'90, '92, and George Bush.

OUT AN ELECTION to fight about anymore, the world moves on to fighting about the meaning of the election. Was the Republican Party's defeat, as Democrats would have it, a defeat of its ideas, the final watch in the long night of Reaganism? The tally of the fate of specific issues in specific races suggests that it was not. Big-government environmentalism was a bust, as was unrestricted abortion and Kevin Phillips's favorite, class warfare (America's premier class warrior, New Jersey Governor Jim Florio, continues to beat Saddam Hussein in unpopularity polls, and almost brought down Bill Bradley). By contrast, taxes, the source of Florio's woes, remain as hot a button in state after state as it was when Reagan was President.

Was election day then, as Charlie Black put it, "a good day for the Republican Party"? No again. GOP happy talk is based partly on cooking the figures. Black compared the GOP's loss of one Senate seat and eight House seats to the average loss, for "the party in the White House," of 28 and four seats in the House and Senate, respectively. But that average lumps elections held when the White House party has been in for six years, which are traditionally wipeouts (1986, 1974, 1966, 1958), with the smaller losses that occur after only two years. Besides, how many more seats can the Republican Party lose, especially in the House? When you're already in the cellar, where else is there to go?

The true standard of comparison is not history, but the GOP's own expectations, as late as early June, when the party hoped to hold its own in the House, and to knock off a number of weak Democratic incumbents in the Senate (Harkin, Simon, Pell)-enough perhaps to retake it.

The Republican Party fell short of these goals because it abandoned its principles. It relied, with White House encouragement, on buoyant presidential popularity ratings that sank in a matter of months. Again with White House encouragement, it sent moderates (Claudine Schneider, Lynn Martin) to do difficult jobs; none succeeded. Most disastrously, it went into the fray behind a President who had broken his major campaign pledge, at a time when the issue was salient nationally. Reaganism is still healthy. Bushism should be taken in a shoebox to the backyard and buried.

Attention now turns to 1992. Barring some upheaval, Republicans will likely renominate the President, though there are those in the GOP who can make trouble for him. William Bennett has stepped down as drug czar. The Gulf and the economy have given us a crop of new worries, on which Bennett will be well placed to speak out. Jack Kemp, who praised Newt Gingrich at the height of the budget debacle (and thus implicitly criticized the White House), is also clearly restless.

On the Democratic side, the buzz of election night was Bradley's narrow escape. Forget him in 1992. Scarcely less embarrassed was Mario Cuomo, who ran eight hundred thousand votes behind his last tally, against a Republican who was lucky to be unknown. Sam Nunn and Al Gore were re-elected handsomely, but Nunn is too colorless, and Gore too moderate, to lead the party. The blank screen on which Democratic fantasies could be projected is Nebraska's Bob Kerrey, whose major claim to popular attention heretofore was squiring Debra Winger.

George Bush is at least fortunate in his opponents. But he cannot rely on the inadequacies of opponents, in either the Democratic Party or his own, for 1992. He will have to win back the public's and the party's trust by firm leadership actuated by the principles he supported in Reagan's Administrations and in his own campaign. It will be a long haul. He has a good deal of mistrust and disaipointment to overcome.