Party delivers tributes to nation's most popular Republican but struggles to find a comparable successor

A theme common in Shakespeare's plays about royal succession is the inability of the rising generation to match the legendary personalities of its forebears. Hamlet, for instance, mourns his father by saying, "Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

Republicans are starting to experience similar feelings. Though a decade out of office and suffering through the last stages of Alzheimer's disease in seclusion in California, former President Ronald Reagan remains the leading Republican in American politics today.

Reagan's 87th birthday this month has been marked with countless banquets, books, panel discussions and other tributes -- including the renaming of Washington National Airport and the airing of a four-and-a-half-hour documentary on public television. Not since John F. Kennedy has a former president been so widely celebrated.

"Ronald Reagan is on his way to becoming the most monumentalized president in our history," his official biographer, Edmund Morris, wrote in The New Yorker this month.

Reagan's legacy is and will be a matter of debate among historians, who are weighing his claim to the credit for winning the Cold War and stimulating a stagnant economy against his administration's failures: the Iran-contra scandal, a ballooning federal deficit and the savings-and-loan debacle.

Whatever the outcome of that debate, no one questions the sincerity of Reagan's admirers. They see his achievement as a renewal of the nation, not to mention the redemption of the GOP.

"Reagan turned things around for the Republican Party," said Robert V. Remini, a presidential historian at the University of Illinois. "And in many ways he personalized and epitomized so much of what was stirring within the Republican Party with their conservative views, and was able to communicate them to the American people and to other politicians."

But even as the GOP acknowledges its debt, some have begun to question whether the continuing focus on Reagan is fogging the party's vision of the future and incurring a certain risk.

By elevating Reagan to nearly mythic stature, Republicans may well succeed in embarrassing Democratic President Bill Clinton. But the GOP also risks heightening another contrast, between the mythic Reagan and his would-be heirs within the party itself.

As the turn of the century draws near, Reagan's party is still looking for a national leader who can take advantage of the country's conservative mood and complete Republican control of the federal government by recapturing the White House.

"We are missing his successor and that person is not yet self-evident," said Eddie Mahe, a veteran Republican consultant. "We went real flat after his eight years, and I think it's the greatest testimonial that after his ten years out of office he still represents the energy of this party."

But a man who has been out of office for so long cannot easily represent the energy of any party. Although both parties often hark back to great leaders of the past, they need active candidates to carry their messages forward.

And it is easy enough to find Republicans who despair over the continuing search for new voices.

"We don't have a national leader -- Reagan was the last one," said Michael Deaver, who served as deputy White House chief of staff during Reagan's first term. "I think if Republicans keep talking about finding another Reagan they make a mistake, because you might not find one for a hundred years."

It is an article of faith for Reagan admirers that the collapse of communism and the resurgence of capitalism in America and worldwide are directly attributable to policies he set in motion. So it is frustrating to see Reagan's ideas coming to fruition at a time when -- despite the installation of a Republican Congress -- much of the credit is claimed by a Democratic president who has taken the watch.

"Democrats, particularly of the Clinton variety, have really done a whale of a job in adjusting to the new political reality created by Reagan, and Republicans at the national level have struggled with that for some time," said Peter Rusthoven, a one-time Reagan speechwriter who is running for the Senate in Indiana.

A fair number of party regulars believe that Reagan's vice president and successor, George Bush, was elected to a "third Reagan term" but betrayed that inheritance by agreeing to a tax increase in 1990. And they do not believe that anyone since, including 1996 GOP standard-bearer Bob Dole and the whole large field of hopefuls for 2000, has successfully seized the mantle.

It is widely accepted within the ranks of Republican activists that both the Bush campaign of 1992 and the Bob Dole campaign in 1996 foundered for want of a clear message.

"If there's something lacking in our party right now, it's the question, do people have a clear idea of exactly where we want to lead the country, and why," Rusthoven said.

As a result, much of the desire to commemorate Reagan may be rooted in Republicans' yearning for a national leader who can turn the party's "rising tide" into a flood, and complete the realignment many in the GOP hoped Reagan's election signaled.

"I think that this memorializing of Reagan before he dies reflects a problem in the Republican Party," said William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and one-time chief economic adviser to Reagan.

"They're looking for some kind of model, and they don't see it in their leaders here in Washington."

Niskanen's comments were echoed by Michael G. Kammen, a Cornell University historian who has written extensively about the burdens placed by the grand reputations of powerful political figures on their successors.

"Surely if there were two or three tremendously visible and very national Republican leaders who were acceptable to both the right and the moderate Republicans, there would be less need to idealize Reagan," Kammen said.

Heroes: Now and Then

Reagan is becoming a sort of flag that all Republicans can salute.

"Reagan is a symbol who calls the party to be something broader," conservative author David Frum said. "The Republican Party is in many ways a very disunited party. In a way, by making Reagan a greater figure, you can create a greater unity."

Frum suggested that the idealization of Reagan not only unifies Republicans but offers them a lodestar to sail by. Just as reverence for Franklin D. Roosevelt after his death in 1945 kept the Democratic Party from sliding back into its pre-New Deal conservativism, Frum said, the strong memory of Reagan is protection keeping Republicans from retreating from the conservative direction in which he took the GOP.

