Dysfunctional Republicans.

Sen. Fred Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee is charged with investigating the DNC/Asian fundraising scandal, which is supposed to be an enormous Democratic vulnerability -- but you'd never guess it from Democrats' and Republicans' respective behavior. At the end of January Democrats turned what is typically a pro-forma committee organizational session into a street fight on the ground-rules of the investigation. They demanded that the scope of the investigation be broadened to include GOP organizations, and won Republican agreement. They demanded procedural safeguards for themselves, and got them. They forced a party-line vote on the committee's budget (Republicans voted for $6.5 million, Democrats $1.8 million), and now threaten a filibuster on the Senate floor if Republicans dare stick to their number.

This is chutzpah of the highest order. "The Democrats are so incredibly brazen about hardballing us on an issue they are so clearly vulnerable on," says one incredulous GOP Senate aide. "I guess in their opinion we're just so susceptible to blackmail that they think as soon as they scream and yell and distort the facts we'll run away." It's not a bad assumption. Only two Republicans, Thompson and Thad Cochran (Miss.), even bothered to show up for all five hours of the organizational meeting over the course of two days. In contrast, all seven committee Democrats were on hand the first day, and most were there for the second day as well.

What's more, committee Democrats are led by John Glenn (D., Ohio), who was entangled in the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s but still feels comfortable covering for the Clinton Administration on an ethics investigation. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), also caught up in the Keating Five scandal if only incidentally, still seeks media redemption through a "bi-partisan" campaign-finance-reform bill.

What gives? Why are Republicans so easy to push around, so defensive, so concerned about being "fair" while Democrats wield partisan cudgels? "If I were a psychologist," says the Senate aide, "I'd probably say that Republicans by nature were all dressed by their mothers until they went away to college."

There is indeed something deep-rooted about Republicans' tendency toward defensiveness and timidity, which has emerged with new force on Capitol Hill over the last year. The GOP has been dubbed the stupid party, but that's true only insofar as it reflects a deeper problem: the GOP is the party of shame. Not in the way Newt Gingrich and Colin Powell use the word, to mean social disapproval for transgressions, but in the sense in which psychologists speak of it, as a gnawing feeling of inadequacy and worthlessness, beyond guilt for any specific act. It's a quietly destructive emotion. Abused children feel it. So, apparently, do Republicans.

Recently, of course, there has been good reason for Republicans, still not recovered from last year's government shutdowns, to feel less than confident. Says one longtime GOP House aide: "I think the fact that things went from being great to being crummy without Republicans' knowing or understanding how that transformation occurred makes them feel very threatened and insecure." It's one of the reasons Senate Republicans are re-authorizing the feminist-inspired Violence Against Women Act in their crime bill and including $400 million in new adult-literacy spending in their education bill. "On item after item," a Senate aide says of proposed spending cuts, "when you bring them up people say, 'You can't do that, Clinton vetoed that last year."'

This only represents the return with a vengeance of a traditional Republican attitude. Richard Brookhiser captured it in the 1980s when he wrote of Republicans that in their hearts they know they're wrong. Says one former RNC official: "There are an awful lot of Republicans who don't think a majority of Americans agree with us on our issues." Why? Perhaps the foremost reason is a constant barrage of negative press coverage. Insofar as the mainstream media are the most significant shapers of public opinion, and are inclined to blame the GOP for everything from homelessness to the alleged destruction of the ozone layer, it's natural that Republicans should feel embattled.

And it's not just the media that provide negative reinforcement. Explains one Washington observer: "[Among Republican politicians] you've got people who come disproportionately from the upper middle class or the upper class, and the people they've been around for much of their career and pre-career [are] generally liberal. It's not that they're apologetic toward the general public, they're apologetic toward their peers." Or at least toward the "better" people whom they would like to have as their peers once they arrive in Washington.

"The most powerful drug in this profession," says one Senate leadership aide, "is the lust for sophistication." That's why support for school prayer, on which some 70 per cent of the public agrees, can seem a minority position in Washington: because at Kay Graham's book party it distinctly is a minority position. It's not likely to be too popular among big donors with their inlaid marble floors and trophy wives, either. And Washington professionals have little use for it. One social conservative who joined a top D.C. lobbying/PR firm in the wake of the 1994 election says when he first arrived, "I was just sort of a zoo creature: 'Let's see if he drools."'

