direction and leadership in the years to come. For the Republicans stood then, as they stand now, on the verge of a historic opportunity to become the nation’s majority party, a dominance the GOP had not enjoyed since before the Depression. It was a moment made even more precious because the chance had seemed to have slipped away in the previous decade.

The opportunity had initially been created by the decline of the Democratic Party after years of domination by the New Deal coalition, the seemingly implausible combination of Southern whites, Northern blue-collar workers, blacks and Jews forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt. When their unity eroded under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon thrust himself and his “silent majority” of white middle-class supporters into the void and to the forefront of the political arena.

But the echoes of Nixon’s victory speech on the night of his 1972 landslide reelection had hardly died down before he was in retreat and on his way out--a result of Watergate. As Buchanan, the disgraced president’s loyal aide, remarked in the midst of the darkening scandal, “We rolled the rock right up the hill only to see it roll right down on top of us.”

For many Republicans, Reagan’s victory--only six years after Nixon’s forced resignation--was marred by the awareness that their success owed more to the ineptness of the Democratic stewardship under President Carter than to public confidence in the GOP. And like the Democrats, Republicans had a changing nation to contend with.

For most of the past half-century, Americans have been on the move in several directions at once: from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West; from the cities and farms to the burgeoning suburbs. As they sought to earn a living, they found that while high-tech and service industries surged, the nation’s manufacturing base was on the skids.

Minorities have gained through civil rights, but a rise in ethnic and racial tensions, exacerbated by a new influx of immigrants of all colors and creeds, offset at least some of those advances.

The traditional household has all but vanished, leaving the stability of the middle class threatened by economic and social pressures and by changes in lifestyles and mores that many find unsettling.

But at the moment of Reagan’s triumph, ambitious politicians could be forgiven for overlooking such challenges as they concentrated instead on the potential the new regime created for their own careers.

CHAPTER ONE / A Majority for Dole

For Bob Dole of Kansas, the Reagan victory had special significance because of the reverses he had suffered as he sought to gain national influence.

Becoming Republican national chairman in 1971, midway through Nixon’s first term, Dole had a rough time with Nixon’s political operatives, who abruptly ousted him at the end of the 1972 presidential campaign, which produced the Watergate scandal.

The saturnine Dole was famed and feared for his scorpion-like wit. During his bitter 1974 Senate reelection battle, he was asked whether he wanted the scandal-tainted Nixon to come to Kansas to campaign for him. Dole snapped back: “I’d settle for a flyover by Air Force One.”

Dole’s next chance on the national scene came as Gerald R. Ford’s running mate in 1976, when he was told to beat up on Democrats, a mission he carried out too well for his own political good. “They told me to go for the jugular,” Dole said. “Nobody told me it was my jugular.”

Nevertheless, Dole got enough national exposure, and enough of a taste for national politics, that he was emboldened to seek the presidency in 1980. But his candidacy died early--in New Hampshire, which gave him only 0.4% of its vote in its primary. Still, Dole exited the presidential stage in plenty of time to redeem himself with a huge Senate reelection victory in Kansas.

And when the same tide that swept Reagan into office brought the Republicans control of the Senate, the 57-year-old Dole, starting his third term, found himself in the legislative majority for the first time and in possession of one of the richest prizes on Capitol Hill: chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee.

Mainly, his former press secretary Walt Riker recalled, Dole wanted to use the momentum of the Reagan presidency “to attack the sins of the past,” particularly the federal deficit. “In every speech and in every town meeting, in everything he ever did, the deficit was talked about over and over again,” Riker recalled.

For the first months of the Reagan presidency Dole bided his time while the supply-side tax cutters had their day. But he became increasingly skeptical about the theory underlying Reaganomics: that deep cuts in tax rates would somehow generate more tax revenue.

“The good news is that a busload of supply-siders went over a cliff,” Dole wisecracked at GOP functions. “The bad news is that there were three empty seats.”

And as the deficit burgeoned rapidly in the wake of tax cuts enacted in 1981, Dole stopped joking, and his Midwestern heritage of fiscal prudence came to the fore.

“The role of Republicans in the Midwest was always to balance the budget,” said longtime Dole advisor David Keene. “If you look at the gubernatorial races in the region over time, you’ll see that Democrats would get elected, do a lot of things, go into debt. So people would elect a Republican, and he would raise taxes and balance the budget.”