"This is part of laying down a marker," said Grover Norquist, a onetime Reagan economic adviser who is now a lobbyist and tax relief activist.

Norquist is leading an effort to have a publicly owned park, building or mountain named for Reagan in every state. Far from being merely symbolic, Norquist insists this action would help to ensure that the party does not retreat from Reagan's anti-regulatory positions.

"All successful Republicans in the future will be like Reagan," he declared.

Yet, at the same time that he was personally certain about his own conservative stances, Reagan was not dismissive of other Republicans who occasionally disagreed with him.

"Reagan never had about him anything that came close to this narrow cause aspect. He was someone who wanted to unite the party and build the coalition," Rusthoven said.

And so proponents of billowing the Republican tent invoke Reagan's pronouncement that anyone who agreed with him a majority of the time washis friend, not his enemy.

"A majority mentality is just that -- if we agree most of the time, let's do business," said Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash.

Dunn, who named her second son Reagan, was chairman of the Washington state GOP during the Reagan years. At that time, she recalls, "He just brought the party together. All I had to do as party chairman was say, 'Remember what Ronald Reagan would say on this issue,' and it was done."

No Clear Heir

But even Republicans agree that the party today can look to no equivalent clarifying figure. Most of the nearly two dozen presidential hopefuls for 2000 in the GOP invoke Reagan's name, but none of them is able to inspire the same sort of argument-settling loyalty themselves.

And the GOP remains split on any number of issues, from abortion to environmental protection to the proper role, if any, for the federal government in education.

"One thing that Reagan did very much better than subsequent Republican leaders is arranging the kind of uneasy wedding of the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives," Niskanen said.

In a way, Reagan benefited from his pathfinding position as the first successful presidential candidate who was truly conservative in the contemporary sense. Groups that had been ignored by the old GOP anti-tax establishment -- notably religious conservatives -- were happy just for Reagan to pay attention to them.

Kay Coles James, who was the spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee during the Reagan era and remains a prominent social issues conservative, still hangs in her office a picture of Reagan "practically breaking my back with a big bear hug."

But if Reagan was loved by opponents of abortion, deficit spending and "activist" judges, and proponents of prayer in public schools, he was not able to deliver on those issues. Subsequent figures have not been lent such leeway.

"Ronald Reagan is a hero to pro-lifers, but he gave them eight years of lip service," said Bill Pascoe, political director of the American Conservative Union. "Bush was always held in deep suspicion, but he's the guy who actually delivered."

In his 1994 book "Dead Right," Frum wrote: "Frustrated on economic issues and apprehensive about social issues, post-Bush conservatives look back on the accomplishments of the early Reagan years the way seventh century Romans must have looked at their aqueducts: to think that we once built all this!"

Yet now those post-Bush conservatives -- the Republicans who have controlled Congress roughly since Frum published his book -- have been able to accomplish many of the goals Reagan could only talk about: balancing the budget, offering new tax cuts, downsizing the federal government and revamping welfare.

Actually achieving this agenda has left Republicans without a consensus as to where they want to take the country next. Part of the nostalgia for Reagan stems from missing his clarion calls, what Mahe called his "consistency of belief."

"In 1984, we found a lot of voters who disagreed with him on abortion or school prayer voted for him because they knew he had convictions," said Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., Republican Party chairman during the last six years of the Reagan presidency.

The most certain claim some Republicans make for Reagan's greatness is a partisan one by definition: in Frum's words, what Reagan (like Roosevelt) "did was change the country for the better of his party."

GOP regulars crow that the ground has shifted so far that even Democrats now shy from the word "liberal" and that it was a Democratic president, Clinton, who declared that "the era of big government is over."

Although they are quick to dismiss Clinton's remark, made during his 1996 State of the Union address, as mere rhetoric, they are frustrated that he gets much of the credit for the rising economy and many of the policy initiatives Republicans wish to claim as their exclusive intellectual property.

"Many of the things that he [Reagan] attempted to do, and was stopped from doing by a Democratic Congress at that time, are now being accomplished by a Democratic president," Fahrenkopf noted.

A Personal Testimonial

In the end, Reagan's significance to the GOP can be measured not only in his own two terms in office but in the millions of voters he converted to the party's cause and in the generation of candidates he inspired to follow his example.

One was state Rep. Barbara Alby, the likely Republican nominee to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Vic Fazio in California's 3rd District. Alby, now 51, was a young welfare mother in Sacramento in 1967 when she saw her benefits slashed by the state's newly installed governor, Ronald Reagan.

Alby had no use for Reagan or his party in 1967, she recalls, but she went to work as a night-shift waitress and built a life of self-respect. Now she says the shrinking of the welfare state was the key to her success.

"The answer for poor women is not more handouts, but opportunity and tough love," Alby says.

And as she campaigns for Congress, Alby gives Reagan the credit: "Outside of George Washington, he's my favorite president."

Like so many Republicans of her postwar generation, Alby has embraced Reagan as the party's leading light, the unfailingly optimistic man who lifted the party from the muck of Watergate and sharpened its conservatism into an anti-government crusade.

But Alby also identified the problem that Reagan's apotheosis presents for all who would follow, when she said: "When you look at our presidential candidates for the year 2000, there's that yearning to have someone like him."