Consider Dan Quayle's criticism of Murphy Brown in 1992. Quayle was making a point that was self-evidently true (two-parent families are best) but that was still made to look utterly idiotic. Quayle not only was subjected to a withering round of press criticism, he was ridiculed by our culture's trend-setters, the fashionable elite. The Emmys in 1992 were devoted almost entirely to Quayle jokes. No wonder the first instinct of the Bush Administration was to retreat. It was outgunned.

The country's opinion-makers and pop-cultural elite don't outnumber everyone else, they just have more social weight; they define the rules, and Republicans are invariably outside them. It's like showing up for the first day of high school with Wrangler jeans when everyone in the "in" crowd is wearing Levis -- a subtle but indelible marker that you don't belong. Only it's not the fashion sense of Republicans that is thrown into question, but their moral sense. Since FDR, Republicans have been attacked for hating the poor. If that stain has faded some, it has not yet been entirely removed, and another has been added: hating women and minorities.

The constant questioning gives Republicans guilty consciences. "When they said we were cutting school lunches," explains pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, "we said, 'Nu-uh,' then checked the language of the bill to make sure that it wasn't in there." This is especially true of issues of race. "Somewhere in their unconscious, Republicans seem to buy the liberal world view of themselves," write Peter Collier and David Horowitz. "When liberals attack Willie Horton commercials as racist, many Republicans feel the critics may have a point. Jack Kemp never stops apologizing for Republicans' absence during the civil-rights revolution of the Sixties. In doing so, he forgets that opponents of civil-rights reform were the Southern Democrats."

Opposition to race preferences, for instance, is unpopular with the press; it is considered gauche in good company and activates GOP guilt on race. Hence, the chances of Republicans' vigorously pursuing it in this Congress are almost nil. They can't even pass uncontroversial measures touching on race. Last year Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) pushed a juvenile-crime bill making minor adjustments to federal law called the "Violent Youth Predators Act." Black Democratic Judiciary Committee members Mel Watt, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Maxine Waters threw a fit, arguing that the word "predator," indeed the entire bill, was a "code word." After McCollum obliged by striking the offending word, Waters and Co. proceeded to provoke hours of debate on the bill's "findings," a collection of statements of statistical fact.

THE upshot was that in a body controlled by Republicans, with all sorts of procedural mechanisms meant to make it possible for the majority to squash the minority, Republicans got rolled by representatives of the most absurd fringe of the Democratic Party. Can you imagine Bob Dornan striking such fear into the hearts of House Democrats? That such a role reversal is inconceivable speaks to another aspect of the GOP personality: Republicans' discomfort with power, both its zealous pursuit and its active use. This is partly a function of being in the minority in Congress for so long -- "Republicans have a congressional culture of losing," is how one Senate aide puts it -- but it goes deeper than that.

Says one Hill aide: "Henry Waxman never feels guilty about anything he does, because he's driven by an ideological vision. People who are driven by ideology have no time for guilt." Many Republicans, especially among the older generation, don't have that ideological drive. Furthermore, insofar as Republicans have an ideology, it is one of distrust of power. This means that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to have chosen politics as a first career, that once they undertake a political career they are less likely to take it seriously, and that they are more likely to allow principles and ethical considerations to get in the way of their practice of it.

The result often is lop-sided struggles in which it's clear the Democrats are more willing to fight to the death, like that first meeting of the Thompson committee. There are signs that this is changing. The vote (for good or ill) to keep Newt Gingrich as Speaker was one. "In essence," says former RNC spokesman Ed Gillespie, "the House Republicans said to the New York Times and Dan Rather, 'Go pound sand. We're in control of the House of Representatives."' But the GOP still counts among its leaders politicians who have absorbed all its insecurities, like several GOP governors (see "Slight Expectations," page 17) and notably Jack Kemp, who works obsessively to prove the purity of his motives. Guilty about race, he has praised Louis Farrakhan; and he famously refused to take the gloves off in last year's campaign.

During the vice-presidential debate, when Al Gore was asked about the Roberto Alomar spitting incident, he paid his opponent a now-famous compliment: "Jack Kemp has been a powerful and needed voice against that kind of coarseness and incivility that you referred to in the question. I think it's an extremely valuable service to have a voice within the Republican Party who says we ought to be one nation."

"Well, thank you, Al," replied Kemp, at which the audience, sensing sarcasm, laughed. Kemp, however, moved swiftly to disabuse them. "I mean that very, very sincerely." Kemp was quite unashamed about dissociating himself from his party -- and why not? It's the ultimate Republican thing to do.