IN MODERATION.(The Talk of the Town)

When Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic Convention in Boston, a lot of people thought--and hoped--that they were seeing the future. Half Kansan and half Kenyan, half black and half white, yet all-American in a novel and exhilarating way that seemed to transcend the usual categories, Obama, who on November 2nd will be elected to the United States Senate from Illinois, embodied and expressed a fresh synthesis of the American civic religion--one that fused not only black and white, and immigrant and native-born, but also self-reliance and social solidarity. "He represents the future of the Party," Stephanie Cutter, the communications director for John Kerry's campaign, said by way of explaining why Obama had been chosen to deliver the keynote speech. And it is not hard to imagine circumstances under which, a decade or two hence, he might represent the future of the country as well.

There was a slight echo of this at Madison Square Garden last week, where the Republicans devoted most of their Convention's prime speaking slots to a parade of politicians--Senator John McCain, of Arizona; Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York; Arnold Schwarzenegger, the spanking-new governor of California; Governor George Pataki, of New York--who are generally regarded, by the debased standards of post-Rockefeller, post-Eisenhower, post-Lincoln Republicanism, as moderates. An inattentive viewer could be forgiven for thinking that this is how the Party sees its own future face. At a glittery donors' luncheon last week, Fred Thompson, the actor-lawyer-former senator, called McCain and Giuliani "the ticket." Whether Bush wins or loses, somebody else will be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008, and these gentlemen evidently believe, or at least hope, that it might be one of them. "rudy eying '08 run?" a headline in Wednesday's Daily News asked. You bet he is. (The day after his speech, he had breakfast with the Iowa delegation.) They're all running for President, even Schwarzenegger, whose speech was devoted largely to glorifying the arc of his own rise from scrawny kid stuck in stuffy social-democratic Austria to global cinematic and American political star. There can be only one climax to Arnold's screenplay, and the fact that it would require a constitutional amendment is just another plot point.

Giuliani is gambling that well-watered memories of his 9/11 Churchillian moment plus an ultra-militant stance on terror and foreign policy can overcome his record of what looks to Republicans (if not to New Yorkers) like social liberalism. Schwarzenegger may figure that his action-hero manly-man gigantism could similarly wash away his pro-choice, non-anti-gay sins. The moderates are indeed popular--with voters, especially independent voters. That's why they are able to win general elections in their own states. Their kind of appeal might even propel one of them (Pataki, say) onto the bottom half of a national Republican ticket someday. But to get elected President you have to win the nomination of a major party, and for these men that means the Republicans.

"There are probably more Americans who have seen UFOs than undecided voters who have read party platforms," Charlie Cook, the inside-dopester political analyst of National Journal, wrote last week. "Such documents are for partisans and ideologues." Platforms are unreliable guides to what a prospective Administration will actually do once in power, and it's true that practically nobody reads them. But they are useful as indications of what the activist base of a party can and cannot stomach. The platform for 2004 again calls for the total recriminalization of abortion--no exceptions mentioned, not even for the life of the mother--and it omits any suggestion that people of good will may honestly disagree, which had been included in at least one recent platform. On the question of gay marriage, the platform goes further even than President Bush, who has merely endorsed a constitutional amendment banning it. In the only simulacrum of a platform fight this year, conservatives inserted language opposing recognition of "other living arrangements as equivalent to marriage," adding, just to drive the point home, that "legal recognition and the accompanying benefits afforded couples should be preserved for ...