Dole created and pushed through Congress what by some measurements was the largest tax increase in history--totaling more than $98 billion. He even got Republican colleague Jesse Helms of North Carolina to vote for a hike in the cigarette tax.

But his insistence on raising taxes when the supply-side tide was racing the other way did him no good with conservatives in his party. Their resentment was memorably expressed by Rep. Newt Gingrich, then an up-and-coming leader of the congressional right, who dubbed Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state.”

Dole brushed aside such criticism from Republicans in the Democrat-controlled House: “If you are in the minority you can put out a lot of newsletters and say, ‘I’m for lower taxes.’ We have a little different view in the Senate because we’re in the majority. We have to be totally responsible from time to time.”

In keeping with that view, Dole engineered passage of the 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and floor-managed legislation establishing a holiday honoring the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also worked to expand the network of federal programs intended to reduce hunger, from food stamps to school breakfasts.

Becoming Senate Republican leader after Reagan’s reelection in 1984, Dole used his new prominence to make another assault on fiscal red ink. Now he concentrated on spending cuts, including postponement of Social Security cost-of-living increases. Once again some in his own party rebelled. This time Reagan broke with Dole, and the proposal died.

The episode served as a reality check. Even though the Senate Republicans had given Dole the title of leader, his authority in the Senate and the party would not go unchallenged, particularly on economics and particularly if the new Republican senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, had anything to say about things. And he almost always did.

CHAPTER TWO / Gramm Jumps to GOP

An intense figure with owl-like features, Gramm’s conduct in the Senate was shaped by a combination of boundless intellectual energy and overbearing self-certitude. When he decided to leave his teaching job at Texas A&M; to make politics his career, his colleague James Miller, who would later become Reagan’s budget director, asked Gramm how he proposed to avoid being depicted as a carpetbagger. After all, Gramm had moved to Georgia from Texas only a few years earlier.

“Jimmy,” Gramm told him, “two Georgians died at the Alamo, and they bought my birthright.”

Gramm’s entry into politics, as a Democrat challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen in 1976, was one of a series of moves deemed foolhardy at the time but that turned out well for him. As expected, the popular Bentsen crushed his little-known rival. But the attention Gramm got from this contest helped him considerably in 1978, when he sought and won his party’s nomination for the 6th Congressional District seat. He coasted to victory over the Republican candidate in the fall.

In the House, Gramm soon found a kindred spirit in a young Republican congressman from Michigan, David A. Stockman, who in two years would become Reagan’s budget director and point man for the supply-side revolution. Gramm “understood instinctively the fundamental conflict between the foolish and wasteful enterprises [of the federal government] and the laws of capitalist prosperity and freedom,” Stockman later wrote.

By 1981, with Reagan in the White House and Stockman his right-hand man, the 39-year-old Gramm helped carry the day for the Reagan revolution. The crucial moment came when Gramm, addressing a caucus of conservative Democrats--”Boll Weevils,” as they were called--again invoked the memory of the Alamo. He recalled the heroes who had crossed the line drawn in the sand by Col. William Barrett Travis.

One fainthearted lawmaker pointed out that everyone who had volunteered to cross the line died, and others agreed. “Yes,” said Gramm, “but the ones who didn’t cross the line died too. And no one remembered their names.”

That was all it took. The backing of the Boll Weevils, many from Texas, ensured the passage of Gramm’s budget, which in turned paved the way for adoption of the huge multiyear tax cut that reshaped the GOP’s economic course.

Meanwhile, his fellow Democrats learned that Gramm, from his privileged post on the House Budget Committee, had been reporting to Stockman about Democratic grand strategy. They removed him from his committee post. Gramm promptly removed himself from the Democratic Party, quit his House seat and announced he would run for reelection as a Republican.

“I had to choose between [Democratic House Speaker] Tip O’Neill and y’all,” he told his constituents, “and I decided to stand with y’all.” An easy victor in the special election, Gramm became something of a folk hero, a status that helped him move on to the Senate when the surprise retirement of Republican Sen. John Tower created a vacancy in 1984.

