Factionalism within his party and plagiarism outside it by his Democratic opponent are the two major obstacles that Mr Robert Dole has to overcome this week at the Republican convention in San Diego and in the 12 weeks of the election campaign. The range of opinion within the party has been dramatised by Mr Dole's selection of Mr Jack Kemp as his running mate. They are long standing sparring partners on matters of policy and are temperamentally poles apart. It remains to be seen how they will cooperate on the campaign. Part of their problem is that they will have to ride together a policy platform that draws selectively from a wide range of positions on several highly contentious matters. Mr Dole, for example, has made a 15 per cent tax cutting package the centrepiece of his economic programme, despite his earlier opposition to supply side economics.
Mr Kemp will be much more at home with this side of the policy, and he will appeal to many voters who continue to value his commitment to welfare, despite the sea change in public attitudes. But he, more so than Mr Dole, will be very uncomfortable with the expected commitment of the party's policy platform to a harsh set of priorities, notably a constitutional ban on abortion, denying the children of illegal immigrants automatic citizenship and the abolition of affirmative action programmes for women and racial minorities. These are among the priorities of the activist Christian right wing, which is making so much of the running in the Republican ranks; but they are sharply at variance with Mr Kemp's beliefs, less so with Mr Dole's. Likewise, both men's firm belief in free trade contradicts the protectionism that Mr Pat Buchanan, within the Republicans, and Mr Ross Perot from outside have articulated so effectively.
It would be a mistake to make too much of such policy heterogeneity, were it not for the fact that the Republican candidates have to contend also with President Clinton's consummate skills in plagiarising their most appealing ideas. He has outwitted them on welfare reform, on crime and security and on balanced budgets over the last nine months. He extracted maximum advantage from the tactical manoeuvring over the budget with the House Speaker, Mr Newt Gingrich, whose vaunted Contract with America has run into the sands astonishingly rapidly.
As has been shrewdly observed by several commentators, in these circumstances conservatives will win either way with this political agenda. But there is room for much electoral volatility, which shows up in - an opinion poll reporting a sharp narrowing of the gap between Messrs Clinton and Dole. Veteran commentators such as David Broder warn that if both the main parties fail to resolve their national crises of identity in the next few years, this volatility will probably herald a major realignment with the emergence of a Reform Party no governing party in America seems able to hold public confidence for more than a moment", as he puts it. All this makes for an intriguing campaign between now and November. This week seems likely to determine whether or not the Republicans can turn such public uncertainty to their own electoral advantage.