NEARLY a year has passed since Senator Goldwater by no means singlehandedly turned the Republican Party into what was inevitably described as a shambles. Now a new national chairman is trying to tidy up; a new House leader struggles to present "positive alternatives" to the Great Society; task forces and study groups have produced dozens of party position papers; and here and there, like forget-me-nots pushing up through the rubble, Republican candidates are catching the public eye—and valiantly striving to grow into political sunflowers. And the state of the party is—a shambles.
There is a lot going on in the G.O.P.—and on the surface most of it sounds like trouble. In California, where Democratic Governor Pat Brown appears vulnerable for next year, there is a veritable chasm between the so-called left and right wings of the Republican Party, and some Republicans are saying, and sounding as though they meant it, that they would rather vote for Brown than for a primary-winning Republican of the other faction. In New York City, Conservative William Buckley now figures to get about 12% of this year's vote for mayor, a considerable part of it at the expense of Republican and Liberal Party Candidate John Lindsay. Michigan's Governor George Romney, who refused to support Goldwater, now has national aspirations of his own, and is traveling about the nation making inspirational speeches about party unity; many unforgiving Republicans are positively smacking their lips in anticipation of the revenge they will take on him for his defection in '64. In Miami, Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton recently urged Republicans to isolate the "radical fringe," presumably meaning the John Birch Society. In Arizona, a syndicated columnist named Goldwater said that he thought the party might do better to exorcise its "left side."
Carried to its extreme, this Republican demonstration of the admirable belief that a true conviction should be stoutly upheld can lead only to the loss of elections. The fearful prospects led Richard Nixon, the one active Republican leader who seems acceptable to all factions, to lecture that "the liberals have got to stop trying to read the conservatives out of the party, and the conservatives have got to stop reading the liberals out of the party." On the other hand, the ferment within the party, brought to the right conclusion at the right time, could result in a stronger party on a better road toward strength and even power.
The Cruel Statistics
It will not be an easy road to find. Smothered under the blanket of Lyndon Johnson's father-of-all-the-peopleism, the G.O.P. is statistically so far behind that many years may go by before it gets its head up. Top Republicans talk publicly of picking up 40 House seats next year; they would happily settle for 20, which would bring the Democrats down to a still overwhelming majority of 275 to 160. Only by a turnover that surpasses imagination could the G.O.P. gain a bare majority of the Senate; Republicans would have to beat all 19 Democratic Senators up for re-election next year while holding the 14 Republican seats that will be risked. In their field of greatest strength, the governorships, the Republicans conceivably could add half a dozen or so to their present 17; they could just as conceivably drop a couple.