Only six months into his term, Gramm called into his office Charles Black, a veteran Republican consultant who had managed his Senate campaign, and showed him, sketched on a yellow legal pad, the outline of a balanced-budget scheme that amounted to a fiscal straitjacket for Congress. The plan called for elimination of the deficit by meeting a series of targeted spending reductions over five years, or failing that, having the cuts made automatically.

Black urged Gramm to get backing from a GOP moderate in the Senate. Two weeks later Gramm told Black: “I think I got the right guy, he’s known as a moderate and he’s a deficit cutter--Warren Rudman of New Hampshire.”

“New Hampshire, get it?” Gramm added.

Black got it. The reference to New Hampshire, with its crucial presidential primary, was a none-too-subtle hint of Gramm’s White House ambitions, and the enactment of the Gramm-Rudman Act, as the law came to be known, markedly boosted those ambitions.

But if this legislation was a personal triumph for Gramm, it was a worrisome sign for his party, making clear the limitations of the theories underpinning Reagan’s economic policy. Problems abounded, including the burgeoning deficit and hard times in the Farm Belt and the energy-producing states of the Southwest, both bulwarks of the GOP political base.

Thus the midterm election of 1986, far from consolidating Republican strength, tilted Congress back to the Democrats, relegating both Dole and Gramm to the minority.

Republicans looked ahead in the wake of that setback, aware that their still-popular president was a lame duck. Dusk was now falling over the Reagan revolution and pointing up the limits of its doctrines. They were soon occupied with finding a new prophet and a strengthened faith.

CHAPTER THREE / Secretary Alexander

Indeed, even before the 1986 vote, the search for new answers was underway among some Republicans, and no one in this group was more active than Lamar Alexander, the governor of Tennessee. If the party needed a clearer direction beyond the anti-government creed that had informed the Reagan revolution, then Alexander was a likely man to fill that bill. “Focused and disciplined” were the words used most often to describe him.

Only 46 as his gubernatorial tenure was ending in 1986, Alexander had a smooth face and bland features and at times cultivated a folksy manner. His political career was distinguished not so much by his convictions, which were not sharply etched, as by his skill at advancing himself.

“From the time he graduated from law school and served his stint as clerk to a federal judge, his ambition in life was to get elected to statewide office in Tennessee,” said Lee Smith, a classmate of Alexander’s at Vanderbilt, now editor of a newsletter on Tennessee politics. “And he didn’t do anything at all without carefully calculating how it might impact that ambition.”

His first chance loomed in 1970 when Alexander, then a junior aide in the Nixon White House, considered running for the Senate. But party leaders talked him out of it, and he settled for managing the gubernatorial campaign of the first Republican to win the statehouse in 50 years.

Thus did opportunity shape the destiny of Alexander. Instead of marching in the footsteps of former Senate Republican Leader Howard H. Baker, Jr., an early mentor on Capitol Hill, he ultimately would dedicate himself to the cause of dismantling the federal government and turning its power to the states and cities.

When he tried to become governor himself in 1974, he failed dismally because of Watergate and his own uninspired campaign style. “He ran as a three-piece suit,” said Vanderbilt political scientist Richard Pride. On his second try in 1978, however, Alexander’s advisors persuaded him to humanize himself by opening his campaign with a walk across the state. Wearing a red-and-black plaid lumberjack shirt, he trudged 1,022 miles, shook countless hands, suffered a badly sprained ankle when he was front-ended by a pickup and gained the attention that helped him to victory.

In view of the intensity that Alexander brought to his eight-year quest for the governorship, what was striking was that he entered the office without any clear agenda. “When my walk across Tennessee ended, I honestly still couldn’t have expressed just in so many words why I wanted to be governor or what I hoped to accomplish. I hoped it would articulate itself along the way.”

Actually it was not until his second term that he found the issue that would define his governorship: education reform. It touched on a major problem in the state, one that also was bound to win him national attention. Alexander’s proposals included a controversial plan to give merit pay to teachers who could claim to be better qualified than others; he rammed the plan through the state Legislature only after a bitter battle with the teachers’ union.

Alexander, in his memoir of his governorship, said his “greatest failure” in office was “not finding a way to work better with the Tennessee Education Assn.”

