n handling the GOP's extremists so effectively last week, George W. Bush set forth a vision of the Republican Party as he wants it to be eight years from now, not the way it is today. It may gain him the opportunity to try to make it so.
All the bitter divisions that made it possible for Bill Clinton and the Democrats to govern for eight years were glossed over, for a time. Tax cranks, culture warriors, isolationsts, Clinton haters: the tempestuous souls who made such a shambles of Republican conventions for the last 12 years simply were excluded from a convention role.
Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Pete Wilson, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Kenneth Starr, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson were scarcely to be seen. Even campaign finance-reformer John McCain, accorded a prime-time speaking spot Tuesday night, was banished on the final day to Washington, D.C. - until Bush staffers called him back.
If Bush is elected, he'll get a chance to try to keep his factions in line. At the very least, he dispelled any lingering doubts that he is not in charge. Before passing on to the Democrats, however, let's take a look at how the Losers (at least the opinion-makers among them) spent the week.
Robert Bartley passed the evenings doing online chats with readers of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal on its new Web site, www.opinionjournal.com. The editor of the page since 1972, Bartley attacked Bill Clinton with implacable fury from the very first. But this spring the editor-for-life moved on to a weekly column.
Meanwhile, deputy Daniel Henninger has taken over much of the daily management, and the page is adulterating the purity of its views in some interesting ways. It still permitted itself an outraged wheeze last week on behalf of ''the missing managers'' - Henry Hyde and the other leaders of the impeachment trial, who were forbidden any role in the convention.
Amity Shlaes, a Journal editorial page alumna who now writes a column for the Financial Times, attended a rump Republican convention in a seaside New Jersey town. There, she reported, a hundred ''furious'' congressmen, local activists, think-tank authors, and donors did ''what Republicans do when no cameras are around: grumble, roar, and plot revolt.''
They also listened to Shlaes' theory of why the party does best when operating with a bunker mentality. ''The Democrats enjoy support from America's unions,'' she wrote. ''In contrast, Republicans have no automatic electoral base, and must convince voters anew in every campaign. Nothing works better to achieve this than firebreathing.''
So much for the party of Big Business.
Meanwhile, in the conservative Weekly Standard, executive editor Fred Barnes explained why ''California Doesn't Matter any More.'' The short answer is that it's gone Democratic. With one-fifth of the electoral votes necessary to win the presidency, only a landslide for Bush will put it in the Republican column - in which case the candidate doesn't need it. The election will be won in the Midwest, he said.
Maybe so. The longer hypothesis of California's supposed irrelevance was a little less convincing. Barnes has determined that the future no longer happens in California. ''Until the 1990s, the state previewed practically everything that happened in America, both socially and politically,'' he wrote. Urban violence. White backlash. Tax-cut fever. Term limits. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan. They all began in California.
Then in 1996 Governor Pete Wilson sought to become the third California Republican in a row to make it to the White House on a new, cutting-edge platform: antiaffirmative action, anti-immigration, antigay.
He never made it past the first round of primaries, and the Republican Party in California was crushed. From 40 percent of the Latino vote in 1994, the GOP share of the California vote dropped to 17 percent in 1998. Blacks and gays similarly turned away.
The California disaster - congressional redistricting in 2002 may by itself return control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats - had more to do than any other factor with the resolutely inclusive tone of last week's Republican convention. The country's Latino population is skyrocketing. The Republicans cannot afford to ignore, much less alienate, what had previously been a relatively conservative bloc of votes.
There is, in fact, still plenty of radicalism in the mainstream Republican Party. Its economists have declared war on the mixed economy, taking aim at Social Security in particular. But that is another story.
By showing that he can handle his party's zealots, George W. Bush has given himself a good chance to win the presidency. But the strategy is not without its risks. As William Safire of the New York Times - another of the big Losers - put it last week, ''If Bush's smiling-in-lockstep strategy backfires, the next GOP convention may be much livelier.''
True enough. But if Gore wins - or even if the GOP Losers escape from the purdah to which Bush has sent them - the next Republican convention may not matter very much either.