In the midst of his struggles, Alexander was active among his fellow governors in trying to promote the overall thrust of Reagan’s new federalism. These doctrines, prefiguring a trend that was to gain momentum after the 1994 elections, called for shifting some federal programs back to the states. And, mindful that despite Reagan’s landslide reelection, the 1984 returns left the Democrats controlling two-thirds of the governorships and a majority of the state legislatures, he sought to energize Republicans at the local level.

National issues are “tremendously important and so fascinating,” Alexander told the 1,500 delegates to a Southern Republican conference in the spring of 1986. “But when we get together that’s all we talk about, and the Democratic governors are running down the street proposing programs to improve the schools, clean up the garbage, fix the roads and make the children more healthy--and they get elected.”

CHAPTER FOUR / Buchanan’s Battles

Whatever merits Alexander’s practical counsel might have at the state and local level, however, the fact was that it had little appeal for the conservative activists who provided the party with much of its passion and intellectual energy.

Among that cadre, Pat Buchanan stood out. Burly, with slicked-down dark hair, he still carried himself with the tautness that recalled his bragged-about youthful exploits as a street fighter. Years before, Buchanan had established himself as a key ally of conservative activists long before, during his service in the Nixon White House.

In his 1976 book, “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories,” Buchanan said “the most formidable obstacle” in the path of conservatives was “the political power of America’s media monopolies.” He had no doubts about what the cure was, which was the diametrical opposite of Alexander’s faith in reviving local government. “If conservatives would turn the nation around,” Buchanan wrote, “they must set as their central political objective the capture of the presidency.”

It wasn’t a new theme to Buchanan, who wrote speeches on behalf of Nixon Vice President Spiro Agnew, denouncing the media.

It seemed only fitting that when Buchanan left Nixon’s service at age 35, he reentered newspaper work, where he had begun his career and where he could now carry on his battle against the liberal media, face to face.

He had no easy time getting established. Though Buchanan himself was untarnished by Watergate, his connection with Nixon did him no good in the early 1970s, when he tried to market his syndicated column. “He only got paid for the columns they printed, and it wasn’t much,” recalled Angela “Bay” Buchanan, his sister and later his campaign manager.

At first he considered himself strictly a print journalist.

“Someone asked him to do a guest editorial on TV,” Bay said. “He and [his wife] Shelly watched it that night. He rolled off the bed laughing, he was so bad.”

Nevertheless, the relentlessly aggressive Buchanan eventually became a star of electronic journalism, first on radio, then on television. His views were blunt and at times so harsh they made some of his ideological allies uncomfortable. He called AIDS nature’s “awful retribution” against homosexuals and questioned whether the bombing of abortion clinics was any worse an offense than abortion itself.

In Reagan’s second term, Buchanan served briefly as White House communications director. But as Reagan’s influence on his fellow citizens weakened, Buchanan left the White House and weighed seriously the prospect of running for president himself.

Many of his old allies on the right rallied around him. They believed, as Buchanan later put it, that only his candidacy could prevent the Republican nomination from being yielded up to “the Republican establishment,” represented by Reagan’s vice president, George Bush, the heavy favorite in the 1988 race. But Buchanan allowed himself to be convinced that his candidacy would only assure Bush’s nomination by dividing the conservative movement between himself and Jack Kemp, then a New York congressman whose own candidacy was well underway.

Afterward, reflecting on the contrast between himself and Kemp, who was absorbed with such economic esoterica as tax rates and monetary reform, Buchanan wrote: “Economics is not the science that sends men to the barricades. Whether the choice of weapons is words or guns, men fight to preserve the most beautiful of the pictures in their minds.”

Two months later, in March 1987, Buchanan left the Reagan White House to return to journalism. But the pictures in his mind remained vivid and compelling, and no one doubted that he would be back to fight for them.

CHAPTER FIVE / ‘The Vision Thing’

A vision of some sort was much in demand among Republicans as the 1988 campaign approached. In the eyes of many GOP activists, the underlying purpose of that competition, more than just to fill Reagan’s vacancy, was to find a replacement for his ideology.

“Whoever follows Ronald Reagan can’t be just someone who exists within the shadow of Ronald Reagan,” said Frank Fahrenkopf, who had chaired the party during Reagan’s first term. “He must have his own philosophy and tell the country where he wants to take it.”

Meeting that test proved difficult for Dole and his main rival, Bush.

While Dole did not lack convictions, he seemed uncomfortable expressing his beliefs in terms that voters could easily grasp. When a debate moderator in Iowa asked what his goals for the country were, Dole went on at length about his skills as a manager and legislator.

“But what are the goals?” the moderator insisted.

“And that’s where I want to go,” Dole retorted. But the truth was Dole had not said anything about going anywhere.

“He was very contemptuous of all the talk about vision,” said Tom Rath, a senior advisor to Dole’s 1988 candidacy. “His answer to the vision talk seemed to be, ‘Give me a picture of the in-basket in the Oval Office and you can put anything in it you want and I can handle it.’ ”

In truth, Bush was not much better in dealing with the demands for articulating a message, which he once notoriously referred to as “the vision thing.”

But Bush had other assets--immense financial support, better name recognition and the support of the party hierarchy--that would ultimately carry him to victory.

Dole’s undoing came in New Hampshire. The Bush campaign attacked Dole with a TV commercial, which, playing off Dole’s reputation for raising taxes, warned the tax-averse citizenry that when it came to raising taxes, Dole “can’t say no.”

This strategy turned out to have fateful consequences for Bush as well as Dole. For while the gambit assured Dole’s defeat, it also led Bush into the “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge that would entrap his presidency.

By the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Rath recalled, “I could see from the way Dole acted that he felt it had slipped away.” Rath had arranged for an elegant luncheon to be catered at campaign headquarters. “Forget that,” Dole said. Instead he put in an order for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Carvel ice cream.

CHAPTER SIX / A Wedge of Ideology

In the wake of Bush’s triumphant and notably negative campaign against Democrat Michael S. Dukakis that fall, the GOP’s ideological agenda came to seem as uninspired as the menu for Dole’s New Hampshire primary luncheon. Whatever identity and focus the party now had stemmed from Bush’s campaign pledge not to raise taxes.

In that ideological vacuum, the party factions now exemplified by Dole, Gramm, Buchanan and Alexander grew increasingly hostile to one another.

Returning to the Senate once again as the leader of the minority, Dole put whatever resentments he felt behind him and became Bush’s newest best friend. The acid test came in the fall of 1990, when Bush, desperate to head off a recession that he feared would end his presidency, decided to break his campaign vow and cut a deal with the Democrats to raise taxes.

House Republicans rebelled. But in the Senate, Dole held the line and helped get the budget through.

The deal, difficult for Dole to swallow, was even more bitter for Gramm, for the agreement in effect nullified the Gramm-Rudman law, which had been his pride and joy. The budget package forced him to choose between his president and his convictions against raising taxes.

Gramm chose both. On the Senate negotiating team, Gramm supported the original arrangement with the Democrats that called for more than $100 billion in new taxes. But when that agreement was rejected by the House, Gramm opposed the new budget proposal that not only had a bigger total of new taxes but also raised tax rates on wealthier Americans.

“We had a Democratic Congress,” Gramm explained later in an interview. “We had a legitimate crisis, which President Bush never defined to the American people, and I was trying to get the best agreement we could.”

Frustrated on the legislative front, Gramm began making long-range preparations for the presidential candidacy that everyone expected him to launch at the first opportunity. First he consolidated his base in Texas, gaining reelection with a record 60% of the vote, and just as important, raising enough money so that he emerged with a $4-million surplus to help finance his presidential candidacy.

No sooner were the votes in than Gramm took another step to enlarge his influence: He gained the chairmanship of the Senate campaign committee and set his sights on regaining GOP control of the Senate in 1992, a task that turned out to be harder than he had imagined because the recession sapped Bush’s popularity and hurt GOP candidates down the ticket.

Gramm tried to make up the difference by pouring out his own energy on the hustings. But dealing with him was a mixed blessing. “He was generous in that he was relentless in raising money,” recalls one GOP candidate. “But he made you dance to get the money. You had to do things the way he wanted them done.” And for all of Gramm’s bullyragging, the drive to regain the Senate fell short, and the Democrats remained in control.

For Alexander, the Bush presidency was also a period of frustration and unfulfilled opportunity. The opportunity came in 1991, when Bush picked him to be education secretary.

That appointment was a chance to return to political life after taking a six-month trip to Australia with his family and serving two years as president of the University of Tennessee.

Once in office at the Education Department, Alexander wanted to implement his belief in curbing the federal role in local activities. But he met resistance from the Democratic-controlled Congress, whose own attempts to aid the schools were blocked by Alexander.

“The Congress was impossible,” Alexander claimed. “They wanted to create more bureaucracy. We wanted to deregulate the schools.”

With Bush’s defeat, Alexander saw new opportunity. “I thought President Bush’s defeat signaled a generational change in our politics. Basically we were replacing one of the most respected veterans of World War II with two guys in their 40s [President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore]. I thought our party would be going through the same sort of change, and I wanted to be part of it.”

But if Alexander saw the election as a portent of generational change, Buchanan viewed it in stark ideological terms: as a repudiation of the centrist approach to governing. Bush had claimed to be Reagan’s heir, but he had turned out to be, or so Buchanan and many conservatives believed, a closet centrist--not much different from the self-styled centrist who had led the Democrats to victory. What the election showed, Buchanan and other conservatives believed, was that centrism was not the answer for the GOP.

Buchanan was in a better position than anyone to make that argument, having spearheaded the conservative challenge to Bush in the 1992 contest for the GOP nomination, while Dole, Gramm and Alexander had collaborated with the incumbent.

Buchanan’s candidacy was doubly divisive. It pitted conservatives against the GOP establishment, whose members rallied around Bush. At the same time, it created divisions within the conservative ranks, particularly because his “new nationalism” led him to repudiate the free-trade principles to which most conservatives were committed and to which Buchanan himself had once paid allegiance.

What drove him to this apostasy, Buchanan explained, was the emotional experience of campaigning in recession-ridden New Hampshire, where the sorry condition of working families mocked the claims made for the much revered free-trade system. “I knew times were tough up there, but I didn’t know how deep it was,” he said later. “I didn’t know the degree of anger and alienation and bitterness.”

After a strong showing in New Hampshire, Buchanan’s campaign petered out. But he saved his harshest blast for last: his address at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, where he proclaimed: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” He implored his listeners to “take back our cities, take back our culture and take back our country.”

When some Republicans claimed Buchanan’s speech contributed to Bush’s defeat, Buchanan, now returned to his role as columnist, shot back: “Republicans did not lose in 1992 because Pat Buchanan gave a blazing speech in Houston. They lost because Big Government conservatives . . . spent four years in an orgy of spending, raised taxes and aborted a seven-year recovery.”

Whatever impact the speech had on the electorate, it was clear that Buchanan meant it as a calling card, signaling that his first campaign would not be his last. But in 1996 he would have plenty of company.

Dole signaled his intentions only hours after Clinton’s victory in the three-cornered race with Bush and independent Ross Perot was assured. In the midst of the talk about a mandate for the new president, Dole reminded one and all that “57% of the Americans who voted in the presidential election voted against Bill Clinton.”

“I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the U.S. Senate,” he declared.

His colleague from Texas, Gramm, was hard on his heels, vying with Dole for the title of “Republican who had tried hardest to keep Clinton from succeeding.” He selected as his main target the health care reform proposal that was the centerpiece of Clinton’s domestic program. After successfully campaigning against it, he offered this jab at his old rival Dole: “I was conservative before conservative was cool.”

As for Alexander, he spent two months in the summer of 1994 driving across the country, meeting people and gathering material for campaign speeches and an inevitable book: “We Know What to Do.” During that summer Alexander also developed a campaign slogan: “Cut their pay and send them home.” The slogan anticipated the 1994 election returns, which sent enough Democrats home for good to put the Republicans in charge.

Those dramatic results robbed Alexander’s battle cry of much of its punch, but it also created problems for his rivals, who could no longer concentrate simply on denouncing Democrat Bill Clinton’s government. Suddenly they had become responsible for half the government itself.

That burden casts a long shadow over the continuing debate on the party’s future and its relationship to government. At one pole are those like Gramm, Buchanan and Speaker Gingrich, the prophet of the midterm revolution who claimed that the election meant that voters had concluded that “government is a bad buy.”

At the other end are those like Dole, who declared as he set out for his second presidential run in 1988: “Government means a lot of things to a lot of people. It means getting their Social Security checks or their veterans check. So my doctrine is ‘Let’s make it work.’ ”

This internal debate recalls the last time Republican majorities on Capitol Hill confronted a none-too-popular Democratic chief executive in a presidential election. The year was 1948 and incumbent Harry S. Truman scored the upset of the century, stunning the overconfident Republicans’ standard-bearer, Thomas E. Dewey, while Democrats took back command of Capitol Hill. Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith writes that Truman won in part because he “skillfully exploited the chronic split within GOP ranks” between hard-line conservatives who wanted to undo government activism created by the Democrats and moderates who saw the need for some of the government machinery.

A similar threat confronts the Republicans in 1996. The challenge facing Dole, Gramm, Buchanan and Alexander is to wage a campaign that produces not just a nominee but, to use the word that gave the last GOP president so much difficulty, a “vision.” To serve its purpose, that concept needs not only to unite their own warring factions but, even more important, to win the confidence of a justly skeptical and increasingly restless electorate.

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.

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About This Series

In these group portraits, The Times examines turning points and touchstones in the lives of Republicans seeking the White House.

* Sunday: Growing up: The boys who would be president, and the places that shaped them.

* Monday: Coming at the ‘60s from another direction: Civil rights, Vietnam and political choices.

* Tuesday: Marriage and family: Norman Rockwell visions vs. today’s realities.

* Today: Life after Reagan: Rivals seek to claim the mantle.

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Evolution / The Other Candidates

How the other GOP presidential candidates have evolved along with their party:

Robert K. Dornan / Congressman

The Republican Evolution: For five years ending in 1982, served as a member of Congress from Los Angeles County. Since 1984, served as a member of Congress from Orange County. Campaigned in 17 states for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980, traveled 34 states for George Bush in 1988 and served as national co-chairman of the Bush-Quayle ’92 campaign.

What he stands for as a Republican: “What you have a right to ask for in your nominee for the presidency is a consistent, charging conservative who . . . is candid, is outspoken, and when the emperor has no clothes, will point at that person and say, ‘That person is a liar.’ “Yes, I am influencing the message in this campaign.”

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Steve Forbes / Magazine publisher

The Republican Evolution: In 1985, President Reagan named Forbes chairman of the bipartisan Board for International Broadcasting, which oversees Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Rappointed by President Bush and served until 1993. Forbes embraces the supply-side economic theories popular during the early years of the Reagan Administration.

What he stands for as a Republican: “I never intended on spending a lifetime in electoral politics. The campaign in ’96 I think is one of the most important in our history, because it will define where America is going in the post-Cold War world both at home and overseas. None of the other candidates are running on a paltform of growth, hope and opportunity, of getting America moving again.”

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Alan Keyes / Former State Department official

The Republican Evolution: In 1983, after serving in a mid-level State Department position under President Ronald Reagan, Keyes was appointed ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council. He was later named assistant secretary of state for international organizations. After resigning in 1987, Keyes served as resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

What he stands for as a Republican: “The other candidates in the race are running away from the issues that are really most important before the American people. . . . They are not willing to talk about the issue of abortion in a forthright way. They do not understand the connection between that issue and the moral crisis we face overall in this country.”

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Richard G. Lugar / Senator

The Republican Evolution: Elected to the Senate in 1976; reelected three times. Served as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1985-86; currently chair of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. Claims the best Senate record for voting with Ronald Reagan during his presidency, but also was instrumental in overcoming Reagan’s veto of sanctions against South Africa.

What he stands for as a Republican: “I believe the president has to be . . . a truth teller, a straight shooter . . . That idea of trust and respect is critical because I think America must lead the world, that we must be the builder of the coalitions that will guarantee our security . . . that will guarantee the highest probability that we’ll be able to control weapons of mass destruction . . . and the highest probability that we’ll be able to knock down trade barriers so that the superiority of our own competitive talents will find entry into every market all over the world. . . . I’m the person who is most able to build those coalitions, on the basis of my experience and negotiating ability . . .”

Researched by GEBE MARTINEZ, MARIA L. La GANGA and BOB SIPCHEN / Los Angeles Times

Sources Interviews with The Times and others, including PBS series “The Challengers ‘96”; campaign speeches and literature